Paralysis Commentary: Getting James Watson Into Bed

[grav_ity]

Okay, so no one asked for a commentary on Paralysis, but there are some things I have to say, because this story kind of terrified me when I started it, and I am so, so ridiculously pleased with how it turned out that I would like to explain why.

My first concern was that the emotional story I was trying to get across wouldn't work. It did, thankfully, mostly because I let it takes its time and really stretch out to fill the whole fic. Switching to James's POV helped a lot, but created my second problem, my bigger concern.

My bigger concern was the part where James gets back into bed.



I know how that works, vaguely, the movements he'd need to do it unassisted (I contemplated giving him a bar, but there's no way in hell James Watson uses a bar). I worked in a nursing home from the time I was 16 until the time I was 22. It's the worst job I've ever had. I was very good at it. When I first got it, I cried myself to sleep every night for a month. I didn't tell a soul how much I hated it, except my other employer, who said to me "Kate, how do you do it?", to which I replied "I cry myself to sleep every night."

I found my first body that summer. Her name was Lillian and she was 98. I don't remember walking out of the room or going to the nurses' station, but I know I didn't have to say anything when I got there. They all knew what had happened from seeing it on my face. They gave me black coffee so I wouldn't puke. It was years before I could drink coffee again.

Another woman, Winnie, used to tell me stories about her passage over from England. "My daddy tried to get us tickets for this new ship. I don't remember what it was called. We ended up on the California." "Winnie," I said. "Was it called the Titanic?" "Yes!" she said. "That's what it was called. He was so disappointed that we didn't get on it." She died three days after her hundredth birthday, happy to have a letter from the Queen.

Most of my job revolved around putting people to bed or getting them up. We had lifts, but they took forever and usually it was easier (and more comfortable for the resident) to just pick them up. Most of them hated it. Hated that this sixteen-year-old girl had to put them to bed (they loved me, they would say, but would I please go get someone else? Someone older, someone they couldn't scare. That made it worse, because I couldn't). So I put them to bed.

Some of them needed help all the way, chair to bed, and then a swing around to get their legs in, and then a thousand tiny corrections to get them close to the centre. Some of them just needed help to swing their legs up. Some of them would insist they could do it themselves, and I would watch, and try to seem older than I was.

Merv was a fighter pilot. They never told him what his targets were. He just flew to coordinates in Germany and fired. Les was part mechanic corps, and among the first to go Poland. He talked about black smoke that stuck to everything, smoke they couldn't explain until the day they arrived at Auschwitz. Susan never looked you in the eye, because when she was in the Camps, that's how you stayed alive. When she didn't think anyone was listening, she would sing. Marjorie raised six children and ran the farm after her husband died. She called me "the baby" for half a decade, and told me almost every day that I should quit and go somewhere else. Jeannie never had any visitors at all. She hated her teeth and was afraid of the bath tub, but she loved to dance.

I loved every single one of them. Isabel was the twenty-second one to die after I started working there, the summer I turned 18. After her, I lost count. After her, I stopped counting.

So getting James into bed was hard. I knew exactly how he did it, and how very badly he needed Declan not to be looking at him when he did. He needed to still be a person. I needed for him still to be a person. But I couldn't make it easy either. So I didn't. Parts of you go, and parts of you stay, and putting that together is the hardest thing I've ever seen those people and their families do.

I think that comes across, the awkwardness and sheer effort it takes to get in, the fact that he doesn't even try to roll on to his side to get closer to Declan, the complete and utter exposure of the scene...and the extremely personal tenderness. It's not my best paragraph, I think, but it's one of my favourites, and certainly one of the most personal. I've never written a disabled character before (I think...and I suppose technically I still haven't, but this is the closest I've ever come), and I was worried I would ruin it. I don't think I did.

So thank you for all your comments. They mean even more than usual, because there were so many things I was worried about, and knowing that I didn't screw up is really, really good.

Comments

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

I had no idea about this part of your life. What an amazing, touching, and powerful story. Thank you for sharing it.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

It's pre-lj (for the most part...there are a couple stories way back, like the time I had to let someone nearly die with his head in my lap because he was DNR, or the time I got locked in the bathroom for two hours and they all thought I'd never come back), and what I've mentioned here is really, really only the tip of the iceberg, but I'm mostly able to talk about it now. I could probably write a book, but I don't know if anyone would read it.

edited because that "nearly" is important!

[shadadukal]

I'm not going to copy-paste my comment from Skype. You already know how I feel about the story.

For this commentary, *hugs* You continually impress me and humble me. You're an amazing person. *hugs more*

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

Thank you, hun. Sometimes I just need to talk. :)

[kaseykcnew.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have any right to comment on this since I don't know you but I feel like I have to say something regardless.

My mother used to work at a nursing home, she worked in several actually, and a lot of the time she'd come home and she'd have to talk about the residents; those who spoke to her, those who wouldn't speak, those who refused care, those who died that night...
I don't think I've ever really understood how she could do the job, how she could go in every night and sometimes watch a person die. I don't think I ever will.

But, I just wanted to say that you are obviously a brilliant person with a good and great heart. You told us a story explaining your feelings about another and I'm glad you did, because I think I'll cherish Paralysis all the more than I did before reading this.

