To Hell and Back

On April 20, 1998, Jan Reid was shot in the abdomen during a robbery in Mexico City. Doctors told him he might not walk again, but after three years he's regained much of the physical and psychological ground he had lost.

by Jan Reid

June 2001

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“But there’s nothing on here,” he said, tapping the MRI’s manila folder, “that says you can’t walk.”

The bullet meant I was a cripple. But I could wiggle my toes; I knew that some of the wiring still worked. I had a vote in how crippled I could be. When Dr. Clifton raised that MRI and said, “There’s nothing on here that says you can’t walk,” something in me decided I would. It would require a lot more courage than taking a pistol-whipping and facing off with the thug who shot me. But I was going to pull myself up and try.

On Norman’s advice my wife, Dorothy, and I decided I would remain in Houston a good while longer. Tucked away in the Texas Medical Center is a small hospital called the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research. Known by its acronym, TIRR, the facility is considered one of the premier rehab hospitals in the country. On May 1, 1998, I left Hermann Hospital and the care of Red Duke for an ambulance ride of five or six blocks. It was the first time I’d been outside since the shooting. Like a released prisoner, I stared at patterns of tiled roofs, the brilliant greens of ordinary grass, a couple in shorts jogging with a baby carriage. Pushed along in a wheelchair, I arrived on my floor in the early afternoon. My new home was a suite with four beds and a bathroom in the middle.My daily uniform consisted of athletic shoes, socks, sweatpants, and a T-shirt. The schedule was unrelenting. Every morning and every afternoon, therapists had me straining against the bonds of my injury. The work was hard, frustrating, and repetitive. Some patients didn’t respond, and they were quickly discharged to their homes and outpatient programs. Screenwriter Bill Broyles, an old friend and editor who had almost lost the use of his arm in an accident, had written me an invaluable letter. This was my job now, he told me. Forget everything else. If they asked me to do some dumb, boring task ten times, I would give them twelve repetitions.

I had to transport myself to and from the sessions on the ground floor. With a standard wheelchair, all I could do was roll in an endless left turn. One of my physical therapists, Theresa Gregorio-Torres, and the therapist in charge of supplies found in storage an old chair that a patient could steer with one hand, by gripping and releasing a set of gears. “I want that one,” I told them. “I want the exercise.” But the one-armed bandit rolled like a wheelbarrow piled with rocks. I needed help from nurses to get from my suite to the elevator. Downstairs, the corridor to the gym had a considerable dip in the floor; I couldn’t build enough momentum going down to clear the ascent. Pulling with all the strength I possessed, I inched and struggled until someone came along and took pity on me. People raised their gazes from mine because I crept along so pathetically.

But I could never feel sorry for myself at the TIRR. On the next machine or mat someone huffed and puffed with injuries far worse than mine. Friendships formed around the bond of our injuries. Jim Copeland was a Rice University linguistics professor who had made his life’s work penetrating the mysteries of the Tarahumara Indians in northern Mexico. He was also a competitive cyclist who had gotten bashed almost to extinction doing his daily miles in the Houston traffic. Jim was much farther along the road to recovery, yet every movement for him was agony. A flight of stairs and a walkway to an office had been built along two walls of the gym. One day I watched awestruck as Jim’s legs gave out climbing the stairs; he got to the top by lifting his hips with shoves of his hands, then onto the landing as a therapist goaded him to crawl. “I’ve got to walk again,” Jim told me. “There’s no other way to get to the Tarahumaras.”

In the afternoons Theresa put me to work screwing bolts into nuts or kneading therapeutic putty. The most encouraging drill was when she had me sit on one of the raised mats and twist and stretch to catch tosses of a big, soft inflated ball. This was an important test of my balance. “Awesome,” remarked one student therapist. Afterward I sat beside Theresa at a table and watched her fill out a form for me. She came to a line for my status and wrote “paraplegic.”

My reaction was absurd: Who, me?

