The Same Routine

The same routine. Another morning, and the same, boring, tedious routine. In fact, this had been the same routine Marcus had gone through religiously for the last 17 months. He breathed and whispered in that groggy tone of his, “Well, at least one thing is different. The halo is gone now.” And with that mantra, he grabbed his legs and swung them over the side of the bed. Reaching for the wheelchair, he half hoisted/half threw himself into the seat and wheeled himself down the hall to start the coffee.

“Vanilla Nut or Columbian Mocha, Sig?”

Sigmund, Marcus’ Golden Retriever, just sat wagging his tail, heedless of the question.

“Vanilla Nut it is then. Good choice.”

Even before he made it back down the hall toward the bathroom, he could smell the hazelnut drifting through the house. The smell of coffee alone was enough to get him going, as much as he could at 5:00 am on a Monday morning. But he knew he was going to have to have more than coffee to get through today. It was going to be his first day back to work since the accident.

He made it to the shower, reached in and got the water at just the right temperature to barely scald his body (he had come to appreciate extreme sensations since half his body sensed nothing any more), stripped, and maneuvered his body over to the stainless steel bench in his shower. Now thinking about it, sensations did come flooding back to him as he soaked under the steaming water. The fact that he did indeed have some sensation on the soles of his feet was a bittersweet notion, since the only sensation he had (or ever would have according to his neurologist) was that of thousands of needles stabbing his foot. The hot water helped the feeling subside after a while though. But then the smells came flooding back. Like the smell of wet metal as the water used to run across the screws of the halo attached to his skull, running down his face, across his cheeks, and off his chin. The smell of Ben-Gay. The smell of bed sores. He sat, for what seemed like hours with his eyes closed reliving the events of the accident and his rehabilitation efforts for the last year and a half. This was something he had done daily since that day in September. As he thought, muscles started involuntarily flexing and tensing, pain began searing through his forehead, and tears began to well up, hidden under the water running down his face...

His morning flashback ritual was shattered by the sound of the alarm on the coffee maker. He was both relieved and angered by this. The relief of avoiding yet another reliving of the accident was mixed with the anger arising from the compulsive drive to force himself through the events of that day again and again, looking for answers, looking for what went wrong, looking for what he could have done differently. He hurriedly finished his shower, realizing he had been sitting in the shower for nearly an hour. The daily rituals of ointments, medications, and annoying dressing habits were only absent mindedly done as they had become instinct to him.

Wheeling himself down to the kitchen, he grabbed his coffee and headed out to work. Crossing the hall to his office, he pulled himself up to his desk, flipped the switch on his PC, and said, “Welcome back to the working world, Marc.”

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Well, that's the first stuff that popped in my head. Stay tuned.