Flying to Dallas by Rosemary

I think as soon as I hung up the phone with the hospital in Dallas, I called my father. He had already been told by his sister Eunice. I was ready to fly down right then, get there, be with my brother through what must be the scarriest moment of his life. My father wasn't. He told me he would drive. It angered me then. I know now that he just wasn't ready to face the facts.

I phoned my boss and told him what had happened. He never asked if I had time left to take off, he just said go. I'm sure that couldn't happen now. But it was a small company, and they actually cared about your life. I was fortunate. When I phoned the airlines, I got the first flight out the next day, Sunday. There were a lot of phone calls to make. There were my two other brothers I needed to contact. After talking to my oldest brother Joe, he offered to take me and mom to Dulles airport the next morning.

It must have been an extremely early flight because I still remember the sun rising over the little pond as you drive into the airport. Very early. I don't remember any of the flight or how we got to the hospital once arriving in Dallas. I just remember walking into the ICU and seeing my brother in this contraption. It was like a gurney that would flip. His face was down, facing the floor, so I just crawled on down there and got underneath of him. He look scared. Lord knows what I said. Probably something to lighten the place up a bit. I hope I did, for John's sake and for my family's sake. But, yes, of course, there were tears. Lots and lots of tears.

How Could Things Be Any Worse Than This? By John

The first thing that troubled me besides that of not being able to move at all and not being able to feel anything below my shoulders was that I would never be able to experience an orgasm again. And I loved orgasms. I was what you might call an orgasm junkie. I masturbated on the average three times the day. Once in the morning as part of my getting ready for work routine (it was a great incentive for getting up), once right before bedtime (it made for a wonderful soporific) and once in the afternoon just for recreational purposes.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself chronologically, but I remember my insurance case manager saying that they would pay for a penile implant. What good would that be if I couldn't feel anything? And my brother Jim told me with his best intentions in mind I'm sure that sex was 90% mental. Best intentions or not, he pissed me off. 90% mental, my ass. For me, the orgasm was the culmination of the sex act. Without it, there was no sex.

It didn't enter my mind at the time but I had found early on in my sexual encounters that sex without kissing was not much like having sex either. There was one sexual partner I had when I was in my early twenties, and for some odd reason she didn't like to kiss. After about the third or fourth time of having sex with her, it seemed I was doing little more than masturbating with a partner, so I stopped. I continue to see her--she was fun to be around--but sex with her seemed pointless.

I spoke earlier of having a drug habit, and after mulling over the fact that my life of orgasms was over, I figured that with a catastrophic injury as bad as mine that I would be able to get all the drugs that I wanted. What doctor would deny me the right to stay high all the time? It was about a week after my injury that my dad told me that he had told my doctor that I had been addicted to drugs since I was 15. Gee, thanks dad, was there anything else you could I do to make my life more miserable?

So there I was, totally paralyzed and numb with no orgasms or drugs in my future. I was sure that I would be spending the rest of my life in a hospital bed, so what did I have to live for? Nothing.

If that were not enough, I was putting my family through another cycle of pain and anguish, especially my dad. I had hurt him enough for the past 15 years already with my drug use. When he had first found out that I had been using heroin, it seemed that I had destroyed his life. "Once you get on that stuff, you'll never get off," he told me the day that I had been arrested for drug possession. It was after dinner, and we two were alone in the kitchen, and he broke down so hard that I couldn't help but to break down myself. There we were, father and son, bawling like babies, and me thinking what a horrible thing I had done to bring this on my dad, the man I loved more than anyone else in the world. I felt like scum. Now here I was again doing it to him again.

The day of my injury, it was my Aunt Eunice and my cousins Mitzi and James that had visited me. I felt bad enough after seeing their reaction to my predicament. Then the next day, somehow miraculously my mom and sister arrived. I couldn't believe how quickly they had gotten there. They were distraught, to say the least, but these two women were stalwarts of strength that I could grab purchase to and maintain some semblance of sanity.

Then my dad showed up, and he broke down as if it were that same day 15 years before that we stood in the kitchen. I had destroyed him again. It was perhaps at that moment that I felt the lowest since being injured. I wished more than ever that I had died in the accident.


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