I CALL MY LEG A LAMBORGHINI 

Anyone with any sense would rather have a good leg than a Lamborghini, if one were to ask such a silly question. To the rehab staff, I call my challenged leg ‘my Lamborghini,’ not to impugn the streamlined beauty of the Lambo, but because legs need a little flattery now and then, a little incentive to get moving more gracefully and stylishly than a sub-par leg such as mine is at the moment, lazing in its new milieu. I need more class down there.

When I call my leg a Lamborghini, the limb evidences a certain flair upon at last lurching into movement; it wears a new hint of grace, because a leg of any reasonable age and sensibility knows what a Lamborghini is, and begins to show distinct, though distant, signs of Astaire. Things are improving. This is the proper approach to managing a leg I believe, on the basis of limited subjective experience, which is basically all one ever gets.

Of course I do not mean to compare legs and Lamborghinis in any real way; Lamborghinis may be fast on certain roads and race tracks, but only there. I can go up my stairs in 30 seconds or into the pantry for some donuts right this moment; that is the proper domain of legs: living space at large. Lamborghinis, being strictly limited in range, are unfairly diminished by this comparison.

Just because I with my quad cane can walk rings around a Lamborghini, which can only sit rumbling throatily by the roadside while I totter into the greater world at will, we should not mock the Lambo, it can reach 60 in 3 seconds, if you insist on doing pointless things; waste is the lap of luxury, after all. There’s no waste in a leg, nor any need for luxury. 

Just a touch of style.

THE TOPS OF THE ROCKIES

One thing they don’t tell you when you start re-walking after a cerebral hemorrhage is how far above the ground you now are. The new reality is a bit of a shock. As a  young man of full height I topped out at a bit over 6 feet (183cm); then, over the course of a lifetime of impact sports, hand-delivering groceries and newspapers, body surfing, motorcycle and other collisions, lugging’n’tossing firewood, general aging etc. I’d bottomed out for a time at about 5’ 11”, with lower elevations anticipated as time arrived. I never expected to be towering like this.

But when in the semi-Lazarus phase after my comet ride I rose from my bed and began to walk with a cane, I was astonished at my elevation. Though the distance is subjective, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. You yourself are starkly aware of the skyscraper you have now become, teetering atop record-breaking legs, head in clouds-- but you could never prove it. 

It is a new experience, far more disquieting than mere hallucinogens. Equally disturbing is the fact that no one else perceives this change; all relate to you as though you were at about the same elevation as before, and wave their friendly greetings right in your face, in all kindness destroying your focus and aggravating your instability way up there alone in the head at the top.

As to the bottom, where not long ago your leg/torso relations were congenial - a matter of longstanding trust, so to speak - now there is a profound distrust of your old rambling partners, with whom you've shared your life, on all its many paths, right down to the ground. But now, as you peer from your teetering summit in the lower stratosphere, you know better. Just look down there. A mere two legs stand below, one of them questionable. Yet folks expect you to operate this bipedal  behemoth with a common grace. See those feet down there, wanting to move? Put on your glasses. There. See them now? Recognize those two shapes in the big, look like shoes? Next to the hospital? Be careful, there are a lot of good folks in there. That’s it, now take a step. 

No, a step; try for the old normal. Of course you feel dizzy now and then. For not-dizzy, you need a normal world with a normal you in it. That’s nowhere around for the moment, but just keep practicing, reality will return. At least most of it. And your leg will less and less think it’s maybe a wing. Trust me; soon it won’t even be thinking of stepping over a car.

Control is the operative word here; that’s what your leg doesn’t have right now. A raw nervous system component is exemplary of chaos; it is the way the universe was just after the Big Bang, so it's familiar to a leg, which had its start in the caldron of universal hardware development. Chaos, amok, rampant -- these archaic words, arising directly from the raw aftereffects of the Big Bang, also apply. And like that early chaos following the primal dawn, they are also temporary.

So enjoy gazing over the Pacific at the tops of the Rockies while you can. 

That perspective won’t last long.

RIGHT ARM, MY FOOT!

Amazing, how long you can store pain without feeling it. Take my right arm, for example. And don’t say I never gave you anything. When I get my rehab massages, the painless arm blossoms into amazing and colorful waves of “welcome” pain, the kind I can appreciate, that I’d had no idea I was blithely carrying around. I’d been kept ignorant of it through the benign graces that have always known their body stuff right down to the ground.

As of now, it’s been about 18 months since my brain short-circuited in a minor way, randomly scrambling the communication routes originally divided between the limbs on my right side, which are now blended in a curious new arrangement and must be reaccommodated, adjusted, built upon and redirected by a select crew of innate nervous system and other operative entities who are complete strangers to me, using unknown algorithmic systems I embody but am not in charge of, thank goodness; I’ve always been inattentive to the principles of higher corporeal math. 

These cryptic entities are now busy trying to reconfigure the new situation, so I wisely remain aside;  I can feel them colluding and assembling in there, working day and night, making way-in-my-head decisions regarding things that even science has no inklings of. It is best not to interfere as though I know what I am doing; when a limb is ready to make a move, it will do so-- and thereby inform me of its success. It’s a nice series of surprises. I’ve never really “known” how to operate a limb anyway, and this is not the time to start, except in the most basic of ways; best leave the fine details to the corporeal experts that were me long before I was.

These nameless entities, which have been carrying out such complex tasks for eons and to which I am newly thankful, have generated a number of miracle-level surprises along my way, the most surprising (and informative) to me being that it’s going on without me-- it doesn’t need yours truly much at all, when I’m the de facto boss, but who the hell do I think I am, anyway. I go along with it all-- not that I have a choice. So what if a hand thinks like a foot for a while now and then? 

Broadens the horizons.