Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap

Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap

by Judy Goldman
Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap

Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap

by Judy Goldman

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Overview

Novelist and poet Judy Goldman's inspiring account of the mishap that left her husband paralyzed, how it tested their marriage, and their struggle to regain their "normal" life.

When Judy Goldman’s husband of almost four decades has a routine spinal injection to alleviate back pain, he is instantly paralyzed from the waist down—a phenomenon no doctor can explain or undo. She’s forced to take over, navigating the byzantine medical world they suddenly find themselves in. Her husband is forced to give in. This is the starting point for Together, which looks at the changes every couple faces—the slow, ordinary ones brought about by time and the sudden, dramatic ones that take us by surprise. Identities shift; roles switch. How do we adjust?  How do we let go of the if-onlys? Together is a deeply honest story about the life we dream of and the life we make—an elegant and empathetic meditation on what happens to love, over time and all at once.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780525563136
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 01/21/2020
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 1,113,833
Product dimensions: 5.15(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.82(d)

About the Author

JUDY GOLDMAN is the author of two memoirs, two novels, and two collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in USA Today, Washington Post, Real Simple, Literary Hub, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Ohio Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She received the Hobson Award for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters, the Fortner Writer and Community Award for "outstanding generosity to other writers and the larger community," the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Beverly D. Clark Author Award from Queens University.

Read an Excerpt

1

Henry and I are at the kitchen table, eating breakfast. Grape-Nuts, sliced banana, milk for him. Oatmeal for me, with walnuts chopped small, fresh blueberries, and dried cranberries. Mugs of coffee. I did not always drink coffee. My feeling was that it never tasted as good as it smelled. But with enough half and half, I like it now. Funny about how we describe ourselves. One minute, we’re: Oh, I’m not a coffee drinker. Never touch it. The next, we’re solidly in another camp: Have to have coffee every morning. Who we are can flip like that. The details always shifting. Henry picks up the Sports section, folds it in half, then half again, pushes the rest of The Charlotte Observer to the far side of the table. I’ve got the Living section. It’s mid-February 2006. Outside: wintry and windy. And wet.

“Doesn’t this sound like a good idea?” he says, pointing to an article I can’t read from where I’m sitting. “A nonsurgical procedure for back pain. Done by a physiatrist.”

“What’s a physiatrist?” I ask, scooting my chair closer so that I can read even the fine print.

“According to the article, physiatrists are MDs,” he says. “Apparently, they treat spinal problems.”

Six years ago, Henry had surgery for spinal stenosis, which helped some. But his back has never really stopped hurting. He’s stiff when he gets out of bed in the morning. Can’t stand for long, finds a chair pretty quickly wherever he happens to be. He lives a normal life, though. A normal life with backaches. He’s so athletic, what he’d really like is to be able to jog again, play racquetball, tennis.

Yes, I say, that does sound like a good idea.

The physiatrist tells Henry he believes he can help. From what I can understand, he’ll use fluoroscopy for guidance while he injects steroids and an anesthetic into the epidural space—between the spine and the spinal cord. The procedure will take about thirty minutes, followed by maybe forty-five minutes of recovery time. Henry will be monitored for an additional fifteen to twenty minutes, then discharged to go home. An hour and a half—total! Compare this to hours on an operating table, days in the hospital, the long recuperation that back surgery entails. This injection is so common, it’s given to women during childbirth. The physiatrist explains that an epidural steroid injection can be highly effective because it delivers pain relief directly to the source of the problem. He recommends two injections, spaced three weeks apart; he needs to inject two different areas. As with all invasive procedures, there are risks. Generally, though, the risks are few and tend to be rare: headache, infection, bleeding, nerve damage.

Henry signs the consent form.

A week later, we report to the hospital outpatient clinic for the first epidural. Afterward, Henry’s right leg is numb. Very little feeling. The physiatrist, a tall fellow with a friendly face and thick, hay-colored hair anyone would envy, says something like “The numbness is a great sign! It means the epidural is working!”

Henry’s leg is so numb he can barely walk. He leans on me as I help him from the car into our house and to our bed. He goes right to sleep, which is unusual for him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him take a nap. The little bit of walking he did completely exhausted him. I keep checking the handout: If numbness persists longer than eight hours, call the office. Every hour, I wake Henry to ask about the numbness. Every hour, he says his leg is still numb. Then he drifts back off. I don’t relax my shoulders for a minute. The eighth hour, I have my hand on the phone, ready to dial. I ask him one last time. All feeling has returned. No need to call. My shoulders relax.

His second epidural is scheduled for three weeks from now.

But first our vacation, planned months ago, on the French side of the island of St. Martin. The romance of spending long days in two chaises pulled close, our bare toes touching, how warm we are from the sun, lost in our books. Less than a hundred feet away, our lunch place juts out over the sea, the smoky grill, the smell of fresh-caught fish cooking.

