Disarmed: An Exceptional Journey

DISARMED

An Exceptional Journey

Ginger T. Manley

Ideas into Books® Westview

P.O. Box 605

Kingston Springs, TN 37082

www.publishedbywestview.com

© 2015 Ginger T. Manley

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduction, storage, transmittal, or retrieval, in whole or in part in any form.

Published by Ginger T. Manley at www.Smashwords.com.

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ISBN: 978-1-62880-063-0 Perfect Bound

ISBN 978-1-62880-064-7 Smashwords

eBook edition, May 2015

Photo credits: All photographs are from the private collection of the author’s family, except as otherwise noted.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the epigraph quote from Storypeople, which is used with permission of Brian Andreas.

Good faith efforts have been made to trace copyrights on materials included in this publication. If any copyrighted material has been included without permission and due acknowledgment, proper credit will be inserted in future printings after notice has been received.

Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper.

He loved her for almost everything she was,

and she decided that was enough to let him stay

for a very long time.

© 1996 Brian Andreas, Storypeople Mr. Right

Other books by Ginger Manley

Gotcha Covered: A Legacy of Service and Protection, 2009, Published by Westview. Available in soft cover through Internet retailers and in select book sellers.

Assisted Loving: The Journey through Sexuality and Aging, 2013, Published by Westview. Available through Internet retailers in soft cover and eBook versions.

Proud Flesh, 2015, Ideas into Books® WESTVIEW. Available through Internet retailers in soft cover and eBook versions.

Other publications and information are available at http://www.gingermanley.com.

Ginger Manley can be contacted at: ginger@gingermanley.com

Contents

Other books by Ginger Manley

Preface

Introduction

Once upon a time

That damn artificial arm

What’s funny about being an amp?

Amps and athletes

The early years

The golf years

If you meet an amp on the road, what do you say?

Will you love me still when I’m old and grey?

Up in the air

Afterword

The End

Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

Disarmed: An Exceptional Journey is the story of my nearly fifty-year relationship with my husband, John, an arm amputee, known affectionately by friends and family as Captain Hook, the One Million Dollar Man, the Bionic Man, the One Armed Bandit, Stumpy, and Oh No.

I have never known John when he has had two natural arms. According to a woman I interviewed whose own spouse had been traumatically wounded in combat, I am an AfterWife—a woman who marries her husband after he has lost a part of himself. Supposedly that is an easier role to play than it is for a wife who must adapt to a changed husband after the fact. I don’t know—and can’t ever know—if that is true. This is simply our story.

John has been reluctant to have the story told. He doesn’t want to be perceived as a hero even though he has been heroic in many ways. I have also had some reluctance. I don’t always want to plumb the depths required to be plumbed for the telling of such a story and I don’t want to be perceived as a Pollyanna, even though there have been pollyanna-ish characteristics to me at times.

We are two very different people who met in an amazingly serendipitous, almost fairy-tale moment. Fairy tales almost never materialize as happy ever after, but somehow we managed to survive, then thrive despite the challenges life presented and today we are happily married just shy of fifty years.

Initially I wrote Disarmed to tell the funny stories. So many people have told me about experiences from their times with John and his artificial arm and I wanted all the stories to be on the same bookshelf and for other people to laugh in the same way we laugh about them. While there is nothing humorous about being an amputee, at the same time there have been so many funny things that have happened that could not possibly be known unless someone is an amputee or the spouse or friend of one. Sometimes humor has been our only asset, and as the saying goes, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Beyond the humor, that damn artificial arm has a life of its own, making this a relationship in which there are inevitably three entities. Any relationship threesome is a setup for a mess, as we say in the south. One other piece is crucial—John is and always will remain a pilot and a competitive athlete and I am and always will remain a registered nurse. Those innate perspectives inform our interactions with each other.

Like every story, this is not complete. To use a brewery metaphor, in the distillation process much of the story evaporated leaving only the essence—the most highly priced and valuable part. The essence of this story, for both armed and disarmed people, is a marriage takes work on both sides and every day brings a chance to choose to go or stay.

Our experience is only ours—others with similar challenges have had far different endings. We did not always live happily ever after, but we are pretty happy to be where we are today. I hope you will join me in this reminiscence of our journey by thinking about what you need to know in whatever journeys and relationships you have. Follow the wisdom of the poet Rumi who teaches, Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Ginger T. Manley

Franklin, Tennessee

Introduction

Just before Christmas 2011 national news reports described a horrifying accident experienced by twenty-three-year-old Lauren Scruggs, a model and celebrity TV host in Dallas. Lauren had exited the right side of a small prop plane in which she was a passenger and got tangled up with the whirring propeller, severing her left hand and causing severe trauma to the left side of her head and shoulder. The networks reported she was recovering from her injuries in Parkland Hospital, noting on the third day after the accident her breathing tube had been removed and she had spoken a few words to her father. Further down in the story, John Nance, an ABC television aviation expert and commentator, was quoted as saying such aircraft accidents as this are very rare.

