“But how did you manage the Antabuse-like effects?” asked my
doctor.
It was only then that I realized: Flagyl, the medicine that
the doctor had given me, reacted to alcohol in the same way that Antabuse did.
And so, unwittingly, I was flirting with a constellation of symptoms, none of
which was good. There was sweating, rapid heart beat, thirst, nausea and severe
vomiting, and, especially….
…light headedness.
How much of any of this did I have? In fact, I have no
memory, although whatever happened must have been insignificant: the next
morning I went to the pharmacist, and came home to search for a list of
gastroenterologists, which I sent to myself by email. So I must have been
functioning, however much the subsequent pain may have erased my memory.
But her comment stayed in my mind since a lingering question
remained: why had I fallen? And why had the fall been like nothing I’d
experienced before?
I know what I believed: that I had woken up at three in the
morning with a severe charley horse, which I had been having frequently. Always
before, I leapt out of bed, grabbed the footboard, and stood on tiptoe leaning
forward on the affected leg. That forces the extension of the contracting
muscle. And that’s exactly what I did—or thought I had done.
The next thing I knew was the sound of my body hitting the
floor.
My mother once told me: there’s no sound like the sound of a
body falling dead weight to the floor. And my initial reaction—beyond the
shock—was anguish. Did I say, “Oh, NO! I’VE FALLEN!”
I think so, and I knew it was no little fall. But did I know
how bad it was? No, because I should have called for Raf, I should have gone to
the hospital by ambulance, and I should have (I suspect) had surgery. But I
only knew that I had to get back in bed; I had, I imagined, merely strained my
back.
I now think that, perhaps due to the light-headedness of the
Flagyl and alcohol, I blacked out. And since I was leaning forward at the time
of the fall, that would explain why my lumbar spine, normally inclining inward
but then exposed somewhat outward, took the brunt of the blow.
In fact, the neurosurgeon whom I saw recently questioned:
what is a guy of 59 doing with a compression fracture? Normally, it afflicts
older people with osteoporosis, or people who suffer traumatic injury like a
fall from a height. He advised a bone density test; I wondered whether what was
essentially an unbroken fall would have been enough to account for the
fractures.
At any rate, I reacted to the fall with unparalleled denial.
If I sneeze, I will Google every condition from allergies to hay fever to
tuberculosis. But even after I got the MRI results, did I look up, “burst
fractures,” about which Mt.
Sinai says:
Burst fractures are much more severe than compression
fractures. The bones spread out in all directions and may damage the spinal
cord. This damage can cause paralysis or injury to the nerves, which control
the body's ability to move or feel sensations.
In fact, my dread over the long San Sebastian Street
festival was not unfounded: shards of the broken vertebrae can lodge in the
disc, and may lodge in the spinal column itself.
But did I look up any of this? Of course not, since I knew
instinctively that I was on the thinnest of ice. The only thing to do was to
take each day at a time, rest, and make sure I didn’t fall again.
If I had looked everything up, I would have known: the little
brace from CVS which I wore for two months (and which I am wearing still,
mostly to remind me to sit up straight) was entirely insufficient. In fact, I
was supposed to be wearing a prescription, tailor-made “molded turtle-like
shell brace,” that spanned my entire spinal column. I should have gotten
physical therapy. And of course, I should have gone for follow-up visits
immediately, and not waited two months.
Nor am I sure how much help any of that would have been. In
fact, I had treated my injury in much the same way an animal would have: I
withdrew, away from any stimulation or any potential harm. And I waited. But in
all of that time, did I reflect on what particular meaning this experience had
for me?
No—because doing so would have made me face what I could not
face: the severity of the injury, and the utterly amazing fact that I was still
up, still walking, and increasingly without pain. The day came when the brace
became more trouble than it was worth: I took it off. Weeks passed when I no
longer needed pain pills: I took them off the cutting board and put them in the
drawer.
Am I out of the woods?
Maybe—but not so out of the woods that I don’t still remember
that crushing pain, that agony of moving in bed, and perhaps worst…
…the sound of my body hitting the floor.
