Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

By Thursday, May 15, I was in the hospital again, this time St. Luke’s Presbyterian Hospital in Denver. Only two days earlier, my doctors had discovered a potentially lethal bone infection in my right arm. The same dirty knife that had saved me was now killing me. After yet another surgery, I was put on the strongest intravenous antibiotics available (needles), and then had battery after battery of blood tests (more needles) to check that the drugs were fighting the infection. The next day, Friday, was to be my sister’s graduation from Texas Tech University. With more tests and another surgery pending, I cried with my parents as it became clear that I wouldn’t make it to Texas to see Sonja receive her diploma. Then, just twenty hours before the ceremonies in Lubbock, my doctors and nurses came up with a plan that would allow me to leave the hospital for three days. With intricate instructions on how to inject the intravenous antibiotics ourselves, my parents and I sped off on a ten-hour midnight drive to Lubbock, Texas. While my dad steered us down the two-lane highways of the Texas panhandle at 70 mph, my mom ran my IV system from the backseat, hanging the drip bags on the coat hook above the side window. By the time we arrived in Lubbock, the car looked like a MASH unit, littered as it was with spent supplies and torn packaging, but we were in time for the Honors College awards banquet where Sonja was honored as the Texas Tech Outstanding Student of the Year. Once all the weekend festivities were over, my parents and I helped my sister pack up her belongings, and then we sat down with my grandma Ralston for a family tradition: playing round after round of euchre. It was just like old times.

Back in Denver, I had one last surgery, and an interesting one it was. I needed an angiogram, which is not, as one might think, a message personally delivered by a singing cherub, but a procedure that started with a curiously smiling prep nurse shaving off the right half of my pubic hair, and then inserting a catheter into my femoral artery until it slid up into my chest. The nurses used the catheter to pump X-ray-sensitive dye into my bloodstream, whereupon I could watch the veins of my right arm appear periodically on a television screen. That was just the warm-up round. Once the results from the angiogram were in, the plastic surgeon knew which of the three retracted arteries to go after in my arm. My tourniquet had damaged one, but the others were in good shape. This was important, because subsequently, the surgeon transplanted a four-inch-long segment of muscle from my inner left thigh onto the end of my right stump, and after fishing out the arteries in my arm, he connected their blood supplies to the slab of raw meat stitched onto my forearm. For the finishing touch, he sliced a rectangular section of skin from my right thigh and patched over the whole end of my arm. This little ten-hour surgery I did not get to watch on television. (It was preempted by the war in Iraq.)

The hours after I came up from the anesthetic proved to be the lowest point of my recovery; I hit bottom that night. I had seven tubes running in and out of me, three new sources of pain from the donor sites as well as my right heel (pressure from my foot’s weight had pinched a nerve in my heel during the surgery); I couldn’t sleep, and wasn’t allowed to eat or drink, so I complained mercilessly. How was it that I had cut off my arm without so much as a whimper, and yet now all I could do was whine? The nurses upped my narcotics hour after hour, but they couldn’t touch the pain. Eventually, though, I couldn’t put three words together to form a sentence; I wanted to tell my mom and dad I was sorry for being such a bitch, but it only frustrated me more to try and talk. My mom sat through it all for six hours until dawn, forgoing sleep and trying to comfort me, though my suffering was relentless despite the drugs. When the morning light came through the drapes, it illuminated her face in a saintly glow, and I cried at her beauty until I finally passed out.

By May 25, I had spent seventeen days in the hospital, but at last I went home for good. I was fixed up, I’d put on almost all of my lost weight, and the bone infection was retreating. However, being on the IV antibiotic program meant that once every eight hours, I had to lie down and get connected to a drip bag for half an hour. This went on for six weeks. Even when it meant getting up in the middle of the night, my mom and dad were always there to make sure I got my medications at the right time. All I had to do was sit still, but I hated that IV system and the weakness that it represented, and I rarely let an opportunity to complain about it pass me by.

Convalescence was hard on me. Not just the drip-bag routine but the whole thing. I hurt all the time from both phantom and real pain, even with the drugs. While I was continuously medicated, I never rested well. Usually, I would lie in bed all night semi-comatose-not really awake, but not sleeping, either. Narcotic stupor doesn’t allow your mind to reset properly. As each dosage came on, I would involuntarily crash-in doctors’ offices, between occupational and physical therapy sessions on a bench in the clinic’s workout room, or while sitting in traffic as my mom shuttled me home. When I revived, it was because the drugs were wearing off, and then all I had was anguish. My frustrations and the drugs turned me into such a bossy and grouchy snot that even I was sick of hearing myself.

My being at home again was difficult for all of us, too. Though we were thankful to have one another and felt blessed to be together as a family, the workload took its toll. My parents each had their businesses to tend to besides looking after me. Add in my appointments, drugs, and insurance issues, and on top of it all, the media and public attention-we had to leave the phone off the hook for almost two months, and called the local authorities to fend off the television station vehicles that staked out the house-and we were all worn threadbare.

For the first four weeks, I was as dependent as a toddler. I found myself easily fed up by the effort involved with my new life, in which rest, recovery, and rehab had replaced skiing, mountaineering, and concerts. Everything was so time-consuming; one clinic appointment occupied an entire morning of preparation and commuting for my mom and me. And there were a hundred appointments, all of which had to be coordinated around my drug schedule. I didn’t get out of Blue John Canyon to spend my life in a groggy blur of structured confinement perforated with agony. Yet that’s what my life had become.

The challenge in the canyon had been severe but straightforward. Once I was out, the challenges became more complex, and at first, I felt unprepared to adapt to my new circumstances. I wanted to get my life back, but that meant I had to learn how to cope with my frustrations and turn them into motivation for action. The drugs were my first targets. In June, with most of the post-operation pain fading, I gradually weaned myself off the painkillers. I could once again enjoy a few choice freedoms-driving my truck, going running with my friends, enjoying a big ol’ salted margarita. I regained more and more of my self-sufficiency and “grew up” again in a process akin to a second adolescence. My mom didn’t want to let me go, and I couldn’t blame her, but I had to get my independence back, for both our sakes.

Once I was off the narcotics, things got better quickly. I learned how to tie my shoelaces and even tie a necktie one-handed. Improving rapidly, I practiced my left-handed print and cursive (I had been a righty prior to my accident) and began typing on my laptop with just five fingers. My occupational therapist got me a rocker knife so I could cut meat. With either adaptive equipment or new techniques, I relearned how to do just about everything I needed. I figured out how to put on my watch and fasten that tricky left wrist button on my dress shirts using my teeth. Still, there were things I needed help with. Sometimes my independence drove me not to ask. Other times, though the offered help was well meant, I wanted to figure things out for myself. In the kitchen one afternoon, I caught my sister trying a little too hard to be sensitive while watching me start to peel an orange.