Still Me by Christopher Reeve Page B

speed readout by a radar controller in Greenland. He had misread the data on his screen. But the professional tone of his voice was completely convincing, and I never thought to question him. If his information had been accurate, I would have run out of fuel 200 miles west of Iceland and crash-landed in the ocean at night. That would have been the end. I expected to die, and my first thought was: I’ve done something stupid, and it will be really inconvenient for people.
    The same thought occurred when this injury happened: “How embarrassing.” Back in the Superman years, I always used to joke about needing to be very careful because I didn’t want to read a headline in the New York Post like “Superman Hit by Bus.” This accident was humiliating and embarrassing. How could I have let it happen?
    So now I felt embarrassed because my body was failing. The doctors would poke and prod, but I already knew the facts. All they could do was make me feel worse.
    And then my stepmother, Helen, came in. She is always well meaning, and I love her very much. But she showed me a letter from somebody who had a high-level injury like mine and was writing about things he’d been able to do; that he really liked his wheelchair and really liked his van, and that he could go for fifteen hours on his ventilator without recharging. In an unintentionally patronizing tone, she said, “You see, there are still lots of options open to you, so many things you can do.” I lost my temper and asked her to leave the room. I just wasn’t ready to hear that. I hadn’t accepted that I was a quadriplegic. I was still in denial, still thinking, There’s been a big mistake here. Any minute someone’s going to come in and say, “Sorry, wrong person; they meant somebody down the hall. It’s not you, you’re free to go.”
    So sometimes having relatives come to visit was hard on me, and other times it was great. Often I was angry because a few of them were talking to the press without consulting me first. There was some disagreement about what to do next, about where I should go for rehabilitation. It was a hugely stressful time. I had to get used to so many new and unpleasant things.
    There were physical therapists in the ICU. About a week after the surgery, they began to move my head a little bit with isometric pressure, even though I was still in a collar all the time. And then there was the ordeal of getting up. I had to wear special stockings, called T.E.D.s. They come up over your knees, like support hose. I hated them. I thought: Old ladies wear those things. Again: This can’t be me. Then Ace bandages over the T.E.D.s, and a binder around my waist. They would slide me into a wheelchair and sit me up very slowly, taking my blood pressure the whole time, because as I sat up my body was too weak to force the blood back up into the heart. Then I’d be wheeled down the hall to the mailroom or a little visiting room that they had set up. I could look out the window at the trees, a nice change of view from the rooftops I could see from my room.
    The days were tolerable, but the nights were still awful. The demons kept coming after me. I would torment myself, my head full of fear and self-recrimination. I never called a nurse in just to say, “I’m lonely and I’m upset.” I didn’t know how to do that. I assumed they had other, more important things to do. As I lay there I often remembered going to a state fair in New Jersey when I was a child. One of the main attractions was “The Man in the Box.” He had been placed in a wooden box and buried six feet in the ground with a tube coming up to the surface so he could breathe. For the price of admission you could look down at him through a little glass window. All you could see was his face. His eyes staring back at you and occasionally blinking were the only signs that he was alive. As you left the exhibit you