“Just Be Yourself”

I make a joke, or so I think, and she looks at me quizzically. “I was trying to be funny,” I say, nervously, and then she cracks a smile.

“Just be yourself,” she responds matter-of-factly, looking back down at her keyboard. But those are the kind of words that stick like old gum to the bottom of your shoe, and try as you might, you can’t quite ignore them.

You must seem more uncomfortable than you think you seem, even as you observe yourself in the process of chatting, questioning, nodding.

There. I’m doing it again. Switching pronouns to distance myself from my experience. To make it less awkward. Less intense. Less demoralizing.

This is Day Two at the new Physical Therapy facility. New for me, that is, in a new neighborhood, in a new city, in a new version of my insurance plan and a new, intensified iteration of my same old, same old back-shoulder-arm situation, along with the added “interest” of a new feature here and there.

I’m standing at the sign-in desk. The place is huge. I ask where to sit, where to wait, where to put my belongings. The administrator is patiently answering. I’m wondering how long before I know the drill.

“By the way, Happy Valentine’s Day,” I say, and she wishes me the same as I converse with as much perkiness as I can manage given the tender spots that throb and ping atop my shoulder, behind my shoulder blade, along my collar bone, around the base of my neck, down my forearm. And then there is the hand, now an extraordinary (and unsettling) nuisance of jolts and tingles, though less frequent a disturbance than six weeks ago.

“It’s all related,” I am told on Day One, which is a 40-minute time-suck of paperwork and plastic vertebrae models and… what can I say? Been there, done that.

The back, another story entirely, requires another referral, another god-only-knows-who at some future point in time, and another specialist for an injury that isn’t special at all; I know my body after more than a decade of this. It is aching for strong, skillful palms and fingers to work out the clogs and knots of my spine’s most recent rebellion.

And sufficient sessions to make progress — and finish the job.

But that too is another story. An American story. An American health care story. No doubt, a story that is replicated, coast to coast, a few million times.

*

I’m still considering “just being myself.”

Nice concept. But which self? My real self? And which one is that? Me before the accidents and complications? Me before this latest move? Me, somewhere in the years in between when I was plainly hopeful in the morning and moderately hopeful in the afternoon and less hopeful in the evening and despondent only between midnight and five a.m.?

I haven’t been myself in months. Make that years — nearly three — and I’m still uncertain of how to rearrange the broken moving parts of who I was, the pieces to be assembled of who I might be now, the shards of who I had hoped to be on “freeing” myself — a euphemism for the inevitable — selling the brick and board of the bungalow where I raised my boys, where we built our history, where we all felt safe.

I’ll just say what I’m not supposed to say. I’ve never really recovered from saying goodbye to our home.

Since that time, it isn’t just that I haven’t felt safe; I’ve felt the opposite of safe — exposed, rootless, adrift — so I wall myself off as if to simulate safety.

No go. Walls don’t work. Sure, they simplify, they keep others out; they also keep out the light. We stagnate. Worse, we shrink inside. The thrumming of whatever hurts grows louder.

In the mornings, when I’m always more optimistic, I imagine the steps to recreating a sense of home wherever I may be; by afternoon, when pessimism (or reality) lumbers in, I’m wandering in search of those sunrise flagstones.

Anything to show me the path. The way to the door. The welcome home — here, now, in whatever form it takes.

“Being myself?”

This is myself, me, a variation of me, mid-morning me — not yet mid-afternoon me or twilight me or God forbid, late-night me, begging my body to stop hurting so I can find a position to catch a few hours’ sleep.

*

I’m standing at the sign-in. It’s Day Two and it’s morning. This “morning me” is shiny, likable, crafty.

The admin points to where I can sit and wait. She tells me my therapist will find me there. I’m wondering if he will be friendlier today. On Day One he was brusque. Stiff. Off-putting.

Was he just being himself? Was he having a bad day? Was his back bothering him? Was his shoulder pinging and his forearm throbbing? Is he going through a divorce or sleep-deprived or pondering his latest swipe right or wishing he had a swipe right to ponder?

Maybe he had a toothache. Maybe he had a headache. Maybe I just need to give him a second chance. But I stressed over the situation after Day One in anticipation of Day Two. And I do need to give him that second chance, but not a third and not a fourth and not a fifth. That would be “just being me” and it is always a mistake.

*

At five in the morning I resolve to confront the situation, slyly; at first light, I walk to the closest supermarket and make my selections from the holiday display near the bakery aisle. So I arrive for Day Two with a container of heart-shaped sugar cookies from the local Kroger and a pink bag of strawberry Valentine’s kisses. If this doesn’t break the ice then nothing will.

“Good morning and Happy Valentine’s Day,” I say, brightly, as he appears from behind a row of steppers and cycles and weight-training machines. I open my Kroger bag and pull out the colorful cookies and chocolate. “Non-healthy goodies to start your day,” I say.

