“Hey, Matty! How’re y’ doin’ t’day?” says a cheerful female voice behind me.
I half turn my head, not enough to see her but enough to look polite. “I’m getting there, Olga. Every day in every way, getting a little better.”
“You want a cup o’ water yet, Matty?” says Olga.
“You’re too good to me. You’re going to spoil me, Olga. I’ll start expecting Herb to wait on me, and then what’ll happen? Yeah. A cup o’ water would be great, dear.”
I continue doing my set of leg lifts while holding onto the smooth wooden bar that’s almost breast high. I’m slowly raising my left leg to the side for the fifth time when my right knee begins to kill me. So, the first four times were painless, I tell myself. As I wince and take in a deep breath, Gerry Kimbrough, who is exercising next to me, tries to clear his throat, preparing to speak.
“How’s it going today, Matty?” he says hoarsely.
“Great, Gerry,” I lie. “How’s it with you?”
He tries again to clear his throat, unproductively. “Pretty good, Matty. I—I’m going to a—a speech path—pathologist. Learning some—some ways to comp—compensate, if—I can.”
“When it can’t be fixed, Gerry, that’s what y’ have to do. Thanks, Olga. Just set it on the window sill there, and I’ll drink it when I get done with another set of ten. Bless you, dear.”
I glance down at Gerry’s ankles and see he’s wearing eight-pound weights today. Good for him!
“Moving up from five pounds to eight today, Gerry? That’s great! I’ve still got these sissy two-pounders on, and today they’re—.” I catch myself just in time. Shut up, motor-mouth, I think. “Today they’re about as much as I can handle.”
“You’re doing—great, too—Matty,” he tells me.
I’ve finished the first set of ten and begin counting the second set, lifting my right leg to the side. My left knee doesn’t begin to hurt until I reach the count of nine, so I go past ten and up to fourteen before shifting to the left leg again.
I pretend I’m kicking the shins of the blonde bitch who backed her ****ing shiny new Mercedes SUV into me, “Grubmanning” me while I was putting my groceries into the rear of my little Honda wagon. Seven—uh! Eight—uh! Nine—uh! Ten—uh! The pain seems less this set than the first, so I take it up to fourteen lifts for this leg, too. Maybe it would be good if I come back to the bar and do one or two more sets in another ten minutes, I think as I sip down half of my water.
“Hang in there, Gerry,” I say and walk over to one of the stationary bicycles.
Some half-bald old coot named Michael is sitting nearby in a raised chair, wearing little pound-and-a-half weights on his ankles and doing leg lifts very slowly. He’s about twenty years older than me, maybe more. We nod a greeting to each other, and I begin to pedal. He’s fairly new to rehab. I think I’ve only seen him here twice before today. Last Friday he mentioned to one of the trainers that he’d been in the navy during World War II.
“Don’t run me over with that, young lady,” he jokes.
“Don’t jump out in front of me, new guy,” I joke back.
After five or six minutes of silence, I hear Michael speak again.
“Hey, Brian! Come over here for a minute. I’ve got something important to tell you.”
Brian Cassidy is one of the older-timers. He was here before me, and I’ve been coming three times a week for the past five months. Trying to come back from a stroke of some kind, is Brian.
“Be right there, Michael,” he says, slowly crossing the room in his dark blue Adidas running suit.
I glance up from my odometer and watch his progress. Brian is holding his cane above the floor and is making an effort to raise his affected leg higher than his so-called “good” leg. Michael continues to do slow leg lifts, and I can tell from his moving lips that he is counting to himself while he waits for Brian to get there.
“At your service, Michael. How can I help you?” Brian says when he is about four feet away from us both.
“I’ve got a bit of serious advice to impart to you, Brian. For you and for your whole family as well.”
“Michael, in all the many decades that we’ve known each other, I have always respected you and have valued whatever you’ve had to say to me. I don’t know if you ever knew that, but it is the Lord’s honest truth.”
I shoot a quick glance up at his face to see whether Brian is being whimsical. He has no trace of a smile on his lips or in his eyes.
“I am glad to hear that, Brian, because what I have to say comes straight from my own hard-won experience,” says Michael. “I want to tell you why I’m here now and pass on what I’ve learned from my misfortune so that others can profit from it.”
I glance from Michael to Brian, back to Michael, back to Brian, and back to Michael. Now Michael has me hooked: I’m curious, too.
Michael sets both his feet on the floor and says under his breath, “Fifty.” Then he begins to rub both his thighs with his palms.
Brian waits patiently, resting part of his weight on his cane now.
“Brian,” says Michael, “I have a recliner chair at home, and five weeks ago I was sitting in it, reading the sports pages after lunch. And I fell asleep doing that!”
He pauses and nods his chin meaningfully at Brian so that he will be certain to take this information in.
After about fifteen seconds of silence, Brian answers, “I’ve got a recliner chair, too, and I’ve fallen asleep in it, too. I don’t think that is anything you should be hard on yourself about, Michael. It can happen.”