When I saw this story on the Internet a few mornings after Lauren’s accident, I turned to my then-seventy-year-old husband who was seated at his desk across the room from where I had been working on my computer, and I said, "This sounds exactly like the accident you had when you were twenty-three years-old. I read him some of the details and he replied, Yes, that does sound like what happened to me."

It had already been a busy morning for him, answering personal correspondence on his e-mail account and typing up a complicated legal opinion to be sent to the government agency for which he contracts as an independent reviewer. His typing was methodic, clicking one by one the letters on the left side of the keyboard with the unsharpened pencil he clinched in his prosthetic left hand. The fingers of his right hand worked all four ranks of that side of the keyboard with the practiced agility he had acquired more than fifty years earlier. Periodically he stopped typing and adjusted his reading glasses with his good right hand, pushing them up on his nose when the left side of the frames slipped down the side of his head over the space where his left ear used to be.

After getting out of bed that morning he pulled on his underwear and pants using his good hand for guiding the correct holes over his legs. Anchoring the left end of the pants waistband with pressure from the stump of his left lower arm, he closed the latch on the waistband in a lapping movement with the right hand.

In his closet he looked at the choices of which prosthesis to wear that day—the more functional hook or the less functional but more cosmetically appealing artificial hand. He chose the hand, which he attached by first wetting his stump with a bit of tap water and then slipping it into the socket of the hard molded casing that attached to the artificial hand, making sure the sensors inside the device lined up well with two specific skin areas on the upper part of the stump. These connections allow him to think about when to open and close the prosthesis by consciously sending signals from his brain to the nerve endings in his arm, much the same as regularly-armed folks do thousands of times a day without being conscious of the process.

It was to be a casual day—no need for coat and tie—so he ruled out a button-up shirt, choosing a polo instead. Drawing the shirt over his head, he tugged it down on the right hemline with his good hand and then reached across and swiveled the closed hand of the prosthesis, placing the artificial hand just below the left hemline of his shirt. He thought the hand to open, then close, grabbing the fabric edge in the clinch, and then he watched the hand pull that side of the polo shirt down over his waist before thinking the hand open again. He re-swiveled the hand into neutral position and let it rest at his side. In a one-handed motion with the right one, he tugged some of the shirt buttons at the neck through their corresponding holes, deciding the top one would remain unbuttoned. He decided to wear slip-on shoes—Topsiders—that morning because it was an easier choice than to tie shoelaces with an artificial hand.

In the bathroom he placed his toothbrush in the again-swiveled artificial hand and locked the hand in place so it would not slip as he applied toothpaste to the brush with his right hand, then he switched the now-ready toothbrush to the right hand for brushing. In his right ear he inserted his single hearing aid, which helps remedy his creeping deafness significantly but not as well as a second hearing aid would do if he had a left ear in which to put it.

Finished with dressing and toilet duties, he stepped into the kitchen and removed his omega-3 fish oil from the refrigerator. Balancing the bottle against his mid-section and the counter top and holding a teaspoon with his artificial hand, he poured his daily spoonful of heart-health, managing to spill a little on his shirt and into the sink. He ate some toast spread with honey; the latter of which I pointed out to him had dropped onto his prosthetic hand unnoticed by him. Seeing the golden droplets, he then proceeded to lick the honey off the prosthesis.

After breakfast he needed to replace the contact lens which he had been wearing in his right eye. For several years he had also tried to wear a left eye contact lens, but because of the nerve damage to the left side of his head and face his left eye waters a lot and it is very hard for him to keep the lens from floating out so he has pretty much given up trying to have bilateral contact-corrected vision. Since it is impossible for him to put in a new contact lens with one hand, he asked for my help to insert it. With that task done, he moved on to our shared office to start his day’s work. Looking at the weather forecast, he wondered if he would also be able to get in nine holes of golf or perhaps some tennis on this unseasonably warm winter day. If he were able to do either of these activities later on, he would need to re-arm himself with a differently adapted prosthesis.

This was just the first hour of his day. He has been doing all these things, and many more, for almost fifty years, with grace, dignity, skill, and quite a bit of humor—but he did not mention any of the humor in the personal note of encouragement he typed and sent to Lauren later that morning. He just told her that he had once been where she was, and while it might seem impossible to her at this stage of recovery to believe life could go on, he wanted her to know it could.

She’ll be busy learning how to adjust to all of this now, he told me as he placed the stamp on the letter. Later on maybe she’ll be able to laugh about some of it.

Once Upon a Time...

Growing up on the Atlantic Coast, John was a consummate athlete. He played Little League baseball every year he was eligible and later he was a lifeguard on the Jersey Shore, participating in guard tournaments against other beach contingents and wowing the young ladies with his physique and charm.

John competing in a lifeguard tournament on the Jersey Shore, c. 1959.

In 2000 he was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame for the Pingry School in New Jersey from which he graduated in 1960. As a part of the induction ceremony several of his classmates spoke, recreating verbal memories of his days as a varsity nine-letterman. In their opinion, he was someone who