Tripped Up

Brittany Lyte

“You must be a wonder to dance with,” my high school clarinet teacher would quip each time I’d tongue uneven septuplets.

None of my prom dates ever complained about my offbeat Macarena or my not-so-Electric Slide, but they were likely too deep in an amber haze of Captain Morgan and prom-night jitters to notice.

Off the dance floor, my coordination blunders kicked in, too. I was a big-time tripper, and not on anything illegal. I usually had purpled shins and a story to prove it (like the time I was strolling through London with my grandmother and collapsed in front of a pub, provoking a roar from the drunken men to whom I had just exposed myself: legs sprawled open, pink skirt over my head, sandals in the street). These wipeouts, however, rapidly lost their humor the summer before my senior year of college.

An editor at the magazine where I was interning would sometimes send me to the streets to scavenge items for a photo shoot or to research a story. Strapped in high heels, I would strut about the city, often stumbling, stubbing the toes of my shoes. By summer’s end, heels, flats, sandals and sneakers alike were tattered as if they had been snatched and gnawed viciously by a real-life Jabberwock. I blamed this excessive (even for me) tripping and subsequent footwear demolition on the wicked combination of my clumsiness, the high heels and Boston’s fabled cobblestone streets. Yet smoldering beneath my denial was a truth that I wasn’t ready to acknowledge. Never before in my three years living in Boston had I worn out my entire collection of shoes in a single season. Something was seriously wrong with my body.

Midsummer, I couldn’t feel or wiggle my toes. Soon this numbness overtook my legs, weakening my stride to a stagger. My knees began giving out mid-step. The muscles deteriorated in one of my calves, noticeably shriveling my right leg to a Mary-Kate Olsen-esque size, scrawny and disparate from my other, toned leg. My sense of balance—if I ever had any—crumpled, making run-ins with the wall a daily affair. I coughed up the cash to hail cabs to my internship to avoid collapsing into the laps of stone-faced strangers riding the T. Stairs? Forget it. I began arriving a half-hour late to work because, even after ditching heels for flip-flops, I couldn’t find a pair of shoes to stabilize my stagger.

One night, while driving to a friend’s house, I eased my foot off the gas pedal at the sight of an upcoming red light. I extended my leg to the brake pedal and pressed down, but the wheels of my Camry continued onward with no sign of slowing. I pushed my braking foot harder. The car rolled farther forward. I slammed my foot, but the car never stopped—until it collided with the truck ahead of me. Looking down, I realized I hadn’t been hitting the brake pedal at all. I had been pushing down on the floor mat but couldn’t feel the difference.

“I’m really sorry,” I told the truck driver, more horrified at my now-undeniable condition than our dented, paint-chipped vehicles.

I wasn’t slurring my words and I smelled only of perfume.

“You’re a real ditz, girly,” the man said before he took mercy on me and let me go.

I finally had to admit to myself that my problem wasn’t the heels.

After a whirlwind of neurology exams and MRIs, a final doctor’s appointment revealed my enigmatic stumbling block: a rare form of tumor lodged in my thoracic spine. I was born with it, and I had one of about two dozen known cases in the world, ever. This gumball-sized protein mass looked like a small lump of fish meat, pearl white and squishy. It had been growing in my spinal cord since my birth, clogging this vital passage for nerve signals the way a network firewall deflects Internet connections. If we removed it quickly, my deadened nerves might rejuvenate, restoring some of my lost balance and sensation. With a statistic-less condition, I focused on the best-case outcome, but worst-case was difficult to eclipse: I might never walk again.

“Do you want us to order you a cane?” the doctor asked.

“Of course not. I’m twenty-one years old,” I thought. “I’d rather hibernate in bed than klutz around Boston with a cane.”

Three days later I lay cold and trembling in a flimsy gown. For the first time in a long time, I released an insuppressible cry that resolved only after the first of two tube-served “cocktails” were fed into my veins by the anesthesiologist. Then he rolled me into the OR.

“Am I paralyzed?”

My first words waking from a seven-hour drug-induced sleep. While the neurosurgeon led my parents, bloodstreams coursing with Xanax, to meet me in the recovery room, the nurse remarked that my doctor planned to write about my case in medical journals.

“I’m going to be famous. This is great,” I slurred in the direction of the surgeon. “Do you think I could get a 30 percent cut of what we make? I’m a journalist, you know. I’m a writer. I could help you write it, and we could go on a book tour. Think about it—just think about it. Mom, did you get me that ice cream? I’m so hungry. You know, you picture operating rooms to be so pristine…but there was shit all over the place! And I’m pretty sure everyone in there saw me naked! I know you all saw me naked!”

I wasn’t paralyzed, but I was definitely loopy.

Lying flat on a stiff bed at Brigham and Women’s hospital that night, I felt almost nothing. The only sensation that registered, racing and relentless, was hunger. Encircled by the anxious, watchful faces of my family, I gobbled spoonful after spoonful of J.P. Licks cake-batter ice cream. For the next two days, I couldn’t move anything but my forearms and legs. I also couldn’t sleep at night. I didn’t like lying alone, unable to move. At six every morning, I called my parents, layering atop their worry the burden of guilt for not yet being by my side.

On the third day, I got out of bed. The muscles in my back had been sliced during surgery, so I needed a nurse to slide my bony body to the edge of the bed and propel me into a standing position. The slightest use of the muscles shot a concentrated, raging rush of pain through my shoulder blades. Finally I lowered myself into a cushioned high-seated chair. My muscles seared. I felt like my upper back was being recklessly hacked and mutilated by a dull blade. I sat hunched like an old maid, shaking for fear of inadvertently rousing another blast of fire.

The next day, a physical therapist insisted I try to walk. I gaped at the absurd request, but with a heavy dose of painkillers and her steady hand to grip, I scuffled a few steps forward. Encouraged, I kept at it throughout the day, slowly, but farther and less fitfully each time.

As I shuffled through the halls of the neurology unit, I took notice of the other patients, mostly old and frail. Outside one room, a family of four stood sobbing, holding each other up. I felt thankful for my youth. My body could fight harder and recover faster than those of my floor mates. I could bounce back. I had to bounce back.

“You’re the best-off patient we have on this floor,” a nurse told me when I returned to my chair, dizzy after walking a lap around the hall.

I realized then that I was going to be okay; I wouldn’t accept any other outcome.

My dizzy spells became more frequent and intense the more I worked on walking. Still, talk of my release from the hospital passed from the lips of the doctor and nurses to my family and me. Everyone thought I could recover better at home, where I would feel more comfortable.

Five days after the surgery, my parents wheeled me out of the hospital. I went home on the condition that I would temporarily trade in my car keys, a semester of school and all mobility outside the reclining position for a doggy bag of OxyContin, a shoehorn, a sock aid and other Inspector Gadget tools. To cure my dizziness, I had to spend the next seven days lying flat, without a pillow. Sprawled in bed with magazines, novels, singing teddy bears, flowers and painkillers arranged in reach of my three-foot-long grabbing claw, I passed the long hours clicking through my friends’ Facebook pages, viewing photos of them smiling together at bars and mingling on campus. When I was finally allowed out of bed, the dizziness had abated. Little by little, I shed my handicaps while slowly regaining my confidence and rebuilding my strength to sit upright, to bend and, finally, to walk again.

It’s five months later and, as always, I’m prone to trip. My right knee sometimes gives out, and my doctor instructed me to forgo black diamonds for the bunny hill if I hit the slopes this season. I still have the same reputation on the dance floor, but no matter how off-tempo my sashay, I remind myself it’s a wonder I can dance at all.

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