The next thing I remember was seeing two doctors looking down at me. They began asking me questions. “Can you cough?” I could, barely. “Can you wiggle your toes?” No, I couldn’t. In spite of my paralysis, I was having severe back spasms that arched my whole body. One of the doctors, whom I would come to know as Dr. Nielsen, an orthopedic surgeon, said he’d give me some medication to stop the spasms.
Then I was wheeled into the operating room where Dr. Nielsen drilled two holes in my skull, one on each side, just above my ears. He must have given me a local anesthetic, because there was no pain, but I could hear the bone grinding as he turned a hand operated drill.
It was quiet and cold and it seemed that only Dr. Nielsen was present. He talked quietly and calmly as he went about his business, explaining to me what he was doing as he worked. His calm demeanor helped comfort me. He explained that he was drilling holes to insert a Crutchfield Halo into my skull, a device that looked like ice tongs.
The halo would be screwed into my skull and then ten pounds would be hung off the top of my head via a cable to stretch out my spinal column and allow the swelling in my damaged spinal cord to go down while the vertebrae healed.
I would then be transferred to a bed called a Stryker Frame, a narrow metal slab with a little bit of padding that could accommodate another slab on top, so I could be flipped like a pancake and lay on my stomach without affecting the traction device. This would prevent pressure sores from forming as I laid motionless for two months.
Of course I wouldn’t begin to understand any of this until days later, when the trauma and panic subsided enough for some information to sink in. Lying face down in my hospital room, the chaos of the emergency room, radiology and operating room behind me, I was finally alone. All I could see was the floor through the slats in the headrest of my Stryker Frame, with my chin and forehead bearing the weight of my head as if I were on a massage table.