Incapacity is worse

When I was in the hospital—in the early stages of recovery from a traumatic brain injury—photos I’d taken were printed out and brought to me.

I had just started talking again, or trying to. Pictures roused more. There was a photo of a bluefish I caught, a wooden owl I carved, me with my rowboat, an eagle, and my favorite raptor: an Osprey. I remember taking the photo, remember where it was.

The bird had just emerged from the sea with a fish to eat. Fish hawk indeed. It is hard not to admire a creature so defined by specialization and prowess, especially when somebody checks each morning that you did not wet or soil the bed you had to be zipped into for your own safety.

As I recover, I think often of a line from Jeffers’ poem “Hurt Hawks.”

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

I am resistant to call myself strong, but when I’m well I do many things. I would not say I’m in pain but the word “incapacity” carries newfound weight.

I normally tie and fish with flies, but haven’t cast one of my rods in months and haven’t sat at my vise in even longer. I’m not able. My right side stubbornly does not like to work. I am still working each day to develop the requisite fine motor skills. Only recently have I started cracking and flipping eggs in the morning, and walking semi-normally to the bathroom. Everybody who knows me well has remarked on the potential agreement between my personality and recovery. I am quite stubborn. This will, according to them, come in handy.

I am the butt of many jokes which thinly veil flattery. One friend remarked that this is one way to learn patience. I have received a dozen great letters from another, about the beautiful ups and downs of everyday life. I am right handed so replying longhand isn’t possible right now. I write, which often means typing as you can probably tell, but my right hand is profoundly slow as I relearn basic word processing mechanics. Typing all of this has not been easy.

In my free time I take photos, usually of birds. That often means hiking and waiting for a thrilling moment, or a worthy subject, then using my right hand to make the camera work—shutter, aperture, ISO—not to mention carrying a hulking telephoto lens. Not the easiest while recovering. It felt very good to travel to see my first Osprey of the year, at a conservation land where I used to work. Trails that were once laughably easy are now hard enough to require that I take breaks. Every right step is marked by thoughts of hyperextension—don’t do it—and a discreet limp.

Just today I tried birding on a paved path and had to stop many times. Trying to get any bird in my viewfinder means coordinating my body, my eyes, my brain—all parts of me which no longer want to work, or work together, when asked. Incapacity is worse. I did get some photographs of Osprey, but certainly not my best. Two Osprey in a tree, not moving, no fish in their talons, but I am still very proud to have taken the photo even though I am less than happy when I zoom to pixel peep.

Back when writing did not pose such a challenge, I was rather diligent in keeping my journal. In October last year, months before January’s accident, I wrote that I was grateful for “my health, my body, and my brain.” I no longer feel like I have any of those things the way I did.

My body does not work how it should, because of what happened to my brain. That being said, I am grateful to have the chance to work hard to get them back closer to how they were. Sometimes the best part of my day is doing PT—lunges, or squatting a dumbbell so light I otherwise might not have touched it. All part of the long game of getting better. Some day this will live in the past tense—as far away as that feels. It will be a thing to talk about, something overcome, at least that is what I hope, and what keeps me going.

It won’t be my first thought when I wake up. It’s at the forefront of my mind constantly. I have no choice. 

Sometimes my thoughts get dark. I've asked myself difficult questions, thoughts have crossed my mind I’d prefer not to write here. I’ve wondered if I’d choose to live in a world where eating, walking, speaking, and seeing are this challenging, where my eyes make birds and reading unclear.

But there’s so much to celebrate, too: my family, friends, specific places, those very birds, those blurry words. The future, however distant and disconnected it feels: catching fish, tying flies, seeing birds; tending gardens, growing mushrooms, picking heavy things up. There will be jokes made by my closest friends, great stories from the same. All of this is in the future—requiring nothing bad happens to me, so nothing will (fingers crossed).

I already woke up from a coma, and survived a pretty gnarly accident. I’ve called this rock bottom, and I don’t see things getting much worse.