Being Pushed

I had a deep and meaningful conversation the other day about how I feel when I am being pushed in my chair.

There a number of situations in which I am not strong enough to secure my own, independent mobility.  That was true before I injured my arm; it is even more so now.  Some of those moments are about the surface we are on; others about gradient; some are about needing to move faster than I can; still others are about an injury.  Some, breath, are about stamina; I don't have enough of it, apparently.  In these situations, I do accept help.  I even willingly accept help -- sort of.  But this doesn't always mean being pushed in my chair.

I hate being pushed in my chair -- more on that in a second or two -- I avoid it as much as I can.

If I think the person with me is fairly strong, I proffer a hand.  We share a grip; we solidify our shoulders in their sockets and breathe down.  I use my body and my chair as resistance to my extended arm, and the other person pulls me.  We walk almost side by side, as friends.  If the person is not that strong, they push on the back of my chair, but I keep a firm hand or two on my wheels.  I keep pushing my wheels.  In both cases, we move as a unit, and we work as a unit. 

I'm struck by how hard this is to write and by how hard I am working to phrase this pushing, this movement as a joint endeavour.  I am getting the assistance I need, yes, but I as I write this, I keep seeing how much I am doing to avoid thinking of "assistance" as "help;" I keep stressing -- want to keep emphasizing -- how much I retain an active role in how I move.  I see it even in the way I have written this description.  "I proffer," "we share," "we solidify," and "I use."  My words reveal my deep ambivalence about not pushing myself.

The Wizard is the only person whom I allow to push me on a regular basis.  I have taken assistance from medical personnel, and, albeit rarely, I accept a push from other close friends such as members of the dance company.  That's different, though.  Accepting a push from the Wizard is deeply complicated and very intimate.  How he pushes, and how I feel about it says a lot about us and our relationship.

On the complicated side, I have to say that I really don't like the way he pushes.  When I move, I move swiftly, powerfully, on the momentum of the stroke and the wheel; I swerve, turn, carve, swoop.  I go first; people should move out of my way.   I move -- even when I am just going down the street -- I move with a keen sense of power and of the purity of the movement.  I love just pushing/stroking/rolling down the street.  This thing, this unity, this oneness is mine.

When the Wizard pushes, my chair feels like a wheelchair -- in the negative sense.  Part of that is that he assesses things differently.  He doesn't pick the same part of the pavement that I would.  Over the years, he has learned to see and shout out warnings for the impacts and bumps -- that's actually very cool (proud happy tone of voice) -- but then he doesn't handle them the way I would.  He waits for other walking people; he is gentle, careful and respectful -- of me and of everyone else on the path. (eeek!) He pushes with love and care, but not with the same joy in movement.  (Wait for the comments that say how ungrateful I am ... yeah, yeah).  

BUT

When the Wizard pushes, he comes down from his great height; his face is close to mine; he breathes over my shoulder; he sees the world from my point of view.  We are close.  Sometimes, I don't want this closeness -- the default positioning of our bodies means that everything we do is now close and intimate.  Sometimes, I just want to go up the hill; I need him to be just a pair of arms pushing.  In these situations, he invariably wants pushing to be an expression of our connection.  And he is able to do that; he can turn an instance of mechanics into a moment of connection.  He has been fabulous at not transmitting the bad parts of our relationship into the pushing.  Even when we are pissed at each other, he can push gently.  I appreciate that: the act of pushing is so deeply personal and intimate that I feel I could trust no one else with the project of moving me.

Over the years, I have learned to take my hands off the wheels and place them on my lap.  Sometimes, I lean from side to side and play airplanes.  Sometimes, I gesticulate; sometimes, I point.

Sometimes, I close my eyes and ride.

Being Real

That fall I wrote about on March 19th, here?  I was wrong about it.  And, indeed, the consequences and meaning of that fall.  I should really have a label dedicated to falling, because this fall might actually be as much a fall from my life as dancer as it is an account of hitting the road on a dismal city street.

Living this injury has been complicated.  When I am hiding from those around me and from myself, I think of it, talk about it as "I fell, smashed my wrist and have a compression injury."  Sometimes, I say, "I tore some muscles in my forearm; I have an extension injury."  But what I should say is this:

During rehearsal, I hyperextended my left elbow.  It didn't dislocate, but it did get partially out of position and all the ligaments are inflamed/overstrained.  I also tore two of my forearm extensors; I put my first rib out of position; and I yanked my neck.  Then, on the way to the car, I fell out of my wheelchair.  I put my left arm down at the wrong angle.  I tore the ligaments and cartilage in my hand and wrist.  My 4th and 5th fingers are particularly affected.  Further, during the imaging tests, they discovered that I also have tendinosis (a degenerative tendon condition -- where the tendon fails to heal).

