Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music by Kara Stanley

Author:Kara Stanley [Stanley, Kara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771641036
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2015-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

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SIMON’S RECOLLECTIONS

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All Your Junk And Your Catalog Too

MY EARLY MEMORIES of waking are patchy and jumbled. I was sleeping so much and so deeply that each time I woke, it felt like a new day, so events I recall as having taken place over the course of a week actually happened in a single twenty-four-hour period. Even though I am told that I had been asking questions about my legs and that the nature of the injury had been explained to me, the first moment I recall realizing that my legs were paralyzed was when two nurses were transferring me from my bed onto a stretcher. They manually rolled my body onto its side and placed a long wooden board under me and then slid me over to the stretcher. I saw the nurse at the bottom of the bed grab my legs and lift them but I felt nothing. They were legs that could have belonged to someone else. That’s the first time I remember consciously realizing that I was paralyzed.

I also vividly recall the first shower I had post-accident, at the end of my stay at Vancouver General. A hulking male attendant wheeled me into a roll-in shower, soaped me, and rinsed me down. The warm water felt great. Afterward, I thanked him for “washing all my junk.”

“No problem, man,” he said. “I washed all your junk and your catalog too.” To this day I still don’t know what a “catalog” refers to!

When you are in the hospital, what Kara referred to as “the indignities of the flesh” are the norm. People see you nude and vulnerable. They wash you and perform “bowel care,” which, no matter how kind and skilled the nurse, is exactly as invasive and scary as it sounds. You have to get used to strangers taking care of your body in a very intimate way. God bless ’em. It’s a very heavy job, that one.

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