How To Fall Down
By: Kelly Bergin
Tags: Health, Chronic Illness, Rehabilitation, Longreads, Memoir

Six months earlier, in July, I lost my ability to walk. It began, appropriately, with hard falls.

First, I tripped on my way up the stairs and thought I was just being clumsy. Two hours later, I fell three steps when my knees suddenly gave out on me, mid-step. I weakened. I could walk from the car to the doctor’s office but I couldn’t walk from the waiting room to the exam room. At the neurologist’s office, I had to hold onto my mother. The doctor admitted me to the neurological floor of the hospital twelve hours later, thinking it was some sort of terrible, degenerative neurological disease.

I had recently survived a systemic crisis in the ICU in UCLA and now I was back home on the Jersey Shore, recovering, improving. I was supposed to concentrate on walking forward and eventually, back onto that plane to graduate school and a new city.

But instead, now I was meeting the neurologist in the ER for a spinal tap. I spent four days in inpatient care. I got all the drugs I wanted. When they scanned my spinal cord and brain, they didn’t find nothing, but it wasn’t anything conclusive.

At first, I was relieved. Then confused. But mostly I was stoned. So very stoned. I began to understand people who shoot up. The way the morphine floated through my veins, that first couple seconds of feeling — they were the greatest of my life. I felt the total absence of physical pain, something I rarely knew as a lupus sufferer with a wrecked body. I didn’t need half as much morphine as they gave me and still I asked for more.

And then they moved me to an inpatient rehab center. I was the youngest patient by decades; a distinction I’m used to. The IV meds stopped and the withdrawal started strong and fast. Headaches, listlessness, depression so acute I could barely swallow without first considering if maybe I should just die first.

I spent three hours a day in physical and occupational therapy, trying to relearn how to lift my hands over my head and how to use the toilet by myself — first, how to do it, and then how to impress the staff enough that they’d clear me medically to go to the bathroom by myself. Before that clearance, though, even peeing required getting the help of a nurse or an aide by pushing the call button. And I had to pee often. My 87-year-old roommate Margo generally didn’t appreciate it.

After a few days, I started sneaking to the bathroom — or as sneaky as one can be in a wheelchair. But even with the modified toilet and its extra arms and extensions, it was so, so hard. It felt like the most physically exhausting thing I’d ever done on my own. I wasn’t some couch potato. I played basketball. I ran competitively. (I’d even run so hard I’d thrown up.) Suddenly, using the toilet was a terrible new struggle.

The gym downstairs was depressing, full of resistance bands and two-pound dumbbells, but there my relative youth shined. My personality came back; I stopped sleeping through activities and social worker interviews and got to work recovering. I Instagrammed it and would think about the surreal juxtaposition of my friends’ pictures of trips to the Hamptons next to those of my summer spent at a rehab hospital on the Jersey Shore. It was hard to accept at the time.

But I was surviving. My pregnant sister brought my two-year-old niece Sadie to see me every few days. Sadie decorated my corner of the room with the stuff my sister let her pick out from the dollar store. A Hawaiian luau dancer hung above my bed and heart-stamped duct tape coated my computer and wheelchair.

I got back to feeling. Feeling in my extremities returned but also feelings in my brain. Patched up with pain pills and Xanax, it started to light up.

I set simple goals and I met them.

And then I tried to put on my shorts by myself and fell out of bed.

A report was written and a fall risk bracelet was slapped on my wrist. But when I walked around the gym, all the old people cheered. We — the therapists and I — decided to try the stairs. I fell. Another report was written. I hid my tears but my red face told the truth. My favorite physical therapist let me sit on the steps, like an inconsolable child, while I gathered all the literal and metaphorical strength in the world to get up only to sit back down again. We would not try again for a few days.