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.

MY BUGATTI WALKER

Sometimes you gotta go minimal on your dreams. Bugatti or Lamborghini would be good; Ferrari too.. As at various other stages of life, I must now confront a new reality: my cane is beginning to feel slow.       

It’s a welcome problem when you outpace your cane. And notwithstanding my long-term Astaire fantasies, I think a good, fast, sleek walker might be the next interim device to accelerate me down the long, well-paved road without handrails toward cane minimalism, something that will take the curves like a dream and leave my fellow caners in the dust. Plus it has wheels. If Bugatti or Lambo don’t make walkers yet, maybe I can get a genuine logo or hood ornament to put on it, or at least a bunch of decals to stick here and there for when I zip past my ambulatory confederates. 

Dreams take time to fulfill, which is what gives them value. Infants, pure as they are, don’t need value, don’t even dream of walking, let alone squealing around curves to take the lead; they live in bottomline reality (where it is best to retain a foothold); they’re happy to waggle their legs in the air for as long as it takes to get wherever it is they might be going, whatever that might mean. They don’t know until they graduate and get their legs, like I’ll get my Bugatti walker. 

Figuratively, I’m just departing a new infancy. I’m long past waggling my leg in the air, which is boring if you’re an adult and have been to Le Mans. A good Bugatti, though, that hugs the road, with maybe not disc brakes -- I’m no longer into that kind of speed-- but with serviceable stoppers, ‘cause I plan to be veering a lot. I still love the verge of control, which I overdid a few times in the early cane phase and on the old motorbikes now trashed, plus even earlier a couple of cars, more lessons learned and life thankfully continued. But a saner life looms now, in a rather novel way for me: a new life of streamlined walking, with a world-class brand.

Now I have to find a reputable sports walker lot within decent driving distance, where they have a full range of the latest models with all the accessories and options right down to flames and pinstriping, ideally in a nice candy apple red...  I can cane around the lot and view the selection, kick the tires, so to speak, ask expert questions like what's the 0 to 60 for this baby? How’s the turning radius on this model? Can this one do wheelies? etc. Maybe even take it for a test walk, well below the speed limit at first.

Be great to be on the road again, that leads anywhere I choose...

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.

HOW TO RAISE A HAND

In this instance, a right hand.

In the middle of winter nights I often had to pull the blankets up on my hospital bed using my left (good) hand. It was an action familiar to me by now, some 4 months after I had clambered onto the comet. At that time, I was not yet using my right hand (I was originally right-handed) because it was still short-circuited and sensitive. So my right arm lived pretty much on its own during this time, and seemed to have forgotten the finer points of handship altogether. I was doing exercises, but the response was primitive, so I wasn't expecting too much too fast; for the time being, at least, I had resigned myself to left-handedness, which had a new interest all its own.

Then one winter night I was again aroused from deep sleep by a cold right arm and had to pull the blankets up. My left hand was maneuvering the covers with the usual drowsy impatience when all at once, from out of  the darkness came a ghostly right hand, emerging slowly from beneath the blanket! It scared the hell out of me. The hand then proceeded to try awkwardly to-- lend a hand. My right hand was wanting to be a hand again! It had ambition! And some form of manual pride! It wasn't going to be left behind, not if it had anything to say about it.

That was when I began to think I was going about this in the wrong way. My right hand was telling me something. I had been thinking that I knew more about being a hand than a hand did. I was treating a hand like a mindless tool, or at most a tool with my mind, currently short-circuited. But here was a hand trying to be a hand all on its own; I wasn't a party to this effort. What I call my hand was wanting to be a hand again: it missed its old job!

As I've said or intimated more than once in these scribblings, my mind knows more than I do. I should pay deeper attention to myself.