I’ve been diagnosed with severe problems in my cervical spine with a recommendation of surgery to nip in the bud the risk of paralysis. I’ve considered that perhaps this is the long awaited answer to my occasional thought in my adult life that if only something were really wrong it would justify my depression and malaise—living chemically does not always keep these gremlins at bay. But I don’t think spinal cord surgery is what I had in mind. Contemplating it has much too much potential for mushrooming in the mind, even if it is apparently somewhat routine. I can’t say what concretely bad thing would be a good candidate to wake me up permanently to life’s daily songs and roses. It certainly can’t involve my children. Actually, I think this is a close as I want to get to a real worry, and a part of me is still holding out for the doctors at the big university hospital saying, Oh, that was a complete misreading of the MRI; you just need a little more physical therapy; how ridiculous to suggest you might be paralyzed if you ignore this.
When he read the MRI, the local neurologist wanted to put me under a colleague’s knife immediately, services I would decline even if a second opinion confirms the diagnosis. My internist said this is dire and let’s get you to a university surgeon ASAP but no don’t cancel your trip to Florida in two weeks. I’m easily confused, so I haven’t yet aligned Get it done yesterday with Go on your trip in two weeks. My husband pointed out that had the neurologist been in town two weeks ago to read the MRI, he would have urged me to get the surgery then, so “immediately" is apparently relative.
Having looked up all the medical words in the MRI report in an attempt to understand what my spinal cord is doing, I’ve decided to now analyze the situation in terms of the accidents that may have compounded the general effects of aging and heredity on my vertebrae and discs, which now loom like greedy monsters around my spinal cord rather than its protectors. I must say, my accident list is rather impressive. It mostly involves cars. While I just recently received my first speeding ticket in thirty years and my second ever, and have no other tickets on my driving record, I’ve been involved in eight car accidents and a slip and fall. For those of you who like statistics, that’s one car accident every 7.75 years of my life, but since the first one occurred when I was fifteen, that increases the frequency to one every 5.875 years. That’s almost as interesting as moving to Fresno for five years and not leaving until thirty-one years later, and then to move forty miles southeast. But I do prefer this area of California’s Central Valley, and I haven’t had any major car accidents here, just a couple of rear-end nudges. So, that takes care of two accidents. On to the previous six. And before I forget, the good thing about my neck is that it’s replaced the dyslexic highway patrolman, who had the audacity to write me my second-ever speeding ticket, as my focus of attention. He claims to have clocked me at 87, while my cruise control was set at 78.
It all began when my parents decided to try out a non-American car and bought a used VW bug, beige. My dad had seatbelts installed. One summer day, my sister and I were returning home from swim practice about twenty miles from home. The parkway route we drove daily was considered, as I recall, one of the most dangerous roads in the nation, or at least in the area. It had no proper onramps and exits, just roads that intersected it. As my sister prepared to turn right off the parkway, she noted a truck barreling down on us. Despite her attempts to escape, he rear-ended us and spun us around. My sister slammed her thigh into the gearshift. I and my seat ended up in the backseat. My sister recalls that that evening everyone went out, leaving her at home alone. This is pretty typical of our family: pick yourself up, go on, get over it. Our psyches aside, as for my neck, perhaps that’s where the non-genetic, non-age-related damage started.
My parents required us to learn to drive on a stick-shift. I learned on the same VW that had tried to buck off my sister and me. My mother had the lucky burden of teaching me, which involved daily trips that summer up and down and around on curvy two-lane country roads to my swim team work-outs at a pool forty-five minutes from home. I can still hear Mom say, “Don’t shift going downhill around a curve.” She just wanted to take the fun out of driving. I imagine she was a little relieved when I got my license in August and she didn’t have to ride with me anymore. At any rate, I now became responsible for my own accidents, and I got right to it.
My parents’ other car at that point was a black Ford station wagon. I pulled out of Shorty O’Rourke’s gas station one day—he was a neighbor who tended to our cars—into the left lane of the one-way main drag, intending to turn left at the light, then left at the next light onto the main drag headed one-way the other way, then up the hill out of town to home. I first learned in high school geometry and later as a dance teacher that neither my head nor my body has more than an extremely rudimentary concept of space, and so I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to drive anything bigger than a VW beetle. Turning from the gas station into the lane right next to it should have been a piece of cake, but I made it complicated and scraped the side of the car in the next lane over. I don’t recall any repercussions at home, and no one was hurt.
When I was a senior in high school, my parents bought a SAAB. I loved that car! Front wheel drive was a new thing, and when the first snow storm of the season hit, I tootled around all the cars spread over the hilly roads. Most people didn’t bother with snow tires and tire studs until the need was clear. So how cool and chic was that to maneuver around all the poor, unprepared, stranded motorists as if it was a sunny summer day? On the other hand, one day the next summer, a bee robbed me of my teenage superiority. Looking in the rearview mirror in an attempt to locate the intruder in my hair (and no, I did not have a teased beehive hairdo, just my usual bob), I drove the car into the guardrail, taking out the entire right side. Fortunately my friend in the passenger seat was fine. Again, I don’t recall any parental repercussions. Perhaps it’s true what my siblings sometimes mutter that our parents loved me, their youngest, best. But I sure wish they were around right now, not off in heaven somewhere, to console me about subjecting my neck to the guillotine.
