Accident at Rt. 436 and Red Bug Road
[The road to M.S. misery]
Introduction
The section, "Accident at Rt. 436 and Redbug Road," contains poetry of a more traditional kind found in poetry therapy when self-expression is the important consideration, and it may become creative expression. In comparison to Schloss who encourages patients to write poems in a stream of consciousness to help patients get in touch with their feelings, I wrote this group of poems not as a stream of consciousness. Instead I used the forms of poetry to serve as a containing function, so that my feelings could be faced and worked through. Unlike William Wordsworth who said that a "poem takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,"(1) these poems were written to work through very strong feelings of rage, disappointment, frustration, depression. At the time I was near despair as my wife and I went through one of the most difficult periods of our lives. Sometimes emotions are so strong they disrupt everything; the issue is not getting in touch with the feelings, but trying to create meaning out of meaninglessness.
In creative expression, all the meaning should come from the poem itself, but I give this background below because the poems and the metaphors may be difficult to understand without it:
Diane had been driving our hearing impaired daughter from her speech therapy in Orlando, Florida when she was rear-ended by a cement truck. She had to make an emergency stop for an ambulance coming towards her from the other side of the street. It swerved to the left, cutting in front of her on the way to a accident call, that in fact was a false alarm, and ironically caused a serious accident--to my wife. If she had not stopped she would have rammed the ambulance; but instead she was rammed from behind and broke her neck.
That was just the beginning of a bizarre series of events in which she went through. She first had a neck fusion, but the surgery failed, although the surgeon kept maintaining all was well and so dictated it in his notes as we sat there. But I insisted she have a repeat CAT scan. The radiologist then called us to tell us the scan showed her neck was very unstable and any incorrect movement could have made her a quadriplegic. We went to another surgeon who was able to fuse it, but the trauma of the surgery ignited Diane’s multiple sclerosis. She developed weakness in her legs that progressed up her body, so she was sent to the rehab floor, but then got lost to the system. She had no physician to write orders, and again I had to intervene to get her discharged.
Diane then went into a hospital in Deland to hopefully reverse the progressive paralysis through a radical program of high doses of steroids and chemotherapy. The idea was to decrease her white count to the level of a dying AID's patient with the hope that the new immature cells would not attack her myelin. Diane had poor veins so the IV team had to stab her up to a dozen times a shift because knowing the status of her blood count was so important. The staff pleaded for a cut down, so she could get her blood drawn more easily, but the neurologist feared she would get an infection while in an immuno-compromised position. She also became anemic so I volunted to be a blood donnor, but found one could not donate in the same hospital, but you had to go to another city.
Diane had to be in reverse isolation, so she would not get an infection from those coming in to serve her. But she did develop a streptococcal blood infection that could have caused her to die. During the time on the steroids she gained fifty lbs., and on the cytoxin, that same material that is in mustard gas used in WWI, she lost all her hair. It was then I wrote the poem, "My Little Butterfly." At the time I had almost lost hope she could recover.
She left that hospital as a quadriplegic and was sent to a rehabilitation hospital where she was told she needed to learn to accept her disability. At the time she needed a lift to get out of bed, someone to dress her and button her clothes, and wipe her butt. But Diane's goal was to walk again, and she did fight back.
A year later with tremendous work and courage, she was playing tennis and later ice skating. But that was not the end of the story in our yo-yo life.
Wordsworth, W. Selected Poems, ed by George W. Meyer, New York: Appleton-Centruy-Crofts, Inc. 1950