New Life, No Instructions

New Life, No Instructions: a memoir
Gail Caldwell (2014, Random House)

    Gail Caldwell's previous volume of memoir (Let’s Take the Long Way Home, 2010) was a beauty. It was the story of gaining a best friend, in her forties, with whom she shared a love of dogs, and a hard-won sobriety. Four years later, the friend and the dog have both died. At 54, she is sober, solitary, and lonely, so she decides to get another dog. She wants a Samoyed, bred for pulling sleds; they are big-hearted and stubborn, and so is she. She heads down to Pennsylvania, where there's a breeder she admires, and comes back with a beautiful white puppy she calls Tula.

    What New Life, No Instructions is really about is the reason a Samoyed was a crazy idea: Caldwell is lame, and getting more so. Her right leg has been weaker than her left since she had polio as a baby. With her mother, she did exercises to stretch and strengthen the leg, but only until she was about five. Nonetheless, as we saw in her earlier book, she exercised avidly, either on the water in a rowing shell, or swimming laps. But over a lifetime of uneven use, her weaker leg was also shortened, so her right foot was always stretching down to reach the ground.

    After Tula came, the strain of keeping up with her brought matters to a head. “I had been falling a lot lately, and spending energy trying not to notice.” The doctor she had was pretty good at not noticing, too, sending her to physical therapy with a diagnosis of sciatica. Happily–at last– she went to a new doctor. “I delivered the usual sketch–polio as an infant, years of exercise and strengthening, recent years of pain. When he asked me where it hurt, my brain was so overloaded with information that I became confused. Had no one ever asked me where it hurt before?”        

    That’s not all: “ ‘What did the MRI show?’ There had been no MRI, ever, and I told him so. ‘OK, what about the X-ray?’ Same answer. In the twenty or so years I had been experiencing difficulty–sprains and injuries and progressive weakness and discomfort–no one, in orthopedics or internal medicine or neurology or physical therapy, had ever ordered or even mentioned an X-ray.” This appalls me, though somehow it doesn’t surprise me.

    Caldwell is not as angry about this as I am, perhaps because she, too, had a fixed idea about the reason for her difficulties. “I had been limping around for a decade while friends worried and doctors shrugged, and yet the polio had been such a basic starting point that no one could see beyond it.” Also, she’s learned in AA that sometimes, things just are what they are. "I don't get to be mad at a resident or a therapist or an internist who was working a twelve-hour day  and assumed I needed a cortisone shot or a referral instead of an X-ray. A thousand little subplots converged on the days I didn't get what I needed, and chances are, almost none of them were about me."

    The ensuing hip replacement is at once dramatic and utterly routine. Thousands of people have them every week, but not everybody gets to add 5/8” of thigh bone in the process. ”Most people recover from hip replacement with the same leg they started with, but mine was on its maiden voyage, longer now but unschooled, and I couldn't go far without muscle spasm or fatigue.”

    Friends rally around, both to feed Caldwell and to take care of Tula; she attributes this partly to having neither partner nor offspring, so her friends feel confident that their help is actually needed. Her rehab is both exceptionally painful and grueling, but within a year she is both moving faster and standing more upright than she has in years.

    As always, Caldwell is as wise as she is tough. ”Real change, though, is forgiving enough to take a little failure, strong enough to take despair in small doses. The ocean liner turns two degrees: different destination. You just don't drink for one day. Don't take the bait, load the gun, say the stupid thing. Do make the phone call, throw away the shoes that hurt. Just rest a little and then move another few inches down the path.”


    So must we all, and a sled dog at your side just might help.

Published by e-mail, June 1, 2020