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

and lift him back up. He would try again and fall again. It was the only way to learn how to do it. It was “a bizarre … system of muscular checks and balances that could not be taught,” wrote a man who went through the same ordeal. “The body had to learn this on its own through days and days of trial and error.”

When Mrs. Lake was away, FDR was supposed to rest. Instead, he often kept exercising. When she returned, he would talk at length about the methods he was thinking up. “He has all sort of new ideas for developing his muscles,” Mrs. Lake told Dr. Lovett, “and I have to discourage him periodically, as tactfully as possible, otherwise he does considerably more harm than good.”

“Counsel him not to try new methods,” Lovett replied, “but to trust us to give him the maximum dose that he can stand for … He cannot be too careful.”

But in his own mind, FDR disagreed. He could be too careful. Caution would never get him where he wanted to go.

As the winter of 1922 turned to spring, he was still telling friends he would be back in action very soon. He said his hips had recovered their normal strength, but he had less and less power the farther down his legs the muscles went, with about 15 percent of his normal strength in his toes. Still, he said, he was “gaining very surely.”

“This foolish infantile paralysis germ has not destroyed any of the muscles,” he told a friend, “and they are all coming back.”

Dr. Draper saw things differently.

“He is walking quite successfully [with crutches and braces],” he wrote to Dr. Lovett, “and seems to be gaining power in the hip muscles. The quadriceps are coming a little, but they are nothing to brag of yet. Below the knee I must say it begins to look rather hopeless…”

Chapter 6“EVERY AMERICAN STANDS”

Dr. Lovett suspected FDR “was going ahead a little too fast mentally.” Once again he wanted to see the patient firsthand, and he wanted him to spend time with his associate, Wilhelmine Wright, a pioneer in physiotherapy. So he asked FDR to make the trip to Boston from New York.

Roosevelt jumped at the invitation. He told a close friend that Dr. Lovett “wants me for about ten days in Boston to get the right kind of braces made and to have his famous Miss Wright teach me how to walk better, so I will be more independent during the summer.”

Wilhelmine Wright knew more than anyone in the world about how people with paralyzed limbs could regain the ability to move around. She had developed her methods year after year in her work with children and young adults recovering from polio. When it came to the basic skills of mobility, FDR was barely in kindergarten. Wright would put him through school.

Her method was to take the standard ways of getting around—standing up and sitting down, walking with crutches, going up and down stairs—and break them into small steps, each of them manageable if the patient would only think of them as isolated movements. Each step required practice and mastery. Then the steps could be merged into sustained mobility.

For a person in FDR’s condition, standing up had to be done like this:

You’re sitting in a heavy chair with arms, preferably a chair with its back pressed up against a wall. Your paralyzed legs are straight out in front of you. They’re locked in braces so you can’t bend at the knees. You hitch yourself up to the edge of the seat. Then, using both hands, you pick up your right leg and lift it across your left leg. Twisting hard to your left at the waist, you reach around to grab the arms of the chair with both hands. Then you flip your whole body around so that you’re in a push-up position against the chair. From there, Wright said, “it is an easy matter to push the hips back and straighten the body while balancing with the chair, and finally to place one crutch and then the other under the arms.”

Not that easy, maybe, but if you can manage it, you’ve stood up by yourself.

Standing upright, the patient could begin to learn how to walk with crutches. This was not easy at all. In fact, Wilhelmine Wright said crutch-walking with paralyzed legs was no easier than ice-skating or dancing, and like those activities, it took serious practice to do it well. (She knew boys who could speed along a city sidewalk just on crutches, without their feet touching the ground, then whip both legs and one crutch out to the side while spinning around a corner on the tip of the other crutch—an acrobatic feat that a gifted gymnast might be proud of.)

For the beginner, the method depended on how much strength you had above the waist. If you were weak in the shoulders, you had to use a slow, awkward “rocking chair” style of walking. For someone like Roosevelt, who was strong in the upper body, a better strategy was to swing the crutches out in front, then pull the legs forward with a little hop. This was faster and more graceful than the rocking-chair approach, but it still required careful coordination of arms and legs.

The hardest thing was to get up and down steps. A strong handrail was essential. You placed one crutch on the step in front of you, holding it steady with your armpit. You slid your other hand up the rail. Then you pushed up on the crutch side while pulling forward with the hand on the rail. That was one step. A typical staircase had thirteen more.

Miss Wright prescribed exercises, too—dozens of them.

For ten days FDR learned. Miss Wright was even more demanding than Mrs. Lake. If she said, “Do this,” and he said, “I can’t,” she replied, “You never have before, but you are going to.”

Dr. Lovett looked in from time