Still Me by Christopher Reeve Page A

way to be with me, to talk to me, to cheer me up. And my family, of course, and the letters still pouring in. I used to love to listen to the people in the letters.
    But the time would come when everybody would have to go. I’d be given a sleeping pill at about ten-thirty or eleven o’clock, but by one or two it would wear off. I’d wake up and be staring at everything, staring at the wall, staring at myself, staring at the future, staring in disbelief.
    The thought that kept going through my mind was: I’ve ruined my life. I’ve ruined my life, and you only get one. You can’t say, “I’ve spoiled this one, so can I have another one, please?” There’s no counter you can go up to and say, “I dropped my ice cream cone; could I please have another one?” I thought, I’ve ruined not only my own life but everybody else’s as well. I’ve ruined Dana’s life, I’ve ruined Will’s life, I’ve ruined Matthew’s and Alexandra’s. This is going to be a huge burden on everybody. It’s not my injury, it’s our injury. Our entire family is hurt. We’ve all been destroyed by this stupid thing that happened. Over a nothing jump. For some reason, I didn’t get my hands down and break my fall. I’m an idiot. I’ve spoiled everything. Why can’t there be an appeal? Why isn’t there a higher authority you can go to and say, “Wait a minute, you didn’t mean for this to happen to me. This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me .”
    I was still in a state of disbelief and very afraid. A large part of the fear was because I couldn’t take a single breath on my own. And the connections of the hoses on these ventilators are tenuous at best. The nurses put tape over the joints, but they don’t always hold very well, and you lie there at three in the morning in fear of a pop-off, when the hose just comes off the ventilator. I had several. After you’ve missed two breaths, an alarm sounds. You just have to hope that someone will come very quickly, turn on the lights, figure out where the break is, and put it back together. But it’s not like holding your breath underwater. I can’t hold my breath. In my case, there’s no breath left in my body. When I exhale, the breath is gone.
    So when you have a pop-off, there is no air in your lungs except for a tiny amount in the nooks and crannies. If you’re pretty healthy, the percentage of oxygen that is getting to your brain can probably stay in the seventies, which means you can last a couple of minutes, but those are very, very anxious minutes. The nurses’ station was not far away, but I was never sure how closely they were paying attention. They had many patients, I was alone in my room, and I had absolutely no control. The feeling of helplessness was hard to take.
    Becoming completely dependent on other people is a terrible adjustment to make. I lay there for a month floating among various moods and feelings—gratitude, horror, self-pity, confusion, anger. There was one doctor at UVA who was the bane of my existence. She came in at all hours of the day and night to poke and prod, and I realized I didn’t have any sensation below the trapezius level, just outside my neck muscles. She would also talk to me as if I were three. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I yelled, “Fuck you, I’m a forty-two-year-old man. You treat me like one or don’t come in this room again.” That chastened her a little bit. I know she intended no harm or discomfort, but she increased my feelings of despair and loss, humiliation and embarrassment.

    Alone for a time trying to come to terms with my situation.
    I know it may seem odd that I felt humiliation and embarrassment. But those are the emotions I tend to feel whenever something goes seriously wrong in my life. On my first flight across the Atlantic, I was given an incorrect ground