“Stay with Dad,” I say. “I’ve got people here. Tex comes when he can. And there’s this guy, Benji. He’s coming. He brought me pizza last night. He’s the guy they were beating on when I got to the bar.”
She’s quiet for a second. “That’s a long drive to bring food to a man you just met.” Mama doesn’t miss much. She never has. “Tell him thank you from me.”
“I’ll tell him, Mama. Get some rest today if you can. Call me tomorrow.”
“I love you, Mickey.”
“I love you too.”
After breakfast, Dr. Raleigh comes for rounds. She’s a small woman with dark hair pulled back tight and a face trained to deliver information without coloring it with personal feeling. I respect that. I do the same on the job. You learn to say “we’re investigating all possibilities” with a face that doesn’t tell the family what you actually think.
“Good morning, Officer Weaver,” she says. “How are we feeling today?”
“Like I’ve been in a hospital bed for five days and would trade my badge for a shower that lasts longer than four minutes.”
She smiles the doctor smile, that acknowledges you’re trying to stay upbeat when the facts aren’t great.
“The imaging from yesterday looks encouraging,” she says. “The swelling is responding to the anti-inflammatories. We’re seeing measurable reduction, which is what we want. It’s moving in the right direction. That’s what we see in patients who recover function. The fact that it’s responding at all is a positive sign.”
“I hear a ‘but’ coming,” I say.
“Well... the rate of reduction is slower than we’d typically hope to see at this stage. That doesn’t mean it won’t continue. It means the timeline is longer than we initially projected. We’re talking weeks rather than days before we can do a full assessment. This isn’t a static injury, Mickey. It’s changing. That matters. I know that’s not what you want to hear.”
“You’re right. What I want to hear is that I’m going to walk again, Dr. Raleigh. Can you tell me that?”
Her face stays neutral. She’s good. But I’m a cop who’s spent years reading faces, and I catch the half-second delay before she answers, the tiny hesitation of a doctor deciding how much hope to hand out.
“I can tell you that the swelling is reducing and that your body is responding to treatment. We’ve seen patients with similar injuries make full recoveries. Every case is different and I won’t make a promise I can’t keep. What I can promise is that we’re doing everything possible.”
I’m days in already, with the best equipment and the best people, and they don’t know if I’ll walk again.
Dr. Raleigh checks a few things, makes notes and leaves.
At nine o’clock, the physical therapist comes along with his assistant. Eddie is a former college linebacker who is wider than I am, and gentle in a way that would be comforting if the things he’s gentle about weren’t so devastating to go through.
Today’s session involves what he calls a “transfer exercise,” which means he’s going to help me move from the bed to the wheelchair. Or that’s what he pretends we’re doing. He’s actually physically moving me. I’m not doing jack shit.
I’ve been avoiding the wheelchair. It’s been sitting against the wall since yesterday and I’ve been pretending it’s decorative, a piece of equipment meant for someone else.
Because once I’m in it, there’s no pretending any of this is temporary. But Eddie says it’s part of the process, that I need to start building upper body compensation, that the sooner I can move myself the sooner I get some independence back.
“Alright, Mickey, here’s what we’re going to do,” Eddie says, positioning the chair next to the bed and locking the wheels. “I’m going to support your upper body. Angela’s going to manage your legs. We’re going to pivot you as a unit. You’re not lifting anything, you’re not pushing anything, you’re just letting us move you. Sound good?”
Fuck no, it doesn’t.
It sounds like two strangers are going to carry me six inches sideways because I can’t do it myself. I’m a cop who chased suspects on foot and caught them most of the time. Now I need help getting from a bed to a chair that’s two feet away.
“Sounds great,” I say, because the only thing worse than needing help is taking out my frustrations on the very people trying to give it.
The transfer takes about forty-five seconds and it is the longest forty-five seconds of my life. Eddie lifts my upper body while Angela positions my legs. I watch them swing off the bed, heavy and limp.
They pivot me into the chair and my legs dangle until Angela arranges them on the footrests, positioning my feet like a mannequin’s feet in a department store window.
The whole time, Benji is in the back of my head. He could walk through that door right now and see me being lifted by two people, one of them a young woman, to move two feet from a bed to a wheelchair. I don’t want to be seen this way.
I’ve had a gun pointed at me a handful of times on the job. Every time I was scared but I could move. I could talk and think. Being scared when you can still act is a different kind of scared than this. I’d rather him never come back than see the reality of what my body actually is right now.
I’m seated in the wheelchair now. The seat is vinyl and it creaks under my weight. The armrests are cold under my palms and the world looks completely different from down here. For a second my body tilts forward just enough that my hands clamp down on the armrests on instinct, like I’m about to fall even though Eddie is still right there.