The TIRR has a wise practice that married couples should spend a weekend at home not long before the patient is discharged. Because of the distance to Austin, Dorothy and I got permission to check into a favorite hotel in Houston. As soon as I rolled my wheelchair through thick carpet into our hotel room, I realized I had forgotten something essential when I packed—the diapers, or maybe it was the disposable catheters, objects I had not come to terms with possessing at all. She had to go back out in the heat and traffic and retrieve them. Saturday afternoon we were reading and then lolling in bed. To my utter surprise, we found I wasn’t impotent. Once more I was lucky: Despite the bullet’s shock force against my spinal cord, for me the fragile and mysterious system of nerve connections had considerable healing capacity. But I wanted things to be the same, at once, and I was numb—as shattering a discovery as the one just before had been joyous.

Later we lay quietly, her back against me. Not far from my mind was the humiliation of that morning, when I hadn’t moved fast enough getting to the bathroom. It is a horror for someone of sound mind to drop shit like a pony or dog. Dorothy started crying now, and in trying to console her, I found out that part of it was my failing to take any responsibilty for the daunting tasks that awaited us outside the institution of a hospital. I had, she said, gotten all too glad to lie around and have people wait on me. We quarreled.

“Are you depressed?” she said.

“I’m starting to be.”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

Communication between men and women is hard enough without psychological trauma and debilitating injury. The next night I was back in my TIRR cocoon, resting in bed and watching television when Dorothy called. Without spelling it out, she wanted to talk about our weekend together. To her it had been a disaster. But I was distant on the phone. I’m not a TV addict, and I know now that I should have turned it off—or at least explained myself and told her I’d call her right back. But it happened that when she called I was transfixed by the drama of the last minute of Michael Jordan’s last basketball game with the Chicago Bulls. As she and I talked, Jordan made the impossible play—stripped the ball from Karl Malone and, seconds before the buzzer, hit the title-winning shot. What a way to go out. What a gifted man!

And, of course, what an irresponsible thing for me to do now as a husband and a lover. Dorothy wasn’t aware of that basketball game and probably wouldn’t have cared if she’d known. All she knew was that once more I had been insensitive to her emotional needs.

In morning sessions my physical therapist, Sherry Dunbar, tried to get me on my feet by using a tilt board, but just that small change in altitude made me nauseous. Then one day, first with Sherry’s help and then on my own, I discovered that I could stand up, sit down, stand up again! She and another therapist got me to walk the length of parallel bars, supporting myself with my arms on the bars. My right leg was much stronger than the left; I dragged that foot, and the knee kept buckling. They improvised a knee brace with plastic bands, and with my elbows and forearms propped on the padding of their most stable walker, I walked about 25 feet, then did it again. A TV crew from Dallas happened to be there that day. The reporter asked me how it felt. My winded reply was silly but honest, straight out of my Texas upbringing: “Like I just scored a touchdown.”But the next day, Dorothy drove in from Austin and came into the gym with an anxious look on her face. “You’re not ready to go home,” she said. “I can’t take care of you, and you can’t take care of yourself.” Sherry absorbed this with a nod, then hurried off to inform the doctors. Dorothy and I met that afternoon with a counselor. We both got a lot off our chests, and as the week slowly passed, our mood lightened. Whether we were ready or not, the Friday of my discharge arrived. It was two months and one day since I had lain in the Mexico City street thinking I was dying.

Dorothy, our daughter, Lila, and I stuffed clothes and medical supplies in a suitcase and boxes. Florence, a Jamaican nurse who had grown close to us, came to say good-bye. “Ah, well, the nice people come and go,” she said, uncharacteristically quiet and shy.

Sherry walked with us as I pushed the wheels of my chair along. As a good-bye present, I showed her that I didn’t need the slide board anymore. I stood up from the wheelchair, grasped the car door, and swung my hips into the front seat. Sherry grinned and hugged us, then we were off, but stalled in the Houston traffic. I reached for Dorothy’s hand and held it, squeezing. Finally we pulled onto the interstate and left the city behind. We rolled the windows down for a few minutes. The breeze carried a mingled scent of grass, dust, and heat that was oddly sweet—the smell of Texas summers I’d known all my life.

Godamighty, I was almost home.

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