Two Degrees
“Two degrees,” he said. As in, "out of 45." He made the first mark on my physical therapy chart that would soon be filled with notes detailing the weakness of my ankle, as well as exclamation points warning about the strength and accuracy of my right hook. He looked up hopefully to see my stunned face.
The ruler was like a compass that we used in art class in the sixth grade. A healthy ankle has at least a 33-degree range of motion. I was at two degrees.I looked down the length of my leg to the poor limb lying helplessly on the red plastic table that was covered with a fresh sheet. From the knee down my leg was roughly the size of a watermelon, banded with deep welts where the cast had held it hostage. If I concentrated, I could point my toes a centimeter or so before the stabbing pain shot immediately up to my brain.
The physical therapy center was the first medical establishment that I had been to that was in any way soothing. It was on Huntington Avenue in Boston, on the campus of Northeastern, on the ground floor of a sunny building. The front of the clinic was all glass and you could watch pedestrians strolling by, casually using their legs for good and evil, without a thought of what it would be like to have one put out of commission for almost a year. The clinic was cheerful. Everything was brightly colored and clean – shiny wood and sparkling tile floors, giant inflatable balls in primary colors, huge elastic bands in every hue, and the dumbbells arranged in ascending weights through the whole spectrum of the rainbow. And amid all these cheery organic strength and flexibility tools crouched The Machine.
The Machine was a hulking beasts on a rickety AV cart that looked like it had been rescued from the rubble of a demolished high school somewhere. The cart creaked as it approached, groaning under the weight of its burden. I shivered in fear as the hair on the back of my neck rose. The Machine was the size of a microwave oven, that 70’s brown simulated wood paneling and obscenely large dials and knobs with little windows displaying varying degrees of electric voltage. I sat uncomfortably on the bench as the P.T. rolled it toward me. I saw the shock pads and cringed visibly. Electro convulsive therapy. I saw a movie on that once. The resulting patient rolled around in her own drool for the rest of her days.
Now they have these devices on television advertised as something you wear that builds muscle while you sit on the couch and stuff your face, watching infomercials. They are based on the same technology as The Machine. But I don’t think these people could possibly strap one of these things on their stomach voluntarily. Just like the once-popular Epilady that ripped the leg on your hair out by the root – it sounds great on TV but when you get that thing near living skin it’s a whole different story.
The Machine purred and hiccupped, glaring at me with an assortment of beady red eyes. I glared back. The P.T. peeled two fresh gel pads from sterile paper packaging sporting a red cross. One on my ankle, the other on the muscle running right above the shin bone. He woke up The Machine, flipping switches and sliding levers like the Dolorian in Back to the Future. It shuddered to life, whirring violently like a flying saucer.The tiny throb started to bounce between the two pads on my leg as they convulsed rhythmically and alternately, creating a strange warmth somewhere in the middle. As the levers on The Machine climbed steadily upward on the digital display, the frequency of the beats increased until they were a steady hum. My muscles began to twitch.
It’s weird when your body does something without your consent. When you’re staring at a part of your anatomy and it’s behaving all on its own, and you’ve got no conscious control over it. I witnessed the muscles in my leg twitching in a spasm, trying to get them to stop, and they would not. The Machine had control over my nervous system, and I watched the electricity zing up and down my leg.The procedure was supposed to stimulate the muscles enough to clear out some of the edema – which is this truly disgusting kind of swelling. The P.T. would work on massaging my ankle, and as he put pressure on the bone, the flesh would pool around his fingers, and the hand prints would be left for ten or fifteen minutes. I had fun with that, drawing smiley faces and other things in my leg when I was bored.
I spent the last fifteen minutes of each session with The Machine, and often times I would be left alone with it in one of the back rooms. I tried not to look at it, tried to read the freshest copy of Entertainment Weekly. Tried not to be mad that it had control over my calf muscle and I didn’t. Tried to feel okay about being manipulated by a piece of machinery from three decades ago whose sole purpose was to shoot electricity into my body. Don’t people, in general, try to avoid electrical current? I remember licking a battery in the third grade on a dare and deciding I’d never do it again.
Although my injury was quite serious – 180 degree dislocation (foot on backward) and compound fracture (bone snapped and poking out through skin), I felt like a bit of a moron sitting there as athletes of all stripes paraded through the door, wearing their assorted injuries like a badge of honor.
Malcolm, relay runner: “Yeah – I was sprinting for the finish line, ahead of the whole pack. I felt the twinge in my thigh, but pressed on even though it hurt at the time. I couldn’t help it – I wanted to win.”
Sasha, three-time Olympic gold medallist: “The uneven parallel bars – you know how it goes.”
Todd, star NU quarterback: “I scored the winning touch-down and my team went on to win the championship. Sure, it’s a knee full of pins for the rest of my life, but imagine the stories I can tell my grandchildren.”
Kristin, klutz: “So, um, I was walking. . . down the street. . . and I fell.”
Well I guess I could flesh that story out a bit. I was walking home from the company party in January, in the dark, with a belly full of amaretto sours, and I slipped on a nasty patch of ice outside my apartment that had been haunting me since the first snow fall. I hit the pavement hard, and looked down in shock to see my foot completely facing the wrong direction, so I stood up to fix it. Yeah. You can imagine where the compound fracture came from.
Come on people -- does that inspire awe, or just a sympathetic giggle? Two and a half surgeries later (one didn’t involve general anesthesia and probably should have, judging by the fingernail marks I left in the surgeon’s face) I was sitting in the bright shiny New England Baptist Hospital Physical Therapy Center, trying to figure out how to move my own toes. And The Machine was not making it any easier on me.
The Machine had a timer with an auto shut-off, and a buzzer to notify the P.T. when it was finished zapping me. But since clinic traffic picked up in the summer, I was shifted from the main area to the private back rooms, where no one could hear me screaming in surrender. Nor could they hear The Machine bleating wildly in completion. It was a 70’s buzzer, not the gentle chimes or alarm-clock-like sounds of modern technology. A buzzer like the world was going to end. And sometimes the world ended several times while I waited for the staff to remember that I was back there. I could not reach The Machine in my state -- leg elevated, packed in ice.
The edema began to clear a bit, so my tangles with The Machine became more brief. Six minutes is all we spent together, and I started getting cocky about it. “So you think you’re such hot shit, huh Machine? We’ll see. We’ll see.” And I would limp out of the room, rocking on my crutches, glancing indignantly at the growling beast over my shoulder. It would shudder and glare back.
After three months, the day came when I was informed that I would be freed from The Machine. The muscles were now a little bit more developed and the swelling was coming down substantially.I sat wistfully with The Machine during our final session. They had left us alone in the back room to say goodbye. Sure, we had been through hell. But we had been through it together, dammit. Through thick and thin, through 40 sessions of physical therapy, through 12 issues of Entertainment Weekly. There is a hostage phenomenon that occurs when someone is held for long periods of time against their will; they eventually feel connected to their captor and not want to leave them. I thought about that as The Machine purred, massaging the muscles in my leg for the last time. Sometimes at night I still see its eyes glowing in darkened rooms.