He smiles. Mission Accomplished!

He thanks me, sets the sweets down in a break room, and over the next 10 minutes I get him talking about himself just a little while I’m expected to rest on my back on wet heat positioned around my shoulder and I’m bored. Terribly, terribly bored. Making matters worse, his responses to my questions are uninspiring.

But then he leads me through a series of exercises — familiar stretches for the frozen shoulder mostly, and a few new tricks for what is assumed, for the time being, to be a pinched nerve in my neck that is having its (evil) way with my left hand.

We review the neck business. I’m lectured on posture. I’m reminded: shoulders back, face forward.

*

“Just be yourself,” the administrator says, but I realize that this is me, a version of me, persisting in asking questions in order to get the therapist to loosen up; this is my best outward-reaching-focus-on-someone-else me that I all too often leave behind when I am awash in pain and fatigue and frustration from the pain and fatigue; this is me not entirely at ease but wanting to put someone else at ease instead — which of course will make me feel better.

*

Over the next 15 minutes, I do my best to follow the therapist’s instructions. I stretch, I lift, I push, I flex; my arms are weak, especially the left, and he tells me “range of motion first and strengthening later.”

As I’m doing reps and it’s silent — so silent, too silent — I ask where he might like to be with a day off — anywhere in the world — no expense incurred, no jet lag, no worries.

“Right here. At work. I’m happy here,” he says.

Strike One.

I try another angle. Same premise. Free trip to dine in France! To ski the Alps! To lounge on a tropical island!

His response is similar.

Strike Two.

I give it the Old College Try one more time.

Same deal. Uh-huh. Three strikes — you’re out!

I tell myself to accept that there won’t be any “storytelling” here as we finish and I ask how often I need to show up.

“Weekly,” he replies.

I smile again, say thank you and goodbye, he smiles pleasantly in response, and I head back to Reception.

*

This is what I have been waiting for since the weekend of my little trip to the ER. It’s a first step. A beginning. I need to give it a chance.

I’m sure all this will do me good over time, but I know already that this PT experience will not be like the last where the practice was small and familial and frankly, soothing in the warmth and energy of the young, vibrant, funny, hard-working, articulate, thoroughly engaged members of the staff.

I miss my 29-year-old physical therapist — his amusing anecdotes of weekend jaunts by plane and bus just for the hell of it, his tale of proposing to his girlfriend on a mountain top with stunning pictures he’s happy to share, the episodic saga of painting his back deck in an unsanctioned color (according to the homeowner’s association), the pleasures of eating Korean and Vietnamese and Greek and Italian in Manhattan and Chicago and Toronto any time that he and his fiancé can get away.

I miss his strong hands making the pain go away. At least for a few hours.

I miss the laughter. That alone was healing.

This energy is different. Older. Disappointing. I wonder if my energy is older and disappointing now. If that is part of “just being myself.”

*

I pad back out to the reception desk to schedule next week, and the week after, and the week after that. I’m trying to add up the dollar figures in my head, the nauseating outlay of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of not-at-your-deductible-yet dollars. So much money. So damn much money. Every new “calendar year” is all about copays and coinsurance and out-of-pocket costs and session counts until you hit your max, and never about treatment completion.

“What is your name?” I ask the admin, a young woman with thick black glasses and thick black curls and a wide face and a wider smile when I ask her to please call me by my first name instead of “Miss Wolf.”

I don’t know why that bugs me but it does. It’s too formal. Too official. Especially for this place, for these activities, for the laying on of hands, the vulnerability of showing pain.

“Roxanne,” she says, her fingers skimming a keyboard in a way I always took for granted that now incites envy, and she searches for weekly appointments, checking with me on my preferred time of day, jotting down the results on a card which I pocket.

“Thank you,” I say, shifting my weight from side to side, wishing her a good day, trying to remember which door is OUT. My back aches. My legs ache. My shoulder aches. My arm aches. My hand is tingling, but only a little.

I knot my scarf around my neck, zip up my sweatshirt, pull on my gloves, gingerly, and navigate one long corridor and two heavy doors, making my way out into the blustery mid-morning. Maybe I will stop for a coffee somewhere and do a little people-watching. Maybe I will stop at my favorite take-out salad place three blocks from the apartment. Maybe I will walk directly “home” to my heating pads and Advil and ruminate on what it means to “just be me” now, here, eyes closed, brain and hands in tandem doing their job in what sometimes feels like a fragile, breakable state, no matter which version of myself I bring to the party — even as my fingers don’t skim the keyboard as prettily or as quickly as they once did.

It is, after all, still morning. I tell myself I can do this. So long as I am working with my shoulders back, facing forward.

 

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