Moving Forward in Reverse by Martin Scott, Coryanne Hicks Page B

black hole,
swallowing other emotions until all that remained of me was a mindless
automaton. The tighter he strapped me in, the more the fight drained out of me
and the greater my numb acceptance of my fate became.
    Next, he turned to the wire cables which ran along my shoulders
and down the outside of each new arm. Each cable was threaded through a series
of loops leading from the back of my shoulder to the back of my upper arm near
my triceps. It tracked along my arm to the outside of the prosthetic forearm,
ending at a lever at the base of the hook itself. With my arm resting
comfortably at my side, elbow slightly bent, he adjusted the cables until they
were almost taught.
    ‘All right,’ he said when he had finished tinkering. I gazed
blankly at the hooks in my lap. ‘So these are called body powered prosthetic
hooks because you use the motion of your shoulder to operate them. If you put
tension on the cable the hook will open.’ He reached over and took hold of the
right prosthetic just above the wrist, forcing me to extend my arm out in front
of me to demonstrate how the motion of my shoulder caused the cable to pull the
hook open, separating it into two antennae-like apparatuses. ‘Release the
tension –’ he had me draw my arm back towards my body so my shoulder relaxed –
‘and the hook closes.’
    I watched it all occur with my mind shut off. I couldn’t focus on,
nor care about what he was saying. As emotionally and mentally enervated as I
was, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open for the duration of the
session.
    Still holding my left arm in his hand, he continued, ‘So the force
of your shoulder opens them and these rubber bands here keep them closed when
there is no pull on the cable.’ He pointed to a rubber band wrapped around the
base of the hook just above the joint where they opened and closed.
    ‘You can see there are two separate hooks on each prosthesis which
allows you to grab and hold anything a hand can hold. You can also move the
hooks around and lock them into various positions with this switch here.’ He
pointed to a small knob of the kind you slide to turn a flashlight on or off.
Again he pulled my arm to put tension on the cable and open the hook, this time
sliding the lever to lock the hooks in the open position before allowing me to
return my arm to my side. In a similar fashion, he slid the latch open, let the
hooks close, then rotated them at the wrist so they curved to the side rather
than down and locked them in place.
    ‘And then to take them off, first open your arms to the side to
relieve the tension on the straps. Then bring your arms up and forward to draw
the straps over your head. Once you’re out of the harness, you can secure one
prosthesis against your lap with the wrist of the other and pull your arm out
of the cylinder.’ He smiled. ‘Easy!’
    I nodded. Operating these was going to be anything but easy.
    ‘Do you have any questions for me, Scott?’ he asked after a pause.
    ‘No,’ I replied softly.
    ‘All right, then. I’ll leave you to experiment. It will take some
time, but many patients have had great success with these.’
    I nodded again.
    ‘Okay. Take care, then.’
    When he had disappeared down the hall, I pulled the hooks off one
at a time and fumbled them onto my bed table. Part of my interest and love for
soccer was my ability to read a situation and evaluate it from various
perspectives. It was far too easy to read the limitations the hooks would
impose on my life.
    Now that I had seen them up-close, I realized with two separate
hooks attached to the end of each prosthetic they more closely resembled the
hands of a tyrannosaurus minus the thumbs than those of Captain Hook. Or the
antennae of an insect when the hooks were curved towards the ground.
    Whatever imagery they induced, the fact was they were hooks, not
hands. They simply could not function to the full capacity of human hands. And
I could only imagine how far the limitations