The next accident was even funnier than the bee incident. But first, about killing the SAAB, without an accident. My sister and her husband drove the SAAB across country from our parents’ home in Pennsylvania and delivered it to me in Davis, California. Even in Left Coast California, SAABs were still pretty rare in the 1970s, and I knew nothing about mechanics. The mechanic I took it to did horrible things to the gray snail, and one day it gave up the ghost on Interstate 80 in Berkeley. I did what any liberated woman would do: accepted a ride from two decent-enough looking guys in a van who stopped and offered to help and did in fact deliver Puga, my black lab, and me, without incident, to a car mechanic. Then I did the next thing any liberated woman would do: called my father in Pennsylvania who said, Call your brother in San Mateo, he’s closer. After a consult, my brother said, Call your boyfriend. I should tour Berkeley more thoroughly to see if the car became garden art.
SAAB-less and knowing nothing about cars or how to go about buying one, I did the natural thing and bought a brand new lemon yellow VW beetle. Puga and I enjoyed that car. We drove frequently to the Bay Area to see my boyfriend. We drove to Fresno, with a giant, golden stuffed Pooh Bear in the front seat and Puga, as usual, in the back, to see my sister and her husband and deliver Pooh to my newborn niece. We drove on a high school field trip to San Francisco and Watsonville with four students crowded in and Puga in the compartment behind the rear seat. I left her in Palo Alto with my boyfriend before we went off to Watsonville.
This is becoming a long story for an accident that has nothing to do with my neck, but it gets even more amusing! One night, as Puga and I lay sleeping in our ground floor apartment in Davis, across the street from the railroad tracks, an explosion awoke us. I was ready to run for the hills, away from the train wreck, and was confused when I looked out to see no train. Instead there was a line of bruised cars, including my yellow VW. It seems a foreign student at the local University of California campus was under the influence of a substance never disclosed and had trouble controlling his car. He totaled six or seven parked cars and got off scot free because he had no insurance and was from out of the country. I never quite understood how that worked, especially when AAA told me if I canceled my insurance I’d never get car insurance again. Actually, the wrecker had done me a bit of a favor as I was quitting my job and wasn’t sure how I’d continue to make the car payments, which is why I didn’t replace the car and cancelled my insurance. I don’t think that accident would have affected my neck had I been in the car: not a single empty beer bottle in the full trunk broke, and they all still met their destiny at the recycling center. And by the way, it’s always good to throw an etymology lesson into an essay, so, to wit, “scot free” originally meant “tax free.”
I’m not always the most careful of people, since I am spatially challenged and singularly focused when a thought pops into my mind. I’ve been called a bull in a china shop. I’m probably lucky that neither I nor other people nor more things in my path have broken. Well, my best friend in my nine-month stint in the Davis/Sacramento area was a fellow teacher. We often commuted together, and when my VW was totaled, he let me use his chartreuse BMW 2002. I don’t remember any of the details, but I managed to help it incur some damage one day, which David simply shrugged off. Perhaps it was self-defense on his part. David, who is a New York Jew and knows whereof he speaks, always said I had a better guilt complex than any Jew he’d ever met. So who knows what burden I would have thrust on him in my abject guilt over damaging his BMW if he had made something of it.
I believe we can fast forward to 2000. With my shortcomings as previously herein mentioned, I find yellow lights challenging. So one summer day, I was driving my year-old Honda Accord east on Shaw Avenue in Fresno, when, after some debate with myself over the yellow light, I opted to stop, thinking, as I so often do, should I have kept going? I believe I may also have changed lanes shortly before this decision. I didn’t have long to wonder about the answer to my question. I’m not sure why there are big rigs traveling the 45 mph speed limit in the middle of a city, but there are, and the one behind me had no intention of stopping at the yellow light and did not see me. My body went forward and then back in slow motion, and my head did a slow-motion slam into the headrest. Then I became aware of arms waving outside my window and a mouth moving in a face, like we were anemones in a tidepool. I got my window down and when the driver asked assured him I was okay. The future joke was that the back of my Accord was a year newer than the front. The truck’s bumper was also damaged, so I guess the impact was pretty profound. I don’t recall if I went to my then doctor, a good friend, or just called. I didn’t feel any pain or stiffness, just a ditzyness for a few days, which he said was from the protective release of adrenaline into my system.
The fact is, I have no pain in my neck, and my logical self says how then could my cervical spinal cord be severely damaged? Last year I slipped on slimy mud. I couldn’t risk dropping my coffee mug (despite its being plastic and having a lid) or my camera, so I slammed, arms up, onto my tail bone and thence backwards, bouncing my head audibly on the clay. Again, I felt no pain, just a bit ditzy for a couple of days, which I found amusing, noting how my brain lagged behind my vision in recording sights. My mug and camera survived perfectly.
It was just this occasional numbness in my arms and my restless legs that resulted in an MRI that says things about my insides that I can neither see nor feel. And I now know I have hyper reflexes: when my left knee is tapped my leg bounces up about ninety degrees. I would have thought having reflexes on such alert would be a good thing! The joke is that in my typical stubborn defiance that anything can be wrong with me, I’ve said, See, no broken bones! when I’ve taken some pretty hard spills in recent years, for the bone density scans have noted some loss of bone. I didn’t know that my favorite quote, from The Little Prince, could apply so literally: The essential is invisible to the eyes. Well, here’s to growing up and becoming a little less petulant, knowing when to bounce back and when to bounce into the doctor’s office for a little expert advice, and a steady hand on the scalpel.
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