It was mid-afternoon on Friday, and Cindy was racing up and down the hallway declaring “I’m horny, I’m horny.” Ike, who was hanging just out in the doorway to my room, muttered that he had something for Cindy to sit on. None of us doubted this. Ike had seven children. Which prompted Perry to turn to me and observe, “Maybe Ike has done a little too much sitting.”

I reacted to Cindy with excitement and intimidation. She was a paraplegic who could use her two strong arms to achieve considerable speed in the hallways…which would also speed her out the door. Paraplegics came and went, discharged within a few weeks, not months. As for Ike, it was probably true about the sitting. He was now a quadriplegic father of seven and a black guy. No more a breadwinner, his future would be challenging. All of us were newly injured, all worrying about the future of our lives, including our sex lives.

Fridays gave shape to the hospital week. Some patients left to spend the weekend at their homes in Los Angeles. On our predominantly quadriplegic ward, many stayed. Families came to visit them. Once the local Kiwanis club decided to take the cripples out for a Saturday barbecue. The result was slightly embarrassing, being transported to a local park where we were offered steaks that no one could cut. I stared at mine, waiting to see if anyone would offer assistance. The Kiwanis guys were all talking to each other. I finally leaned over, grabbed the steak in my teeth and took a bite. I repeated this, catching the disgusted look of one of our Kiwanis benefactors.

Weekdays, the ward was abuzz with patients going to and from physical therapy, occupational therapy, meals…and the wait to get better. I had arrived in mid-July, gotten a discharge date for September. And then things shifted. My left leg was showing serious signs of recovery. I would stay through November. No, mid-December. I began standing. A physical therapist would haul me to my feet and let me rock to and fro until my balance seemed secure. Then it was a step away from the wheelchair toward the waiting therapist. Then another. The parallel bars came next, me limping between them, reaching the end and falling exhausted back into the wheelchair. 

From there…a walker. My right hand was paralyzed, and still is, but I could grip one side of the walker with the left hand, the right hand on the bar. In this way I achieved something like stability. The PT left me on my own, pushing the walker from one end of the gym to the other. Until we moved outside. There was a small patio with diagonal walkways where I traipsed up and down. Soon the PT attached 5-pound, then 10-pound, weights to the walker.

The next increment was momentous. Julia…her name began to matter because we were spending so much time together…took me for a stroll. With my one usable arm holding a forearm crutch, I twisted and lurched all the way down the corridor passing room after room. Guillermo who occupied the bed next to mine propelled himself out to watch, pushing his wheelchair’s quad pegs. He hooked the latter, protuberances on the wheel rims, between lifeless fingers. I had tried to master this myself a month before and found it exhausting.

“Es un milagre.” It’s a miracle. Guillermo said what I was feeling, and everyone knew. In my five months at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, this simply hadn’t happened. The night I had been ambulanced to the Berkeley campus hospital, a neurosurgeon happened to be walking out the door. He responded with the latest treatment, Cortisone, to reduce the swelling of the injured spinal cord. Not everyone had been so lucky.

For most people on my ward, traumatic bad luck had come in the form of a traffic accident. In 1968, seatbelts were not mandatory. Airbags hadn’t been invented. My fellow patients were mostly late adolescents who had gone through the windshield of their cars. A few had been injured in diving accidents. In five months at Rancho, I was the only gunshot wound, the result of a mugging near the campus.

Almost 56 years later, gunshot wounds predominate. The urologist I went to see at Rancho this week told me this. The facility’s name change told me something else. Now designated “National Rehabilitation Center,” Rancho is still California’s go-to place for spinal cord injury rehab. Jane and I made a one-day trip there, flying in and out of Long Beach airport. We got to nearby Rancho early, dropped off by a medical transport van. I couldn’t resist. I had to find the old ward, see what the place looked like.

It wasn’t easy. Rancho los Amigos is now a very modern multi-story facility. My former home, the 500 wing, sat across a parking lot, a long cinderblock structure. It looked abandoned. It was. Though not totally, which meant it was still possible to go inside.

“I think this is it,” I told Jane. She pushed a door open. We stared at a long empty linoleum hallway. For a moment, I had second thoughts. Perhaps this wasn’t it…56 years is a long time. I took a chance and rolled inside, looked around and began to piece together that thing called the past. This had to be it. The six-bed room where I had stayed…where was that? Or more appropriate, what was it now? The whole wing was empty. And at the end, the former physical therapy gym, if recollection serves me, was now an orthotics facility. And the rest? Storage, at best.

Were these there in 1968, the molded plastic hand railings? They rang a bell. Yes, although they had no function for me at the time, they had made a vague impression. And since there was no other opportunity for exercise on this day of travel up and down California…what else? I parked my wheelchair, and Jane helped me stand. Thus we set off, my paralyzed right arm in Jane’s, me doing my quadripetic stagger. We did this again. There was no one in the hallways. This was Rancho’s ghost ward.

I rolled outside, looking behind me to identify the one thing that seemed certain. Here was the patio where I had pushed the walker. This had to be it. And either way, what did it matter? Somehow, I was alive. Somehow, I was back. And somehow, I was back with Jane. At age 21 in 1968, my capacity for human connection was very limited. My physical wound healed a bit. My emotional wounds healed a lot. We headed for the urology clinic, then the airport, then home…grateful that I have one now.