Master of His Fate by James Tobin (free ebooks for android txt) 📗

But then she became suspicious.

As January turned to February, she noticed that FDR would seem to make progress for a day or two. Then she would arrive the next morning to find the patient tired and cranky, with his ankles strangely swollen.

She called in Dr. Draper and told him what was happening.

Have you been overworking the patient? Draper asked.

Absolutely not, Mrs. Lake replied.

They were puzzled.

So Mrs. Lake did “a little private detective work” with Nurse Rockey, who attended FDR at night, when Mrs. Lake was gone.

Mrs. Lake asked the nurse if Mr. Roosevelt had been exercising at night.

Yes, he had, Miss Rockey replied.

“She remarked with some pride,” Mrs. Lake wrote Dr. Lovett, “that she was doing some ‘quite heavy manipulation’ (her own words) on the patient at night.”

Mrs. Lake went straight back to FDR, who admitted under questioning that he had asked Nurse Rockey to administer heavy Swedish massage to his legs—“to build up the muscles!” he told her. This was exactly the sort of deep-muscle massage the doctors had forbidden.

Mrs. Lake scolded him. Didn’t he remember that massage could damage his fragile muscles at this point? He must take things slowly. Didn’t he want to learn how to walk with crutches? He would never do so if he overworked his muscles.

Of course, he said. He was sorry.

“I am getting on extremely well,” he wrote a friend just then, “though it seems slow, and I am not out of the house yet. However, as complete and permanent recovery is promised in a few months I am not worrying.”

Dr. Lovett came from Boston again. He saw something Mrs. Lake had missed. Yes, as she feared, FDR was developing contractures in the hamstring muscles. But Lovett also saw that where the legs met the upper body, muscles were hardening into contractures that could leave FDR permanently bent at the waist.

So Lovett brought in a specialist, Dr. Arthur Krida, who encased Roosevelt in rock-hard plaster casts from his waist to his ankles, one for each leg, with hinges at the joints.

Now FDR had to lie on his bed with his lower body absolutely rigid, twenty-four hours a day. Every day, Dr. Krida came back to the house. Every day, he would pound wedges into the joints of the casts. The farther he pounded the wedge, the more the contracting muscles stretched.

With no way to exercise his legs, FDR’s fears rose to the surface. He asked Mrs. Lake, With all this time lying still, won’t I lose all the strength I’ve regained?

For two weeks he lay entombed in the plaster casts. Finally Dr. Krida cut them off. The muscles had stretched. The danger of contracture was past, and the patient had not lost much strength.

Now, Dr. Lovett said, it was time to get Roosevelt up on his feet. The next goal was to learn the difficult art of walking with crutches.

Of all the mammals, only humans stand upright on two feet. It is one of the traits that define us as a species. It seems easy to most of us only because we’re used to it. We learned it as toddlers. But we forget the weeks of trial and error.

The apparently simple act of standing is actually a highly complicated effort requiring the coordination of nerves, muscles, and bones. The brain of a person getting up from a chair sends millions of signals through the motor nerves to the toes, feet, ankles, calves, thighs, buttocks, lower back, and abdomen, all the muscles moving in harmony to keep one hundred or two hundred pounds safely balanced on two loosely jointed stalks. The muscles have to be loose and limber enough to allow the legs to bend at the ankles, knees, hips, and waist—then strong enough to tighten in an instant, holding the bones in a straight line, locked at the joints.

Paralysis in any of the complex muscles of the legs makes this a mess.

That’s how it was with FDR. The doctors and nurses tried once or twice to get him upright. But his knees and ankles simply collapsed under his weight.

So back came Dr. Krida to the house on East Sixty-Fifth Street. He took careful measurements of FDR’s legs, ankles, and feet. In a few days he returned with a set of metal braces that weighed about ten pounds apiece. The braces were fastened to FDR’s legs with leather straps and metal buckles. They extended from just above his waist down to his heels, with hinges at the knees. When the hinges were locked, FDR’s whole lower body was held as stiff and straight as a tree trunk.

The nurses lifted him to his feet. They inserted a crutch under each armpit. With a nurse on each side, he stood up for the first time in half a year.

It was strangely frightening to attempt this feat, once so simple. Another young man recovering from polio—a less severe case than FDR’s, with only one leg paralyzed—wrote: “It depressed me to find it so difficult … I had not known that the weakness of my hips, only slightly involved, would so completely destroy my feeling of security. Even with my back to a wall, my brace locked at the knee, I would feel brittle and vulnerable, at least ten feet tall; thinking that if I fell I would shatter on the floor like a tower of blocks.”

FDR wouldn’t shatter, but falls were definitely dangerous, especially with braces. Typically, a person who starts to fall goes into a quick crouch, bending at the knees to cushion the impact. Not so with FDR. If he went down, he would go straight down, like a tree sawed through at the ground.

He practiced just standing up with the braces holding his legs straight, trying to keep his balance. Then he began to make jerky stiff-legged movements across the floor, just a few inches at a time. Sometimes he would start to fall. The nurses would catch him