There.  I have a chronic condition and two interacting and conflicting acute local injuries; all of the former interact with and are complicated by my disability.  The lived of experience of all of this has been complicated.  There's is and has been a fair amount of pain that has been difficult to control.  More important, it hasn't been easy to find out what to do about any of it.

What are my options?  I've been through some drama: A phone call from my doctor telling me, mid-rehearsal, to stop dancing right now in case my tendon ruptures.  And a followup two days later saying, well, it's probably OK.  And a third call saying that, well, no one really knows.  I've had one doctor recommend surgeries for the tendon and for my wrist; and another flatly rule out surgery.  I've had one say, well, I can't help you.  Don't do anything that hurts -- just go ahead and live.  In other words, no one knows what to do.

I've decided to settle on PT; I'm trying to rest, strengthen and recover.  But even this hasn't been a simple strategy.  The conflicting injuries and disability stuff have been a challenge. "Oh, cool!  Double crush!" was my PT's reaction.  But she doesn't have to live with "double crush" on a daily basis.  And frankly, she hasn't been able to come up with a plan that enables me to wheel, continue some kind of life, rehab all the bits and pieces.

I'm surprised by all of this.  The cynic in me pretends to be unruffled that the medical system is failing me at what I consider to be an important moment in my life.  But the person in me is surprised by my reaction to all of this.

I have spent years building a body that "should" not be able to do what it can do, given what is known of my disability stuff.  I trained my body every day -- in different ways.  I took dance classes; I prepared.  The me that went out on the stage was a carefully constructed, carefully managed physical presence.  I have worked to be here.  Harder than anything I have ever done in my life before.  And now?  Well, now?  No one can tell me what any of this means.  Should I be worried about the tendinosis?  If one arm is so bad, what does that say about the other arm?  Is my right arm OK?  How do you know? Are there reliable ways to produce healing?  Do I just dance on until I can't?  Should I pull out now?

I'm also surprised by a new awareness of how much I relied on my body.  I now have an even keener sense of how much I loved what my body could do; I am more aware of how much I delighted in its power, grace and impossibility.  I know that I mistakenly operated on the assumption that training, growth, progression meant control, but I thought that this was permanent.  I felt that dancing was a constant. I knew that I could do the extraordinary on a quotidian basis, so I kept doing it until I knew no other daily practice.  I saw myself as a confident series of muscles, bones, metal and wheels.  I imagined myself purely as a wholly physical being who knew that the cells of her could float through it all because I knew that if they couldn't float, they could power on.  I had my body; I was strong.

If I had read that last paragraph on the internet, I know that I would be right in there, wondering about what the writer thought about strength as a virtue constructed by the medical world.  I would be asking questions about the value of extreme physicality and the writer's pride in her prowess.  Did that pride have the tiniest scent of ableism in it?

I've thought about it a lot, actually; it was one of the reasons I wrote the BADD 2011 post that I did.  Am I *that* person?  I don't think I am, but I am also the first to admit that the unconscious does weird things to us, so the best I can say is that I don't think I am that person.  I don't think that I ever attempted to "overcome" or "compensate" for my disability.  I worked to be in my disability as wholly as possible and to extend my disabled body as a disabled body so that it could be as free and full as possible without trying to repair or cure it.

Still, the transition to my current state has been surprising.  I hear in the back of my head, my mother's voice, warning me that "pride comes before a fall."  Is she right?  Even if I don't accept or recognize for myself the overly Biblical sinner's language here, have I been too proud?  And is that pride making it difficult for me to adjust to the new normal?

Whatever the cause, I wonder on a daily basis if I will be able to return to dancing.  I feel sad; so sad.  The company keeps going, and I am missing out on all the fun, fireworks, and artistry.  I love dancing, and I'm at home without a clear end date or, I should say, restart date.  I'm grieving.  And I am frustrated by the uncertainty of it all.  When will the pain stop; is the PT working; will I be able to dance soon?  When can I go about my life?

The linguist in me appreciates the way in which my life seems to be shaped by various understandings of the word "to fall."  I fell into my life as a dancer; it was quite by chance that I was at a conference where I was exposed to disabled dancers; it was by chance that I was in the geographical region that had places for disabled dances to take class.  I now seem to have fallen out, albeit temporarily, of my life as a dancer.  I want to say something like "easy come, easy go;" I fell in; I worked hard, but did I deserve to be here?

But the reality of my current existence bites a little deeper.  I worked hard to be here; I want to return, but  I don't want to stage a comeback.

I will have to start with the idea that my body is beyond my control.