It was past midnight. I wanted Bob to go home. I was in the hospital’s care now and our dog, Gracie, needed him. She was probably still standing by our front door, waiting for me. The rest of our crew needed him too and it was about a two hour drive from the hospital to our home.

Bob did not want to leave me.

“I’m staying until they find you a room,” he said.

“I’ll worry more if you stay, sweets. The roads are pure ice and even if you leave now, you’ll barely have enough sleep to keep your eyes open on the drive back here tomorrow. Call me when you get home.”

Bob has said to me that was one of his worst moments. “I turned back before I went out the swinging doors and saw you sitting in your wheelchair, so scared, so vulnerable, holding a little suitcase of things in your lap. I hated leaving you.”

I was finally in a hospital room when he called from home. Although I had no feeling in my arms, I was somehow able to get the telephone receiver onto my pillow. “How are the cats and Gracie?” I said.

“Fine,” he lied.

That was the first night for Gracie that I had not been with her. She knew before Bob took me to the emergency room at the hospital that I was in trouble. She knew that Bob was terrified. And she knew that I needed her. She was right.

I would never have imagined how much I would need her. And how much she would welcome her mission of taking care of me.

Bob was with me that next day when I finally had an MRI. I was losing more and more sensation. I no longer had any feeling in my midriff region.

“I am really panicking,” I said to both the attending doctor and to Bob. It was obvious I was. “I cannot go into that tube.”

The doctor had vials of drugs on the table. He injected one after another and still, as Bob put it, I was talking like a “crazy jaybird.”

The doc switched me to a morphine IV. After the second or third dose he said, “I’ve never given a patient so much pre-medication.” Eventually I was so zoned out, I could have stayed in that tube for a year.

Two hours later, we met at the nurses’ station. The chief neurologist of several Boston hospitals had been called in. I was in my wheelchair with Bob standing behind me. Three other neurologists on my team were observing.

We were looking at my MRI on a screen. Two vertebrae in my neck had completely disengaged and were in the process of crossing over each other. And in doing so, choking off my spinal cord. Without immediate surgery, the cord would be severed entirely and I would be a completely paralyzed quadriplegic on a ventilator.

Why did this happen? Nobody knew. Everything that could have even remotely caused this had been ruled out.

It had happened spontaneously.

I was barely being able to enunciate through my screaming terror and torrential tears. “Can you fix me?”

“No.” The neurologist was a straight-shooter. “What’s done is done. We can hopefully stop the progression surgically.”

“Hopefully?”

“Surgery isn’t a guarantee of improvement. There’s a fifty percent chance that even with surgery you will never walk again.”

I slung my arms over the ledge of the nurses’ station, stood up and pulled myself for several feet along the ledge. At this stage, I was deteriorating faster. My body was in an advanced state of spasticity. Nerves were sending crazy signals from my brain to the rest of my body and my arms and legs were uncontrollably swinging widely through the air. “Are you also telling me that even if surgery stops the progression, I could spend the rest of my life like this?”

“Yes.”  . . . . . . .

One morning after Bob had left for work, I made an extraordinary decision. I was going to beat the odds and walk again. I would not tell Bob this yet. I wanted it to be a surprise. With Gracie by my side on her leash attached to a harness, I managed to get out the back slider and stood, holding my cane in one hand, and Gracie’s leash and harness with my other hand. I just felt safer having both methods of holding on to her.

This would be two tests:

Could I at the very least go a distance of about twenty yards without exhausting myself to the point where I couldn’t move?

Would Gracie be able to help by using just the right amount of strength to gently propel me forward while I held on to her leash and harness?

She was nervous. Prior to this moment, whenever I was outside with her, Bob was always home. She was trained to the command, “Get Dad!” for all the times I fell. But now we were on our own.

“Gracie, I won’t go far. If I can’t do it, I can just crawl back into the house. You’ve seen me crawl a hundred times. You know I can do that.”

I put my cane a few inches in front of my left leg. I took one step. Gracie took one step. I took another. She took another. She had never been trained to do this.

It turned out that what she was helping me with was leverage and balance. I did make it twenty yards, but that was way too much. I couldn’t walk one step further. I couldn’t turn around. I couldn’t move. And I couldn’t get the strength to slowly put myself on the ground.

It is remarkable how dramatically things changed when so many nerves could no longer send signals to my legs. It’s something that I, of course, have never thought about before. I was overtired and therefore could not get the neurological signals to work that would provide enough strength so that I could just bend my knees and get my body down. My choices were either to stand, which I knew I wouldn’t be able to do for more than a few more seconds, or to let my body fall. So I really didn’t have any options but to fall.

Gracie was agitated. “It’s okay, girl. This fall is going to be a planned one.” I was hoping the surety in my voice would keep her from being scared. I let my body fall to the ground.

I lost my grasp on her harness. I reached for her leash but couldn’t get it. She did not move. Just like that time at Sandy Neck Beach and in our living room, she sat next to me at attention and kept her body close to mine so I could lean on her. And lean on her I did.

I rested for at least a half hour. She never moved from her post. Then I had the strength to crawl on my hands and knees. Gracie never faltered keeping the snail-like pace with me. By the time we got inside the slider, I rolled over on my back. She lay down next to me. I reached over and petted her. “Thank you, my friend.” I was overwhelmingly disappointed with my lack of ability. I decided I’d never try this again.

Originally I planned that each day from then on, after Bob left the house, Gracie and I would go a few feet further. But now, I put myself back into the world of failure. No longer did I believe in one of my most important – yet now gone for good – truisms: It’s all in the attempt; not in the distance.   .  .  .  .  .  .  .

I began to make emotional changes. I had not had a drink since my promise that I wouldn’t. Gracie and I resumed our secret walks out back. She would do the same thing outside that she had been doing in the house. When there was a rock or a tree limb in front of me, she would stop, turn sideways and block me until she knew I had seen what was in the way.

In several weeks, I was up to walking eighty-five yards. It was literally unbelievable. All four of my neurologists had said this was entirely impossible.

I became more and more determined to prove them wrong. And I planned to do this until I reached a monumental goal.

I still hadn’t gone far enough, in my mind, to tell Bob. I wanted him to have the biggest surprise of his life. 

Yet I so wished it would be the biggest surprise of mine in a different way. Who would have ever known what would happen instead?