As a playwright, I was familiar with The Hero’s Journey.
Joseph Campbell’s seminal work was not just a blueprint for story structure, it was my religion. Just as my plays portrayed characters fighting unbeatable odds, my life also played out like a hero’s journey.
Like Frodo or Harry Potter (or, perhaps more like de Sade’s Juliette), I’d been a friendless, naive outcast tossed into a forbidding world. I’d proven my skills through a series of challenges, joined forces with a band-of-misfits, then taken on the world by making an independent web series about female sexual agency. When Unicornland beat all the odds — going viral and receiving glowing reviews from big media — I felt the music swell on my happy ending.
Four days later, I was paralyzed in the snow.
It was a holiday weekend. What little powder remained from the night before had, by 10 a.m., tamped down to ice. The runs were jammed with stop-and-go traffic. Factoring in the half-hour queue at the ski lift, there was time for one more run before lunch. I boarded the lift, and as I sailed through the sky, my legs swaying gently from the weight of the board, I scanned the terrain. Next to where I was headed, a double black diamond mogul run looked blissfully empty. A few snowboarders swooped down, leaping off jumps like dolphins in the surf. I’d never done a jump before, but “just do it” had been my mantra for the past two years. It was paying off; the drive to Big Bear was my first real vacation in ages, and — if Unicornland took off according to plan — would be my last for the foreseeable future. Eager to make the most of things, I leapt off the lift, shuffled my board up to the edge, then leaned into the tilt.
The next thing I knew, I was spread-eagled at the foot of a mogul.
I tried to sit up, but my legs didn’t move. Reaching for them, my hands felt the plastic slick of snow pants with no sensation beneath. A samaritan in a yellow hat glided over and knelt by my side. “I’m so stupid,” I told him. He took my hand, saying, “There’s a reason why they call it an accident.”
In the blur of the next few hours, I watched, awestruck as unfolding scenes vectored the tangent of reality away from normal. I heard myself pleading with the medics to call my fiancé just one more time, but there was nothing I could do to close the gap between us, now expanding to an impossible chasm as the blood wagon I was straitjacketed into hurtled down the mogul run. Then I was lying on a table in the medic’s bay, a glorified shack, making cavalier jokes while a staff of seeming teenagers performed basic triage. The sounds of a descending helicopter whipped the air above us; like a baby they pushed me head out. In the cabin, the EMTs snapped pictures of the view for me. They held the phone up to my face so I could see the snow-capped mountains we were — somehow — flying over. I told them to take a “before” picture of me and as we landed on the roof of Antelope Valley Hospital, I babbled an Oscar Speech of hammy thank yous.
Throughout these scenes, I was aware that this was no accident. It was an inciting incident: the start of the Journey every Hero must go on to reconcile their greatest self with their shadow. I knew, despite the pain and strangeness and suddenness of it all, that there was a lesson to be learned, and a moral or happy ending on the other side. Adrenalin held back the pain that was now shooting up and down my spine. My challenge, my moment, had finally come! All eyes on me, the heroine of the story.
The first thing that happens when you arrive at the ER with a spinal cord injury is a doctor sticks his finger in your ass. Dr. Farrukh, Antelope Valley’s premier neurosurgeon, was wearing a tux; he’d been paged over while dressing for a gala. Nurses rolled me gingerly to the side, and I closed my eyes and thought about the last time a man in a tux had stuck his finger in my ass. It was fairly recent.
“The bad news is, you have an unstable burst fracture at T12. We’ll need to do spinal fusion right away,” he said, snapping off the latex gloves. “The good news is, it’s incomplete.”
I didn’t know what “incomplete” meant. That there was good news was enough. The drugs took over. I passed out.
This is fine, right? Everything’s fine.
Six hours, a titanium implant, and two liters of transfused blood later, I awoke to tremendous noise and movement, certain the anesthetic had worn off and this was death. But no; the surgery was over, successful. I’d crossed the threshold into Act 1.
The room cleared, leaving my fiancé and I alone with our new reality. He’d endured his own literal midnight ride, calling all the hospitals in Southern California to locate me, then driving halfway across the state. Now we were reunited, and the fellowship was complete.
If a spinal cord injury is an insult to the body, it’s nothing compared to spinal fusion. More than the accident itself, I would need to recover from surgery. The internal map of my body had been dammed, dug up, and rerouted. It would have to learn everything from scratch the way horses are broken — through punishment. For now, it trusted nothing and no one — not the nurses, not the drugs, and definitely not me. I was desperate to sleep, but my body tormented me with pain and — when I dared to dampen the pain with morphine — spasms, constipation, cottonmouth, cramps, and hallucinations.
