Page 2 of A Cure for Recovery

It’s not something they’ve talked about, but he knows they’ll need to, soon. A little voice in the back of his head points out, unhelpfully, that helplessness is a mental and emotional state, and not a physical ailment. He’ll probably have to go see a whole different sort of doctor to tackle it, and isn’t that just wonderful?

Despite a long wait, the click and inward glide of the door still startles him. He swears he can feel his blood pressure elevate, a tinny whining starting up in his ears.Calm down, idiot, he chastises himself, and attempts to push a pleasant smile across his face.

When he was first home from the hospital last fall, Noah urged him to come to New York and see a variety of specialists – just as he’d suggested for Lawson’s father, before the shooting. And Tommyconsideredit, sure…but some reticence had kept him from so much as researching anyone. Instead, he worked his way through a series of specialists and physical therapists in Eastman and its surrounding satellite hospitals.

His new doctor – carefully selected thanks to her stellar reviews working with nerve damage patients – enters the room on a not-unpleasant cloud of hand sanitizer scent, still briskly rubbing her palms together, his chart tucked under her arm. She’s tiny, and her scrubs are printed with little cartoon cats under her white coat, and her smile is unexpectedly bright and broad.

“Good morning!”

Tommy feels his face start to fall, and then corrects it. He thinks of doctors as stern and professional, but that’s a ridiculous stereotype. Sternness and professionalism aren’t synonymous.

“Morning.” He can’t dobright, but he can do polite.

She heels the door shut and goes over to the counter to set his chart down. She gives it only the most cursory of glances and then turns to give him her undivided attention. Despite the friendly smile, there’s an intensity to her dark-brown gaze that he finds reassuring.

He lets out a slow breath.

“I’m Dr. Wilson,” she says, “but, please, call me Rachel.” Hands now apparently dry, she leans back against the counter, crosses one foot over the other, and stuffs her hands in her coat pockets. Casul. Easy. “I read up on your chart and cross-referenced with your previous PT last night, so I’m familiar with the details of your shooting” – she doesn’t skip over the word or avert her gaze – “and recovery after the fact. It sounds like you’re doing really well in a medical sense. Clean scans, a perfect resection. But.” Her smile twitches sideways into rueful territory. “I take it if you’re here to see me, then you don’t feel like things are going all that well, right? So why don’t you tell me what you’ve been experiencing, and we’ll see if we can make things better.”

Tommy blinks. His other doctors have been helpful and encouraging, but it’s never felt like this…like a…collaboration. “Um,” he says, intelligently, and her smile is smaller this time, and kind.

She nabs the stool under the counter and settles on it, which puts her lower than him, and somehow less intimidating; when did he decide she wasintimidating? A question he can’t begin to parse at the moment.

“That’s okay,” Dr. Wilson says. “Nerve damage like yours is tricky and can result in a lot of inexact symptoms. We can break it down piece by piece.”

His face warms unpleasantly, and he smooths his palms down the thighs of his sweatpants before he can catch himself.

“You’re still using your cane?”

“Yes.” He glances toward it, fleetingly, where he left it over against the wall, out of reach from the table where he now sits. A small, probably stupid act of rebellion, and a pathetic victory, to cross the room without it; he’s glad no one saw him floundering up onto the table, his upper body strength halved post-surgery. He’s started lifting weights again, but nothing like he used to, muscles weak betrayers.

“Would you say you use it rarely, occasionally, or frequently?”

Last week, he insisted on going downstairs to fetch snacks when Lawson set his laptop up on the desk so they could watch a movie. Lawson tried to go, his face softly worried in a way that left Tommy hyperaware of his own shortcomings. Tommy snapped at him, more harshly than intended, and made the trip himself, sans cane. He tripped on his way back up, and loitered in the middle of the stairs, clutching the banister and sweating, not sure if he could make it all the way back up. The idea of shouting for help, of waking his in-laws, and panicking Lawson, made him want to scream. His eyes pricked with tears, and he hauled himself back up, arms shaking, bag of Doritos clenched in histeethso he could use both hands on the rail.

He swallows. “All the time. I have to use it all the time, or I…”

Dr. Wilson nods. “Any falls?”

“Not serious ones.”

His last doctor went grave when he mentioned falling.All falls are serious.

But Dr. Wilson only nods, and says, “Is it more of a strength issue? Or a balance issue? For instance: do your legs feel weak? Or are they slow to respond when you try to take a step?”

Weak, he starts to say, immediately, becauseheis weak. What else could it mean when he still can’t drive? When it’s been seven months and he still struggles to make it all the way through the grocery store? When Lawson sometimes (a lot of the time) helps him shower. When he sweat through the underarms of his t-shirt twenty minutes ago trying to untie his shoes.

But Dr. Wilson studies him, undemanding, wanting to help, and so he swallows down the word and really thinks about it. The time he fell out of the shower, he managed to actually shower, but the stall has a tall lip on it. He made to step over it, an automatic motion, and then his foot dragged, and caught, and he went down hard on his hands and knees on the bath mat.

In the grocery store, he had his cane hooked over his arm, bent down to snag a box of cereal off the bottom shelf, and then couldn’t get back up. But not because his legs quaked and wouldn’t support him; because he couldn’t feel his legs, his whole lower half suddenly numb. Not only had Lawson needed to help him up, but the cane wasn’t enough after that; Lawson had to walk with a strong arm secured around his waist, half-dragging him toward the exit.

“Slow to respond,” he says, and doesn’t know if that’s better or worse, harder or easier to say. “Sometimes everything goes numb, and sometimes my legs just…won’t move.”

She nods, as though she expected as much. “Your nerves are still healing.”

“But it’s beenseven months,” he bursts out.

Again, she nods. “The nervous system is a fragile, remarkable, incredibly strong network inside the body. Sometimes, nerve damage is permanent, but because you can stand, and walk, and because you have moments of nearly normal functioning, I’d say that’s not the case with you. Your body ishealing. You can’t put a timetable on that. One of my patients had Bell’s Palsy, and it took her a year to regain full facial function.” She smiles, encouraging, though his stomach cramps on the idea of a year, or more.

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