At my mother's suggestion I might start working on an EMI ward at one of the nursing homes nearby (I want to be a psychologist) and I think, after reading this, I will seriously consider it because sometimes we forget that those who have aged and are from another generation feel just as much as we do, sometimes even more...

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

*hugs* Thank you for commenting! It's a public post, and it's something that I did a long time ago (well, five years...but sometimes it feels like forever), so I welcome all comers. :)

For me, there wasn't really anyone I could talk to that first summer. It was a strange one: my mum was in Australia, my dad was super busy, and my brothers and I were all working opposite shifts. I could go a whole week without seeing anyone, because at any given moment one of us would be asleep, one would be at work, and one would be trying to cook dinner. I've never really talked about it to anyone. Not even about the longest night of my life, listening to Muriel breathe from all the way down the hall, counting, waiting, wondering each time if that one was the last. It took days. Hours. And then it was over.

Thank you. SO MUCH.

[kaseykcnew.livejournal.com]

*hugs back* You're welcome. Oh, public. :)

Sometimes a day can feel like a lifetime and I'm sure five years definitely feels like that at times.

I've gone through some crazy stuff in my life so far and most of the time I never had anyone to talk to - no-one that would listen to what I wasn't saying at least. So I would write. And I'd sing and if they didn't work I'd bury myself in anything I could think of; namely school work.

I always find writing something, even if it's a short paragraph, in the persona of some fictional character, about my problems helped me. And maybe, by writing Paralysis, you've helped yourself because you ended up explaining what Paralysis was about in this post. And perhaps that's what you really needed to do. *smiles*

And there's no need to thank me. If anything, I should be thanking you for explaining. :)

[mylittleredgirl.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's all so amazing. *hugs you*

My mother worked in hospice care when I was about 7. It's probably because she was so much older than you that she had a very different reaction to it, or maybe I was too young to hear the truth. I remember her talking about playing the piano in the lounge once late at night because one of her favorite patients wanted to hear music as they died. She would bring me sometimes on weekends because some of the old people liked children (she kept me away from the angry ones), and it was kind of strange when I'd find out that people had died (I remember we had to go there on Christmas once and someone had died and strangely, my memory is of looking at a linen chute door and wondering if that was where they put the bodies).

Your post makes me want to volunteer in hospice care. I don't think I could have handled it at 16, though. You're such an awesome person. <3

[emmy-roo.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons that I really, really need my husband to get a well-paying job is because I want to be able to turn down shifts with elderly clients. Last Saturday, a 92-year-old dementia patient shattered my heart because she hated so much getting bathed. We had to lift her into the shower chair and strip her naked, and seeing the scars from her double mastectomy and hysterectomy just about undid me; not only did she no longer have her memories or her mind, but she lacked her womanliness as well. She kept clawing at us, saying, "My daddy wouldn't want . . . my daddy will never . . . My daddy doesn't let people touch . . ." but she could never finish the sentences. We just kept telling her that her daddy wanted her to be clean, and she screamed and cried as if we were raping her when we had to clean between her legs.

Before she lost all command of her own body, she had refused to shower for over a decade. She'd sponged herself off instead. But that isn't sufficient for someone who is largely immobile, because you can't kill all the fungus. She had fungus growing in the folds of skin beneath her arms and atop her thighs and we washed and treated it as well as we could while she cried, and my heart was just breaking.

You did that for a lot longer than I have, and at least providing home care we can give the elderly a lot more dignity. My estimation of your bravery and strength has, if possible, increased.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

When I started, we only did day-baths and I worked evenings so I didn't have to do them. My first day shift I cried in the tub room because I couldn't get out doing it. I have a scar on my arm from being scratched. It was horrible, and even at the end, when I'd built up a "thick skin", it was still the worst part.

[emmy-roo.livejournal.com]

It's enough to make me hope that I die young.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

I've had a DNR since I was old enough to make the decision legally. When I got my health card and asked for it, the woman was all "really?" and I was all "PUT IT ON THE CARD". You can't get them on AB health cards, but my Ontario card has one.

[emmy-roo.livejournal.com]

I don't have a DNR, but what I do have is a husband who knows without a doubt that if I can't be saved with my self intact, then I don't want to be saved at all. I just hope that he loves me enough to let me go if something happens.

[emmy-roo.livejournal.com]

I think the stories that are written from the depths of our own pain are the most powerful. I want to share one that I wrote after talking to my grandfather about his experiences in WWII. He was captured after the Battle of the Bulge and was Missing in Action for 4 months, presumed dead. It wasn't until his POW camp was liberated that they discovered he had survived being shot twice (once in the lower back and once in the thigh) and his family found out that he was alive.

Lacrymosa

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

[colej55.livejournal.com]

I, too, started working in a nursing home at 16 and then progressed to home health care, private duty nursing, and hospice respite care - something I still do when I can get the work or are physically able to take the jobs. I've also spent most of my life in wheelchairs or on crutches (since 1968), so I know how it feels to be ogled at. I guess that's why I connected so much with how you beautifully wrote the scene where James gets into bed - not only the physical description, but the emotions of both characters. Now that I know your background, it's even that much more poignant. I completely understand how hard it is to do that kind of work without a good way to externalize it. Bless you!

I never cease to be amazed by your depth as a person and the breadth of your experiences. Keep using it for good!!!

[darthanne.livejournal.com]

*hugs* Thank you for sharing this. I think your experience came through in the poignancy and emotion of the story you wrote.