“Incomplete,” it turned out, is the best outcome for a broken back. It meant that the spinal cord had not been completely severed, allowing for the possibility of recovery of function. Once I knew that, I knew I’d make a full recovery. I’d bike and fuck and shower standing up and fix myself sandwiches at the kitchen counter again. Besides chocolate — and the presence of Philippe and family — my comfort was knowing that each day took me further from the snow and closer to recovery. But, as in any well-wrought hero’s journey, time was not enough. There was work to do.
Sade was the only physical therapist assigned to the ICU. Unlike the strapping doctors with their manicured rows of teeth, Patagonia windbreakers, and prolonged eye contact, she tiptoed quietly around my bedside. “Can you feel this?” she asked, grazing a fingertip against my toe. “How about now? …Or now?” Her fingers crept up my quads, past my hips. “Now,” I blurted out when she reached my waist. She frowned and went even quieter.
The confident doctors had encouraged my optimism and praised my confidence. They didn’t seem overly concerned that sensation had not returned to my legs after four days in the ICU. But Sade’s face said what the doctors’ breezy reassurance masked; a glass half full is also half empty.
Birthday celebrations made possible by a grab bar from Sade.
My dad arrived that morning from London with a suitcase full of Cadbury’s for the nurses and a grim outlook informed by — what else? — a tragic backstory. Having raised my brother, a wheelchair user with Cerebral Palsy, my father was fluent in the medical-industrial patois of hope and fear; the pie-in-the-sky promises and contextual qualifiers. He brushed off “incomplete” like a fly, observing that the offensive had already begun. Thirty-six hours after the accident, we’d received a $65K bill for the helicopter transport, and an ominous Statement of Notice indicating claims had been made by an out-of-network doctor. Optimism, he believed, was a trap set up to engender dependence. The only remedy for unreal expectations was facts, starting with a clear-eyed view of the Grand Deception. Dad tasked my fiancé and I with building a spreadsheet to track provider services.
On day five in the ICU, Sade arrived with a metal triangle. Clipping a carabiner to the frame above the gurney, she demonstrated an underhand grip of the grab-bar, and how I should activate the shoulder system to pull up. Now I could shift position without calling a nurse. Our time was up, but she hadn’t even asked about feeling in my legs.
The next morning, I twitched my right toe.
During the following 24 hours, my legs tingled and spasmed. While we celebrated, a nurse dropped off a stack of pamphlets for rehabilitation hospitals that looked more like resorts, with palm tree-lined drives and state-of-the-art facilities and prices to match. That my condition had improved enough to transition to rehab was good news, but it also represented a more insurmountable monster ahead: Money. More Statements of Notice had arrived, suggesting my insurance was stretched thin as dental floss. Discussions dissolved into shouting matches (Dad), cynical asides (my fiancé), and uncontrollable weeping (me). We were still arguing the next day when Nancy the hospital administrator strolled in, her Chico’s blazer encasing sun-leathered cleavage with a chunky gold pendant nestled on top like the cherry on a sundae.
Nancy called my father “Dad” and my fiancé “Handsome” She had fluffy hair, a tooth-achingly sweet smile, and a bracelet with jangling charms for each of her grandchildren. It was as if the hospital had back-engineered a drone for bedside manner; warm and upbeat, with shoulders perfectly proportioned for crying on. We knew better than to trust Nancy, but we needed her, and she knew it.
Nancy settled into the armchair at my bedside, apparently at ease in the humid tension of the room. When my fiancé held away the paperwork, she smiled, breezily guesstimating numbers that bullseyed the ones haunting our brains. She asked for our shortlist of clinics, and after a pause — in which none of us could think of a decent excuse not to, or an alternative solution — –we spilled. She didn’t need to ask for my insurance; it was embedded in a hashtag on my wrist band.
“Leave it all to me,” Nancy said. We winced. She would return, we knew, with some agonizing Sophie’s Choice scenario. A maximal spread of options that was objectively awful, but the best we could afford. And we’d then be left to make the math work.
An hour later, she returned. I’d been offered a place at Casa Colina, our third choice and the most expensive, for only three weeks. After that, I’d have to pay out of pocket... but before our sighs got too deep, Nancy closed the curtain, huddled in, and lowered her voice to deliver a game plan. In the next 45 minutes, she reshuffled 20 years of expertise into a precise roadmap for my recovery that took traffic and timing into consideration, while avoiding all toll roads and speeding traps: after three weeks at Casa Colina Hospital, I’d be eligible for their residential Transitional Living Facility, then could petition for a further six months of treatment from Rehab Without Walls after returning home. She handed us a stack of application forms, tabbed by submission dates, with notes penciled into the margin suggesting language to include. We relaxed. Before she left, I pressed the last box of Cadbury’s Roses into her hands. She leaned in for a hug, then — with a subtle glance at my father and fiancé — whispered, “If they give you any more trouble, send for me.”
