In His Right Mind

Recovering, lefty style

My husband is a freak. He is amazingly strong despite never having lifted a dumbbell in his life. He once carried a couch on his back up three flights of stairs. He regularly performs impressive feats of agility, despite having the stamina and flexibility of your average great-grandpa. He does handstands and successfully chases busses several blocks down the street.

So last month, when the principal of the school he was student teaching at called to say that he had fallen on the playground and perhaps had suffered a concussion, my first thought was that he had been trying to show off to his second graders by walking on his hands or doing a backflip off the monkey bars.  Upon arriving at the school I was surprised to find out that he had fallen and hit his head on the blacktop during a simple game of tag, and I was further surprised at the hospital when they told me that he didn’t have a concussion but a hemorrhage, and that he had to be taken into emergency surgery.

Neurosurgery is serious business, but someone forgot to tell this to Bill. He was in ICU for nearly a week, and for the first few days he was sedated and breathing through a ventilator. This didn’t stop him from trying to escape. Yes, he was in a drug-induced coma, but he still tried to get out of bed, pull out his IVs, and push away the nurses. They tied his wrists to the bed and put mittens over his hands to prevent him from causing himself or anyone else harm.

While he was in ICU I stayed overnight in the hospital, finding it impossible to sleep because he was constantly on the move, nearly falling off the bed, sitting up, tugging and kicking, hitting his head against the bedrails. I had to keep constant vigilance. Whenever I left the room it seemed like something happened. At one point I went home to take a nap, and upon returning I discovered that the moment I left he tried to bust out like the Hulk and six people had to hold him down.

On his third night in ICU, just before going to the waiting room to visit with my family, I noticed his mittens were off, and I told the nurse that this made me nervous. But the nurse shrugged it off and said, “We’ll put them on overnight.” Well, sure enough, a friend who was visiting in my husband’s room came out a few moments later to tell me that Bill had pulled out his breathing tube, or self-excavated, as the nurses so eloquently term it.

News of Bill’s self-excavation terrified me. The sedatives he was on suppressed his lung function, and so I thought that the nurses would try to put it back in again, a process I am sure would have been difficult given Bill’s defiant state. But they said that since he was breathing on his own and his oxygen levels were good, they wouldn’t try to reinsert it. I was relieved, not only because he could be off that horrible machine, but also because he wouldn’t try to punch anyone.

A few days later, still mostly unconscious and unable to eat, a nurse tried to put a little feeding tube down his nose and Bill slapped his hand away and said, “Fuck, you, dude.” I tried not to laugh, but these words made me very happy. Next to his constant requests for soda and falafel, this was the first sign that he was coming back to himself.

After two weeks in the hospital, Bill is home and recovering, and finds it very strange to hear all of these accounts of things he said and did that he has no recollection of. He is very proud to learn that even while sedated he shirked authority, and also that he surprised everyone by his stature-to-muscle ratio. When a particular nurse found out that Bill was mostly vegan, he said that he would consider changing his diet, if begin a vegan gave you such beastly strength.

But what this nurse didn’t realize was that, although veganism is the diet of superheroes, what Bill eats has nothing to do with his power. His brawn comes not from nurture but from nature. His freakpowers are not something any mortal man can hope to attain, even through the strictest of discipline. And Bill realizes he is lucky to have this gift, and often flexes his biceps and marvels as if an icy blue lightning rod implanted what he sees there. He does not take his gift for granted, and he only uses it for good, like to open salsa jars or carry home a box of kitty litter from Dominick’s. 

But I know he wants to do more with his powers. To most Bill meets he seems such a sweet, shy, mild-mannered boy, but I get to see him mirror-boxing before bed and see that gleam in his eye—the primal joy of knowing that no other ape in the jungle can mess with him, and the hope that someday a villain will corner us in an alley and whip out his tommy gun, asking, just asking, for Bill to reveal his true strength. This scenario used to scare me, because I know if we were ever in such a situation my husband would do something stupid. A left hook isn’t much against a firearm, even if it is a freakish beastly left hook. But now I don’t know.

Everyone has commented on how unlucky the situation is. He was just playing tag, and he fell, and now all this. Most people would have landed on their arm and suffered nothing more than a broken bone, but not him. Not Bill, the born loser. Only I see things a little differently. I read a statistic that upwards of 80 percent of people who receive a head injury like his die. But Bill didn’t. He defied that most infamous, inescapable foe. So maybe he is lucky, after all. Or perhaps he is, indeed, superpowered.  At any rate, I’ll feel a little safer walking with him through the city streets at night, and also thankful to still have such a sturdy arm for support.