“You have two solid upper legs. Yet even the whole leg isn’t necessarily in great functioning form right now because it is adapting while you are on crutches. You still have that solid femur bone and associated muscles on your partial leg, which will allow us to get you fitted for a prosthetic, as soon as that stump has healed. While your legs are not necessarily in great functioning form right now,” Shane noted, “they will be. You’ve gone through so many surgeries that your body must have some time to recover and to relearn its proper function again. None of this is easy on your body. I mean, if you saw what they did during the surgeries”—Shane shook his head—“it’s just amazing that the human body can recover at all.”
“I wanted to see a video of each one,” Ryatt confessed, “but apparently they don’t do that.”
“Interesting.” Shane frowned, looking at him. “If it were me having that kind of surgery, I’d want to know what they did too. But, in your case, I can tell you that it was pretty rough. You’ve got pins. You’ve got staples. They would break bones and move things around in order to get them where they wanted them.”
Ryatt nodded. “There was talk about some pretty rough fixes.”
“Exactly, so just take it easy on yourself and don’t expect more than you have to give each day.”
“I haven’t expected very much out of myself yet,” he admitted. “I’m afraid to even look at the reasoning behind that because I feel like I’ve… I had just given up.”
“But that doesn’t mean that you should be afraid of that,” Shane stated. “You’ve turned quite a corner in many ways. You just need more time to keep improving.”
“That’s the problem though, isn’t it?” he murmured. “Only so much time that I have left in that bed.”
“No.” Shane frowned. “We’re very good at making sure that you get the time you need here,” he stated. “And we don’t take beds away from patients. So get that nonsense out of your head. Don’t think about that as being your blocking point.”
Ryatt nodded slowly. “It is definitely a concern. I mean, after seeing that my sister is back again”—Ryatt shook his head—“that was one eye-opener and not one I particularly liked to see.”
“I don’t think she liked it either,” Shane noted, “but Hathaway House is doing her a world of good.”
“Is it?” He stared at Shane. “You’re not lying to me about that, are you?”
Shane stared at him in shock. “No, absolutely not. I wouldn’t do that. Lying doesn’t help anyone. Not even liars trying to get away with something. And, if someone here ever lies to you, you immediately report it to Dani and to the Major. Plus, even though Quinton is your sister, you still don’t get access to her medical details. If she wants you to have that, she’ll give you formal permission. However, for our purposes here, dealing with you, your mind-set, your recovery at Hathaway House, I’ll state for the record, in generic terms, that your sister’s progressed this second time too—which is evident to all who see her around here daily, whether medical personnel, other patients, or visitors or the like.”
“I didn’t call you a liar—”
“Yes, you did,” Shane interrupted. “And I’ll call you out on every one of those negative, critical, and downright false statements that you make in front of me, until your own brain tells you to stop it. It’s not good for anyone’s health—yours, Quinton’s, mine,anyone’s.” He stared at Ryatt and said, “Now under that veneer is the real reason you are reaching for. What is it?” When Ryatt hesitated, Shane added, “Don’t waste my time or yours. Spit it out, Ryatt. Face it.”
“It just worries me. I mean, what if I go through all this, and it’s for nought? She’s back again. Do you realize how much work and effort she put in the first time?” And then he stopped. “Of course you do. You were on her team back then, weren’t you?”
“I was,” Shane confirmed. “And you’re right. It is disconcerting to see somebody who went through so much return again. The good news though, she will be back up on her feet in record time because of all the work she’d done before, and now we know what more we need to do to correct it.”
“But why wasn’t that done in the first place?” he asked in frustration.
“Just like a new car, with time and use, it wears down. And our human bodies are much more complex machines than some vehicle. We still don’t know all there is to know about the systems within us. So health and healing are dynamic fields, changing as we learn more. But, in a nutshell from a PT perspective, time sometimes makes the body shift, and, in Quinton’s case, she didn’t recognize when her alignment was out of balance and didn’t take the steps to correct it.”
“So it was her fault?” he asked, confused.
“I certainly wouldn’t use the termfault, but… definitely something changed in her physical body, and that can happen to any of us,” Shane added. “It can happen to you, yes. It can happen to me. It can even happen to Quinton a third time,” he stated. “It’s all about doing what we need to do to stay healthyevery day. And listening to our bodies. If something feels wrong, speak up, get it checked.”
Ryatt nodded at that. “Fine. It’s still disconcerting.”
“Of course it is, and, in your case, probably a little more than we would have expected. You’ve seen your sister so healthy and so strong that this probably seems to you like a major failing, and I wouldn’t want her or you to think of it that way,” he explained.
“I don’t want her to think of it as a failing at all.”
“And that’s good,” Shane replied, “because she’s done so much, all the rehab work before and again now. It’s not that she’s done something wrong. It’s just that healing is not always 100 percent or permanent.”
He nodded. “I get that. I do. It’s just depressing to think of everything that she’s gone through, and here she is, back again.”
“And yet it seemed to me that, dealing with her relapse, you picked yourself up and weren’t quite so upset with yourself,” Shane noted, sitting back. “Your attitude before was terrible, as you know, since you and I both were at loggerheads about it. However, since then, seeing your sister and what she’s going through again, you seem to be better.”
“And that’s terrible, isn’t it?” he asked, staring at him, his shoulders slumping. “Makes me feel even worse.”
“Which is not why I’m saying it, but I’m asking you, how is that a thing? Explain to me how seeing your sister’s setback could eventually motivate you out of your bad mood?”
“I don’t know.” Ryatt shrugged. “I’d just seen her for so long, supposedly healthy, but her in that hospital bed is a vision that made me really depressed, and then I got really angry.”