On the day of my scheduled transfer, Sade stopped by after visiting hours were over. “I brought you something,” she said, reaching into her backpack. I lifted up the bedsheet and she handed me a warm bundle of fresh resistance bands. It was against hospital policy to give them out. But she was out of her scrubs — wearing a wifebeater that showed off epic half-sleeve tattoos, with her hair up revealing shaved sides — so the rules no longer applied. Her slight frame and wavering gaze had made me nervous at first. Now I recognized the light, agile poise of a ninja.
On my first morning at Casa Colina, Nurse Suzanne pushed the curtain open at 7:30 a.m. I’d been awake for hours, ready for the promised 90 minutes of physical therapy, the first step on the road back to normal.
“Actually, today you have Spinal Cord Injury Survivors Group. It only meets once a month. You lucked out!”
Spinal Cord Injury Survivors Group? No thank you. Considering I could only just wiggle my toes, three weeks seemed barely enough time for the full recovery of my hero’s journey. I was here for intense physical therapy, not to make friends.
Suzanne said there were no PTs available to work with me that day. Due to my midweek transfer, I wasn’t on rotation until the following Monday. But she insisted the group would be therapeutic in other ways. “You’ll meet others in your position.”
My position? Hadn’t she read my chart? I was incomplete. I was going to make a full recovery and this all would be nothing but a memory. But it was off to group or lie in bed all day.
As one of the few inpatients at SCI Survivor’s Group, I got a front row seat to the saddest parade in Southern California. The members were almost exclusively men, largely boomers in t-shirts bearing motorcycle brands. And there were a lot of them. Filling the room took almost a half hour. Then introductions began. Mike, Bob, Mark, Tom, Frank and every other single-syllable white dude name followed a script that started with an accident doing <insert daredevil stunt> that led to the OR for a spinal fusion at <insert vertebrae number>. Each finished their monologue with expressions of gratitude to <insert name of long-suffering partner> and big dreams for the future.
Every last one of them was incomplete.
This was the longest I’d sat upright in almost two weeks, and my back was searing with pain. I flashed Suzanne a look, and she jumped to her feet just as all eyes swiveled to me in my Nasty Woman t-shirt, brace, and hospital socks. I mumbled my inserts to the script, but when I got to the part about how my injury was incomplete, I choked.
Suzanne grabbed my chair handles, but the room was too full to sneak round the back. She had no choice but to push me into the center of the circle, through the laser beams of 30 pairs of eyes.
In that room full of hopeless cases pitifully clinging to hope, I realized the happy ending I’d imagined, this promise of “incomplete,” was less a chalice than an empty trinket. I was a victim, but not in the way I’d thought. There are no accidents, only foolish acts. I was no better than the rest of these idiots, who’d been high on ego and taken youth and health for granted. Nothing had “happened” to me. I would never walk again, and I had brought it on myself.
Back in bed, I stared at my legs, skeletal and wrapped pathetically in compression socks and braces. I willed my right leg to move. It tensed, shook spastically, then collapsed. I grabbed my thigh and pulled the knee bent; as soon as I let go, the leg splayed open, lifeless. I’d never appreciated how heavy my legs were. The weight of them apart tore at my hips. When lying on my side, the knee of one leg seemed to crush the other. In the 10 days since the accident, my comfort had been the knowledge that each passing moment took me further from the snow. Now I realized the only thing I was getting further from was life as I had known it.
Then the door opened, and a stream of Norse giants entered.
My new roommate, Toni, had moved in while I was at group. Her extended family had arrived to get her settled. I tried to will myself invisible, but every one of them stared until I met their gaze. They proffered hands and hugs. They were despicably friendly. The doctor entered last. He closed the curtain partition. Then he began to talk:
At 47 years old, Toni suffered a stroke due to undiagnosed hypertension. She was found unconscious on the kitchen floor by one of her teenage sons, and rushed into the OR for emergency brain surgery. By removing damaged sections of her brain, surgeons saved her life. Her prognosis was uncertain, the doctor now explained. She had lost her entire memory and recognized no one. She was unable to walk, speak, comprehend, and would likely never regain those full functions. She was incontinent, and would require round-the-clock care.
While Toni’s family pressed the doctor, I tried to quiet heaving sobs. The unfairness of me, a total stranger, being privy to such an intimate diagnosis flooded me with rage. The random cruelty of the cause of her loss of dignity, and the injustice of her lying unconscious while her family stood around deciding her future filled me with pity.
