One.
The physical therapist asks if you can describe the pain. You can: The tendons around your knee feel like desert-hot barbed wire. Someone has raised your kneecap like a lid, poured shards of broken glass into it, and sewed the lid up again with Frankenstein stitches. Or like razor-sharp jacks – like, the children’s game, jacks? (the therapist’s eyes have shifted focus to a middle distance) – were shoved under your knee like serrano peppers in an empanada.
He hands you a sheet of paper which displays ten emojis. The one on the far left is crying. The one on the far right, beaming happily. You point to the fifth emoji, a face whose mouth is a straight line.
It had started as barbed-wire pain but once you began the anti-inflammatories, it has dulled to a hard ache, like the heartache of losing a friend, a friend you’re better off without since she never really had your back but sometimes she had your belly, the belly you’d clutch when your gales of rogue laughter pierced a tender spot until you only had enough breath to gasp, “Stop, stop, it hurts.”
Two.
Almost every exercise assigned to you consists of three sets of ten reps: the calf raises, the leg presses on the weight machine, the squats. One exception is the wobble board. You like the wobble board, where you must stand without letting the edges hit the floor. You balance well, focusing (like your intake therapist) on a private middle distance. You are a surfer without an ocean. You wobble-wobble-click for the two minute time period. Decades of riding the subway have trained you to stand without support. You suppress a sneeze of pride when you see another client founder, clack-clack-clacking against the floor, left to right to left, swimming at the air to steady herself. You chide yourself that in a physical rehabilitation center, you compete only with yourself.
(But still, you have better balance. You have better balance!)
Three.
The first time you were in physical therapy, you were struck by specificity of the tasks to the injuries, as though meted out by the adjudicators in Dante’s Inferno, where the damned are sentenced to punishments earned by their sins in life. In the fifth circle of Hell, for example, the Sullen choke on their anger for eternity. This one has always stayed with you.
Those sessions took place on the rehabilitation floor of the hospital across the street from Gracie Mansion and the East River. It was a long walk to the edge of Manhattan on crutches with your twice-fractured ankle. There, an injured skier walked backwards down the linoleum hall, pulling a carpeted sled strapped to his waist, turned, and walked backwards back. It seemed Sisyphean. Players from the WNBA, those magnificent Minervas, gently hoisted weights to mend incremental tears in their wings.
In the PT room in Queens, twenty years later, your fellow patients are more homespun: wounded college athletes in danger of losing their scholarships, careworn laborers injured on the job, and people fighting to retain their mobility against the erosion of time.
Four.
Must you count yourself among the lattermost?
Already?
Five.
Your orthopedist breezed through your consult like a movie star guest-appearing on a sitcom as a favor to an old friend, say, someone from his improv class when they were all L.A.-broke and smoldering with ambition. He has that much ease, your orthopedist, and since he never looks at you, you are afforded the leisure to craft this metaphor. He had no doubt been a varsity athlete in college, where he was pre-med. After he collided with fate on the field, he was keen to interpret his own X-rays and found that his bones were as gorgeous as the rest of him. Just look at the splendor of that multiple fracture! Your arthritic knee, by contrast, is so mundane he can’t get through it fast enough. His eyes dart from the X-ray to his prescription pad. Surgery. Oh, anti-inflammatories, and physical therapy, if you want. But total knee replacement is the only way to “take care” of this. Have a nice day.
Six.
The first physical therapist, the intake therapist, resembles one of those interchangeable actors on Saturday Night Live who are hired because they can imitate presidents. You try to engage him with humorous observations. After one session together, he assigns you to other therapists and avoids so much as eye contact. One therapist looks too young to be working, Apparently she harbors similar doubts about you, because she asks if you are “still working.” When you confirm this, she approves.
“It’s important to stay busy. It’s good to work,” she coos in a tone usually reserved for puppies or stroke victims. “My grandfather still works.”
Her what, now? Is she saying that you look old enough to have a grandchild old enough to have qualified as a physical therapist, albeit a condescending one? That is not accurate. Is it? You would calculate the math, but the contemplation of the sum is too painful. You would rate this pain by circling the fourth emoji on the scale, closer to the crying.
Seven.
Your favorite therapist looks like Nancy Kerrigan – black hair, bright blue eyes, with a slender grace as she moves about the exercise room carrying resistance bands and leg weights. The child at the reception desk doesn’t know the story of Nancy Kerrigan and when you tell her – an Olympic skater who was struck on the leg with a tire iron by the husband of her rival – she looks at you with the wide-eyed incomprehension of the young people in your office.
“This was recently a movie,” you tell the receptionist impatiently. “I, Tonya? With Margot Robbie? It’s not ancient history.”
But it is, still, history. Caitlin Carver, the actress who played Nancy Kerrigan in I, Tonya (but resembles Kerrigan less than your favorite therapist) was but two years old when the attack occurred.
Eight.
One morning, the music in the PT room is “Friday, I’m in Love,” by The Cure.
Monday, you can fall apart
Tuesday, Wednesday, break my heart –
What is happening! You are usually content with the anodyne Motown and Hall and Oates playing in the room, but this, this music from your big-haired, heavily eyelined youth, is not physical therapy room music! It was angst, not arthritis, that The Cure set out to cure! This isn’t an old fogey song; it only goes back to the time when your need for health insurance overrode your hunger for independence, when you stopped freelancing and took a job in a law firm because all that writing strengthened your typing speed into a marketable skill. Remember how you used to wake up on Friday mornings with this song running through your head, regret clogging your throat like mucus as you realized that after this workday, you would have forty-eight hours to try to play at your old life. Until Monday, when you would fall apart.
Nine.
When you begin your physical therapy regimen, the television in the PT room is showing the French Open, players racing rubber-kneed back and forth, impossibly buoyant on the red clay court. A long time ago, you wrote about tennis. You don’t mention this because you would have to explain that you covered the Virginia Slims Tennis Tournament and then explain further that this was a women’s tennis tournament sponsored by a tobacco company which marketed itself to women with the vague idea that the advent of both women-focused championship tennis and long slim cigarettes with jaunty advertising jingles were concepts of equal feminist empowerment. This idea, to the young people running this clinic, would be as alien as a newsstand or an eight-track tape or a phone booth.
Ten.
By the time the insurance runs out, the U.S. Open is playing. You have gone through Wimbledon, through many mornings of sets of ten, weights and bands handed to you by the slim, patient, chino-clad, polo-shirted trainers, culminating always in a blissful cool-down period with an ice pack. You numb your knee on the exam table, glancing at the tennis, watching the trainers work with other patients or tap into their laptops on the pristine center island that serves as their shared desk, diligently logging your progress as efficiently as they ignore your anecdotes.
You have gained strength. You can work short distances without a cane. You can stand on one leg and throw a softball at an upended trampoline so that it rockets back to you with a force that impresses the therapists. (You never did throw like a girl.)
Nancy Kerrigan is not in attendance on your last day, which is probably just as well, as you might have hugged her, and you suspect that physical affection in this place is as unwelcome as metaphor. There is no ceremony, only more paperwork. You are once again asked to describe the pain. The pain is no longer splintery but rather a specific isolated soreness, as though you’d overdone it on a workout, or a few months ago your rival’s husband had hit you in the side of your knee with a tire iron.
You circle the seven on the emoji scale, closer to the smile.
You pick up your cane by the receptionist’s desk and walk out the door, with only a slight limp. The knee you were born with is still intact for the time being. For the time being, it works. And that young therapist was right: it’s good to work.
