Page 42 of How to Walk Away

KITTY WAS GONEin the morning when I woke up, and she’d folded the chair-bed back so neatly that it was almost like she was never there. For a second, I wondered if she’d left for good—until I noticed her stuff in a neat pile in the corner. Maybe she’d left early to make herself scarce to avoid running into my mom.

And so I launched into another day, all on my own—everything pretty much exactly the same until the very end, when Ian walked me back from another awkward, silent, antisocial session of physical therapy, and we found a nurse I’d never seen before waiting for me in my room.

She met my eyes with a bright smile. “How do you feel about good news?”

I glanced at Ian, who gave me a tiny shrug.

I hesitated. “I’m… for it?”

The nurse’s smile got bigger. “Because I have good news for you.”

I waited. “Okay.” I wasn’t sure I could muster the excitement she was clearly expecting. “I guess you’d better tell me, then.”

Then she pointed right at my crotch. “We’re about to take out that catheter.”

***

THERE WAS NOguarantee the catheter wasn’t going back in. The spinal surgeon had noted “sacral sparing” down in the nether regions, and he was optimistic that I had both enough sensation down there to feel when I needed to pee, and enough muscle control to make it happen—but there was no guarantee.

Only trying would tell.

The nurse put an absorbent pad on the bed before helping me get up into it, and then she slid the tube out with no ceremony at all. Then she helped me into an open-back gown for the night, “for easy access.”

“When you feel the feeling and need to pee,” she said, “move fast. Press the call button. Don’t try to transfer on your own.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t wait until you’re about to burst!”

“I won’t.”

She’d be back soon to check on me. The question now was, would I feel that feeling? And if I did feel it, and manage to get to the bathroom without wetting myself first, would my urethra know what to do when I got there?

Safe to say, I had never adequately appreciated the sheer, elegant genius of the urinary system. Now it became a significant character in the story of my life. It was common for patients with injuries like mine to spend the rest of their lives catheterized, facing all the humiliations and discomfort that implied—not to mention chronic infections from the tubes. I found myself rooting for my bladder to impress us all.

After the nurse left, I lay in the silence of my room, eavesdropping on the conversations outside, waiting alertly to feel that delightful old sensation of needing to pee—what did it even feel like? I could barely remember—and rooting for my brave little-urethra-that-could to face this challenge and triumph.

Until I fell asleep.

I slept until Kitty arrived with Chinese takeout.

She poked me, saying, “Hey, are you sleeping?”

I put my hand over my eyes. “Don’t wake me when I’m sleeping, Kit!”

“I brought dinner,” she said, as if takeout justified anything, and she started unloading containers.

As I came awake, I noticed something. “Oh, my God. I need to pee! I can feel it!”

Kit looked at me like I was a little nuts. “Hooray?”

I pointed at the transfer board. “We have to get me to the bathroom.”

Long story short: I did it.Wedid it—my urethra and I—without a hitch.

Except for the moment when I looked up to find Kit trying to take a picture of me on the toilet.

“Kit! What the hell? Don’t take a picture of me peeing!”

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