Where was Toni in her hero’s journey? Was this her Dark Night of the Soul? Her Whiff of Death? The cardinal rule of storytelling is that heroes show agency, even in the pits of despair. Undiagnosed hypertension had written Toni out of her own story.
The men in Spinal Cord Injury Survivor’s group had seemed deluded, a bunch of cliches or statistics. According to my logic, they weren’t heroes either. But when their situations had resonated uncomfortably with mine, I’d balked. Could it be that I was no hero? Or worse, that the accident was just that, with no meaning attached?
That night I allowed myself to consider the unthinkable — that I might never recover. I thought about all the things I might never do again: No more biking across LA to general meetings or dinner dates or stand-up classes. No more strutting around in seven-inch heels at sex parties. No more popping out for groceries, or a late-night gym session. No more being noticed for my body’s proximity to the ideal. There were other, more nebulous possibilities: Philippe might leave me, I might have to move back in with my parents, I might never have children... As I considered the array of this new life, I wondered, what was so heroic about returning to my life of privilege? Who was I benefitting, besides myself? Of course I wanted to walk again. Anyone would. But if I didn’t, did that mean it was game over? I had no right to write off the SCI survivors, or Toni, and I had no right to see myself as a champion for doing what they could not. The hero’s journey wasn’t just a rubric for living the dream; it had been a way to make myself exceptional. To prioritize my story, romanticize my mistakes as personal growth, and hold the rest of the world at arm’s length.
There was one thing I could do: close the book. If I wasn’t a hero and this wasn’t my journey, there was nothing to prove. To go through life thinking everything is connected in a puzzle only you can solve is to miss the millions of pieces that don’t fit the story. I stopped trying to solve my puzzle, and learned to just be. I cried when I was sad, laughed when I was happy, cooed at the baby hummingbirds who emerged, bedraggled and bobbing, from a tiny nest in a bush outside the inpatient gym. I binged al pastor tacos, entire duty-free boxes of Cadbury’s chocolate, and extra large strawberry milkshakes without a second thought, took drugs when I hurt, slept when I was tired. I canceled all the PR meetings for Unicornland and stopped thinking about the things I was supposed to be doing to fight for my big, important career. There was no fighting, only gratitude.
From there it became easy to do what I was told. There were difficult, humbling days of reckoning with my weakness. But these taught me to see the difference between pain that means stop and pain that means growth. And not getting consumed with a sense of shame or self-pity opened my eyes to a lot of other people. Like Dana, still paraplegic 18 months after her injury, despite daily hours-long prayer sessions. Because her husband faithfully drove out every weekend from Long Beach, she didn’t dare tell him she was giving up. She never told me either, but it showed up in the way she resisted physical therapy. Like Kelly, trapped in the hospital for 15 years despite full functions, prohibited from leaving due to a catch-22 in his worker’s comp. Like Michelle, the brilliant young PT who fought for respect from the peacocking neurosurgeons while simultaneously navigating a heartbreaking fertility journey. Like Richard, the “crazy” aggressive and volatile client whose caustic throwaways and epic tantrums illustrated how we all felt. Like Maryanne, the Pulitzer-nominated novelist who used up all her energy at lunch straining to think up the perfect simile for her traumatized brain (“like lace”). Like Suzanne, a Nurse Tech with a natural gift for therapy, whose $13-an-hour job would never cover tuition for a doctorate. Like Desiré, the good Christian outpatient whose miraculous recovery from a C-spine injury had become hospital lore, but who still joined us at the gym every day (I suspect) out of loneliness. Once I got out of seeing myself as the hero of the story, things got a lot easier. A lot less painful. Fun, occasionally. Frankly, kind of lovely.
Going through life as the hero of my own story made everyone else, by default, a supporting player. By shifting focus away from my journey, I was able to settle into the fabric of a much richer story — that of all the incredible people I met along the way, and how meaningful was the time we spent healing together.
And then, somehow, I got better. On April 7th — two months after being airlifted to the ER — I walked out of Casa Colina and into the front seat of a rented Mini Cooper.
In the months and years since, I’ve grappled with the question of why I walked out of rehab on fully functioning legs when others could not, and the only answer I’ve come up with is dumb luck. Sure there was a lot of hard work involved, a lot of following instructions, but recovering from a spinal cord injury is, like being a professional writer, simply an area of life where one can do everything right and get nowhere.
I no longer see my life, or anyone’s as a hero’s journey. I no longer believe we are agents of our own fate. The people we meet are not mere champions, villains, or supporting players; their presence and influence in our lives is more heroic for its unexpected grace. We must not take our limited agency for granted, nor fall into despair at the randomness of life. Instead, we must do it all: follow instructions, connect with others, listen, participate, play…and with a little luck we’ll make it out of the snow.