“I know that as well as you, Brian. Let me tell this my own way. It’s important, as you’ll soon see.”
Michael pauses for another ten seconds to collect his train of thought.
“At three-thirty, Brian, I woke up and realized I needed to get to the bank before they closed. So I tried to spring out of the recliner the way I’ve done maybe a million times before—only this time something happened to me, something new.”
I continue to pedal at a steady rate, glancing from one man to the other during this next pause. Their eyes are on each other’s faces, and they never look at me.
“Brian, when I stood up, my right leg was as strong as ever—but my left leg was like a piece of limp spaghetti. No strength at all! It just gave way, and I fell down to the floor and broke my hip!”
Brian opens his mouth to speak, but Michael waves his hand for silence.
“I was in the hospital for three days before they did a hip replacement on me. It seems they wanted to know why my leg had gone so weak before they performed any surgery on it. I had seventeen dozen tests done on my muscles, nerves, heart, veins, arteries, and everything else—just so we’d be on the safe side, so to speak. And do you know what was determined?”
After another significant pause, Brian shakes his head slowly and admits that he does not know.
“Brian, listen to this. We figured out that I had been sleeping for two hours with my legs crossed. My right leg was on top of my left leg, and it cut off the circulation to it. Put it to sleep, as they used to say. No feeling in it at all when I stood up! Didn’t know where it was, and it got twisted the wrong way when I tried to take a step, and I just fell! Simple as that!”
“That’s really terrible for this misfortune to happen to you, Michael,” says Brian, wide-eyed. “I hope that you’re recovering from it all right—with no complications or nothing.”
“Brian, my advice for you and your family is this: never sit in a chair of any kind with your legs crossed! I mean it. Never!”
Brian rubs his chin and nods his head in agreement.
“Michael, I will take this to heart and will pass it along to my whole family. May I tell you something of a related nature?”
Michael looks down at his hands, which are still resting on his thighs, and considers this for a long interval. Finally he looks up at Brian and nods assent.
“Until you gave me this fine advice today, Michael, I had totally forgotten something which I and my daughter had witnessed about two years ago. She had driven me to my appointment with my stroke doctor, and we were sitting in the waiting room, you know, waiting.”
Michael is staring at his own hands while Brian speaks, and Brian is starting to look fatigued and is beginning to shift his weight from one leg to the other.
“One of the other doctors comes out of the door that leads to the examining rooms in the back—not my doctor but one of the others in that suite, you know. And he walks up to a patient who is sitting across from me and Betty, and he slaps the guy pretty hard across the knee, knocking his magazine out of his hands, almost angry-like, you know. Well, he had the guy’s full attention right away—and everybody else’s, too, if I might say so.”
Brian moves closer to Michael and bends down to try to look him in the eyes. After a few seconds of silence, Michael looks up at him.
“That doctor raised his voice and said, as if for all of us to hear, ‘Mr. Smith,’ or whatever his name was—I really don’t remember—‘Mr. Smith! Don’t you ever sit with your legs crossed like that! You could put one of ‘em to sleep, and when you stood up, maybe you’d fall over and just break a hip! The only good news is today you’d already be at a doctor’s office when you did it!’ Michael, I had totally forgotten his advice until you were kind enough to give me your own excellent advice.”
Michael glances over at me, and our eyes meet for three seconds. Then he winks at me. I look away, wondering if Brian is being sarcastic in any way with Michael—or if both of them have been. Are they play-acting—for themselves? For others here? I can’t decide.
“Brian, let me tell you something, young man,” says Michael decisively. “That was a valuable lesson which that doctor was trying to impart. I only hope that you will remember and actually heed it—now that you’ve heard it from me.”
Then I sense that he is turning in my direction.
“And I also hope that this young lady here—who may or may not have been listening to either of us whilst she has been speeding down the gorgeous kaleidoscope of the highway of life on her bicycle, perhaps far too rapidly to smell its many small flowers—is herself able to do the same.”
I smile and nod towards them both and dismount from the bike without a word, giving them a little wave with my right hand. My husband, Herb, who has been sitting and reading in the waiting area while I exercised, is now standing, waiting for me with our cab driver near Eva, the receptionist. The bike’s odometer tells me that I’ve “ridden” two miles “farther” than I had planned, and the wall clock behind Eva tells me that my hour is about up.
I take two slow steps towards Herb, who had a serious stroke nearly ten years ago, and then I slowly turn back towards Michael and Brian. They are both looking at me. There is room, I think, in my world for ironic repartee and for straightforward, kindly concern. Either can be good. And both can be good.
“Michael? May I call you Michael? I’m Matty. Matty Marshall. Brian—Michael—I’d like to thank you both. I learned something important about health and safety today, and I hope that I shall remember it and apply it. And I will be certain to pass along what I learned to my own family. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Ms. Matty Marshall,” says Michael, making a slight bow and giving me a second wink.
“‘U’re welcome, Matty,” echoes Brian Cassidy with what looks like a very faint trace of a smile.
