Dr. Murphy turned off the light box, hooked his foot around his stool to bring it closer, and dropped onto it. “If you’re looking for odds and probabilities, I can give you those.” He clasped his hands and leaned forward. He looked both of us in the eye. “But until I can get Garth in an MRI and run some more tests, I won’t be able to give you hard facts.”
“MRI?” I said. “That’s one of those machines they slide you into that’s about the size of a mouse hole and tell you not to move for the whole hour you’re in there, right?”
A smile tugged at the corners of Dr. Murphy’s mouth. “That’s about it, right. Are you claustrophobic? Because I can order a couple of sedatives to be administered before you’re shoved into the mouse hole.”
I nudged Josie when I saw her thinking about smiling. I shook my head. “Claustrophobic? No. The day my blood pressure starts to rise from the thought of climbing into small spaces is the day I’m going to have someone send me out to pasture and put me out of my misery. But it does sound expensive.” When Dr. Murphy crossed his arms and nodded but didn’t offer the actual price tag, I asked, “How expensive?”
“You’re uninsured, correct?”
I made a face. “Lucky for me, I sure am.”
Dr. Murphy came close to wincing with me. “I’d estimate that out-of-pocket, it’ll run you upwards of four, maybe five thousand dollars. Tack on another thousand for the dye injection we’ll do first, and that’ll put you in the ballpark.”
My eyes came close to bursting out of their sockets. “Are you telling me that this MRI thing is going to cost me a grand total of five to six thousand dollars?”
I couldn’t comprehend it. An hour in a big machine would cost me more than I’d made riding bulls four years ago. All of the sweat and
blood and bruises I’d endured that year to make that kind of money, and I’d have to wave bye-bye to it after spending one hour in a glorified mouse hole? If Josie hadn’t been gaping at Dr. Murphy as well, I would have asked him to repeat himself to see if I’d heard wrong.
“That’s why it’s recommended that people carry some kind of health insurance. These kinds of tests don’t come with coin slots you can just drop a few quarters in and hop in and out a minute later.”
I rubbed my forehead, wondering how I could have just regained feeling from my waist up yet still feel my dreams slipping away. All I could envision was a huge stack of hospital bills eating all my winnings from the past year and, along with it, Josie’s and my plan to start our own ranch. “What would happen if I didn’t get the MRI?”
“The world would come to a screeching halt,” Dr. Murphy answered promptly. Before my head could whip in his direction, he rolled closer and continued, “The MRI will show us what’s going on with your spine. There’s damage there somewhere, and we can guess what it is until we’re blue in the face, but we won’t know for sure until we get the MRI results.”
Josie kept nodding her head while I wanted to shake mine. “Can it change anything if I do it? Or will it just change what we know?”
Dr. Murphy gave me a curious look, as if he didn’t understand where I was coming from. That was ironic since I didn’t know where he was coming from either.
“When we know what we’re dealing with, we can figure out how best to move forward,” he said. “I can’t diagnose you blindly, nor can I create a rehab plan for you until we know what we’re dealing with so we know how best to attack it.”
Josie was still nodding along with Dr. Murphy’s every word, making me wonder if I were insane for wanting to give some pause before dropping thousands of dollars or if they were. Like the ever-profound Clay Black used to tell me when I asked for a few dollars when we were out of milk, money didn’t grow on trees. Shit, if it did, Clay Black would have drunk nicer whiskey.
“But how can you ‘attack it’ if we do find out extensive nerve damage is responsible for my paralysis? How can you ‘fix it’ if I’ll always be paralyzed to some degree?” My hand wrapped around the arm of my chair and squeezed. In the few days since the accident, my strength seemed to have diminished. “Is surgery an option? Could you lay me on my stomach, open me up, and untangle all of those nerves before sewing me shut again? Is that an option?”
Dr. Murphy slid his hands back into his lab coat pockets and sighed. “No, it’s not a very viable option, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally out. An MRI might show us something that would require surgery. We won’t know for sure though until we get it done.”
Surgery. He hadn’t said it, but I guessed for a person in my condition, it could even mean surgeries. Not even I was brave enough to ask how much those surgeries would cost, with all the staff and equipment and time they would take, if an MRI cost five plus grand. “And what is the likelihood I’d make a full recovery if you did surgery? Whatever it might be based on, whatever you might see from this MRI?” Could I speak in any more hypotheticals before I started to sound like a politician?
One of his shoulders rose. “Not promising. In terms of numbers, approximately two to five percent of patients make a full recovery, in terms of how you’ve defined it, after a severe spinal trauma like yours.”
My eyes widened. Even the ardent pessimist inside me had guessed a number higher than that. “Then why perform surgery if the odds are that bad? Why not save a patient the pain, expense, and misplaced hope if only a few in every hundred actually get better?”
Josie was staying quiet beside me, no longer bobbing her head in agreement. Instead, she was twisting her hands in her lap and biting her lip as though she was nervous. I wasn’t used to seeing her nervous, and witnessing it made a pit open up in my stomach.
Dr. Murphy rolled closer, not seeming to blink as he stared at me. “Just because the likelihood of failing is high doesn’t mean you don’t try.” He lifted a brow, watching me carefully. “I thought that was a concept you bull riders would be quite familiar with.”
FIVE DAYS HAD passed since my appointment with Dr. Murphy, but I felt as if twice that number of days had passed. Being confined to a wheelchair, unable to go where I wanted to go or do the things I wanted to do, made life slow to an agonizing pace. I was used to spending my days working hard in some capacity, and even though I might have complained about it on those days I’d had to search for a stray calf in a blizzard and felt like my fingers and toes were so cold I could’ve snapped them right off, the work had made the time go by quickly. I’d been useful, filling my days with hard labor and earning a night of hard sleep. But now? I did next to nothing during the days, so the same followed me into the night. I’d never had such a hard time sleeping.
Joze suggested I call Dr. Murphy to get a prescription for sleeping pills, but I hadn’t. I knew what my problem was, and it didn’t seem like one I could fix. How could a person who’d spent a lifetime working hard instantly change to working hardly at all and expect to sleep at night? If I hadn’t done anything during the day to make me tired, I didn’t deserve to sleep. That was the whole reason humans slept in the first place: to recover.
But I hadn’t done anything to recover from, so that translated into me not sleeping, which translated into me spending wide-eyed nights thinking of nothing but what had happened and what should happen going forward.
I could move from my waist up, which was a miracle I was still thanking my lucky stars for. But after I’d gotten used to having the strength back in my upper half, I found myself getting impatient for the same to happen to my lower half. I was a greedy son of a bitch, I recognized that, but how could I not be? I’d gotten my arms back—I wanted my legs back too. I wanted everything that resided south of my waist back.
Wondering if Josie and I would ever be able to be close like we had been before also kept me up at night. I could wrap my arms around her and hold her hand now, but that wasn’t where I wanted our physical relationship to start and end. Especially after having experienced just how fucking amazing the rest had been and could be again if . . .
If . . .