The Monster In The Mirror (Relentless Grace Excerpt #5)

Happy Monday! I’ve decided to add a feature.

For the next few Mondays, I’ll post a series of excerpts from RELENTLESS GRACE. You can read previous excerpts here.

I hope you enjoy them, and that you’ll encounter God’s invitation to give hope another chance.

THE MONSTER IN THE MIRROR (Relentless Grace Excerpt #5)

Intensive Care became my new home. Five days later a team of neurosurgeons fused the vertebrae, joining crushed and splintered bones with an assortment of metal plates and screws along with a chunk of bone transplanted from my hip.

I emerged from surgery encased in a “halo brace” to stabilize my neck while the fusion healed. This contraption surely descended from some medieval instrument of torture, a metal jacket attached to vertical rods that clamped to a metal ring around my head—my “halo.” Four screws secured the halo to my head. It took some time to assimilate that little piece of information—the thing was screwed into my skull!

As the fog of the anesthetic subsided I gradually became acquainted with this primitive apparatus that served as an inflexible exoskeleton to lock my upper body solidly in one position. Not that I could move much anyway, but this device added profoundly to the discomfort and frustration.

I had to learn to live with my new halo because we’d be together for four months.

The therapists tried hard to be friendly and encouraging, to make the best of an awful situation. Jokes, sports, movies, they tried every topic and tactic to distract me from the dismal circumstances and create a more pleasant and personal relationship. I wasn’t playing their game. I was miserable and had no intention of pretending otherwise. I couldn’t see beyond the halo, the catheter, the orthopedic stockings, and this bed that had become my prison. I did everything possible to make sure everyone around me understood the hopelessness, that efforts to help were pointless and doomed to fail.

I also had lost my voice, making a bad situation even worse. The surgeon accidentally damaged a nerve to my right vocal cord, so in addition to the paralysis I could speak only in a hoarse whisper. I really didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway, but communication now required significant effort. I effectively used my inability to speak as a perfect excuse to refuse any sort of positive interaction with anyone. I became increasingly mired in despair and anger.

A few weeks after my injury, an aide helped me to the P.T. waiting area. Quite by accident, he parked my chair near a full-length mirror. I didn’t notice at first, but then a movement caught my eye. I saw the mirror slightly to the left, not directly in front of me but still within the limited field of vision created by the brace that prevented me from turning my head. At first the reflection didn’t register. It took a moment to realize the image in the mirror was—ME!

I stared in horror at the ghost gazing back at me through sunken, glazed eyes. He slumped limply in a large, leather wheelchair. Clothes appeared to hang from his emaciated skeleton. The feet pointed at odd angles like those of a rag doll carelessly arranged; uncombed, greasy hair, hadn’t shaved in several weeks, his skin a pale, chalky white. The ghastly specter evoked memories of grainy black-and-white pictures from Nazi concentration camps, an empty half-alive stare that looks but doesn’t really see.

And the halo brace! Screws protruded from his head, every bit like the Frankenstein monsters from those shadowy old movies. The creature might have escaped his shackles in some secret basement laboratory, the wretched result of a mad experiment gone horribly wrong.

I stared, gradually assimilating details of the shocking spectacle. Fascination faded to disbelief and then terror as I began to comprehend my link to the gruesome image. I moved my right arm like a child might do to verify that the reflection in the mirror really somehow connected to him. Sure enough, the monster’s arm flopped across his body as well. That pathetic, half-human phantom was ME!

I’d never actually seen the halo brace. I guess I’d developed some sort of mental image of the awkward apparatus that immobilized my lifeless body, but I hadn’t really considered the appearance of this horrific contraption. I certainly wasn’t prepared for the ghastly image staring lifelessly back at me like some mistaken merger of man and mechanism. I wanted to escape from the pitiful, subhuman specter, but of course I couldn’t move.

Couldn’t run, couldn’t walk, couldn’t push the chair, couldn’t even turn away. That monster remained right there in front of me, and I was powerless to evade his ghostly gaze. As fearsome as the apparition appeared, I couldn’t force myself to squeeze my eyes shut and make him disappear.

I screamed in horror, or I did what passed for screaming with my hoarse whisper of a voice. No one heard my nearly silent wail, so I banged my arms in frustration on the sides of the chair. The spasmodic movements were the only volitional actions I could generate to attract attention and express the fear and anger.

Eventually one of the aides came to investigate the commotion. “Get me out of here,” I rasped. “Take me back to my room.” He didn’t realize the source of my distress, but he pivoted the chair and we headed back toward the elevator. As we turned away, I got one last glimpse of the monster in the mirror. I croaked another horrified moan.

Back in my room, no one could console me or make sense of what had upset me. “Just leave me alone! Go away! Let me alone!” I whispered through tears.

“What’s wrong?” asked Julie, my nurse. “What happened?”

But I didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to tell her about the monster, about the horror of the frightening image that confronted me, about the embarrassment of finally realizing what others saw when they looked at me. I just wanted to turn off the lights and hide my pathetic remnant of a person in darkness. “Everyone, just get out. LEAVE ME ALONE!” Now I was begging, “Please, turn off the lights and go away.”

In the cool darkness of the hospital room, I cried. How could all of this have happened? The entire period since the accident drifted past in a horrible, surreal haze—ambulance, emergency room, Intensive Care, surgery, recovery. Weeks passed in a fog of pain, sleep and drugs, until days had little definition and time either passed or not but it didn’t much matter. The shock of the entire episode blurred the distinction between reality and some sort of bizarre nightmare. I acted in the dream, aware but not really. The whole dreadful muddle seemed like a struggle to awaken from a dream within a scene in a bad movie.

But in that dark room, the fog began to lift. That ghastly, half-dead reflection wasn’t a character in a scary dream or the product of a drug-induced hallucination. The screws in the head, the chair that trapped me, the feet that didn’t appear to be connected to legs I couldn’t see or feel—that pitiful fabrication of some demented imagination was what remained of ME. I had become that gaunt, slumped, pathetic-looking monster. I cried.

I sat where they had left me, facing toward the window of my room. The blinds were mostly closed and I stared blankly at the window. I heard the door open quietly behind me. “Rich?” Julie whispered. “What can I do?”

“Nothing,” I murmured. “Please, leave me alone.” The door closed again.

I cried, stared at the blinds and cried some more. I should have been out of the chair and back in bed a long time ago. I felt dizzy, light-headed, and nauseous, I struggled to breathe, and my back ached. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t turn the chair or call for help if I’d wanted to. I was just there. Helpless. Alone.