Been down so long it looks like up to me

When I began my recent three-month stay at a rehab hospital I came from a month in an ICU. I arrived by ambulance on a gurney, attached to a ventilator, with both a feeding tube and PIC line. I'd spent very little time out of bed and hadn't so much as had a drink of water by mouth in four weeks. It was all pretty grim, but the point of my transfer to rehab was that there was plenty of room for improvement, even for a gimp like me.

My assigned primary doctor at rehab was bubbly and optimistic. At our first meeting she suggested I consult the in-house psychiatrist and be prescribed an anti-depressant.

"Show me someone who can't walk," she said, "and I'll show you someone who's depressed."

That's what I get for consulting an expert -- I had no idea that I've been clinically depressed since 1983. I thought my current anxiety was because, you know, I'd been in a month-long medical crisis and still wasn't breathing or eating on my own and all this was new and alarming to me. Or, perhaps, the experience of near-constant discomfort and pain had unnerved me just a little bit. Nope -- the inability to walk has apparently been the emotional ruin of me since I was fifteen. (Gimpy Mumpy writes here about the aggressive tendency of the medical establishment to prescribe psychiatric pharmaceuticals to disabled people on the grounds that we can't possible be stable or content.)

I wanted to ask the doc if she'd read my medical records and knew I'd begun this current medical crisis from a permanently seated position or if she was actually that bubbly and optimistic that she planned to cure me of uncurable pre-existing conditions too. I've little interest in any form of that myth and certainly not from any doctor caring for me.

Maybe her image of a rehab patient didn't allow for already-disabled people getting sick. Maybe her physician God-complex was running amuck. Maybe she was just a loon. But maybe the cultural default image of a person being bodily "normal" didn't allow her to register the facts plainly in my medical files. Files she finally told me she had read. And certainly she didn't understand at all how her statement denied a lifetime of who I am.

John Hockenberry, in his autobiogaphy Moving Violations, tells of a mishap with a city bus that cut too close to a street corner and caught his manual wheelchair where he sat on the sidewalk. He dove clear of disaster, but his chair was mangled under the bus. As people ran to help and he calmly told them he was fine but wasn't getting up because he couldn't walk, they were unable to piece together what he said. Being already disabled wasn't a logical possibility to them, even with the wheelchair in evidence.

That's just how invisible disabled people are: we can't possibly, really exist. (Unless, of course, you poke us in public with rude questions to assure yourself we're real.)

Back to Dr. Perky. What pep talk does she give to her patients seeking rehab because of permanent paralysis? Does she tell them they will never be happy again because of their new injuries? And is their dosage higher than mine?