Evenings, we stroll the rutted mile from our small resort to the row of Caribbean-colored, gingerbread-cottage restaurants. Henry’s back is still hurting, so we have to stop every now and then for him to stretch—backward, forward, bending way over, hands on knees—but a little pain is not going to keep him from what he wants to do. The moon’s soft light catches the sea grape leaves all around us. We debate the menus posted on the little front porches. Our main concern: Are we in the mood for mussels or sole?

Seven days after St. Martin, we leave early for our one-forty-five appointment at the same hospital outpatient clinic as before. It’s one of those golden North Carolina days that always make me wonder why anyone would ever want to live anywhere else. Pure sunlight, air fragrant.

Henry checks in. There are so many people here, the waiting room feels tight. The only available chairs together are catty-corner, a square table in between. But no sooner do we sit down than a nurse comes to take Henry back. She has an air of efficiency about her—the way she holds her head and her shoulders, her sensible nurse shoes. I didn’t know anybody still wore those. She says she’ll call for me in a few minutes, after they get him ready; I can keep him company while he waits for the doctor. I pick up People magazine and settle in, even though I don’t recognize the names of any of the celebrities.

I glance at my watch. How did it get to be three o’clock? Why aren’t they coming for me?

At three-thirty, a nurse—not the same one who took him back, but a shiny-faced young woman, perky, smiley—appears and says that my husband has had the epidural.

“Oh,” I say, “I thought somebody was going to come get me so I could be with him before—”

“Well,” she says, “we’re real busy today, and things got sorta hectic back there, and then the doctor was all of a sudden ready for him around three o’clock, and we never had a chance to come get you.”

I walk behind her down the long hall. She’s repeating, brightly, “Your husband’s verrry numb! Verrry numb!” as though she’s marveling over some unusual turn of events, more amusing, really, than anything to worry about.

“He’s numb?” I ask, trying to match her brightness, wondering why my little laugh is coming out shaky.

She stops outside a closed door. Pauses. Opens it. I follow her in.

When she moves to the side and Henry is in full view, I see that he’s flat on his back on a gurney, a sheet pulled up around his neck, the way you’d tuck in a child. His expression is contorted. His whole face an agonized flinch. As though he took the world head‑on and lost.

“Judy,” he whispers, his eyes clutching at mine, “I can’t feel a thing from my waist down. I can’t move my legs.”

I turn to the nurse. “Where’s the doctor?” My voice rises with each word, going someplace totally unfamiliar. “Does the doctor know?”

“Well,” she says, “not exactly.”

“He needs to see this!” My voice verges on shrill. My hand brushes the air. “Go. Get the doctor. Please! Ask him to come in here!”

She’s backing out of the room.

I’m shivering.

 

I sit down beside Henry, put my hand on his arm. I don’t know where to touch him, if it’s even okay to touch him.

“Tell me,” I say.

He says that when the doctor was giving the injection, he felt severe pain. He must have groaned, because the doctor asked him, Are you okay? He told the doctor, No, I’m not okay. I’m in excruciating pain. The doctor said, We’re almost done. Then he finished the injection.

Henry tells me that his back, where the needle went in, still hurts.

 

Maybe it’s not as bad as I’m terrified that it is. Maybe he’s really all right. Maybe I can help him be all right. Maybe what’s been taken away can be brought back. I just have to figure this out. But I need to hurry. Before it—whatever it is—locks into place.

I loosen the sheet around his feet.

“Can you feel this?” I scratch his bare toes.

“No,” he says. “Not at all.” He sounds as though he’s grown tired somewhere deep in his body.

“Can you wiggle your toes?”

“I’m trying. Are they moving?”

They aren’t. I wiggle them myself, to get them started. But then, nothing.

“Can you flex this foot? Or this one?”

“I can’t make either one move.”

“How about your leg?” I tap his knee through the sheet. “Can you lift your leg? Can you lift it just a little? This one? Or this one?”

“I’m trying, I’m trying as hard as I can.”

I stroke the tops of his feet, then the soles, with my fingers. For a second, I think how another time, another place, I might run my hand down his calf to his foot. Maybe in the morning, on my way to the bathroom, rounding the bed, I might reach under the sheet and touch the bottom of his foot. That careless, offhanded thing married people do.

“What about this?” I ask, massaging his ankles. “Can you feel me doing this?”

“I can’t.”

Now I’m reaching under the sheet and rubbing his calves.

No.

I reach farther and touch his knees, thighs, groin, buttocks.

No, no, no, no.

He feels nothing.

I feel everything.

 

One minute you’re complaining that the zinc-based sunscreen you’re supposed to wear in the Caribbean goes on like Elmer’s Glue. The next, you’re Googling paralysis. Everything is okay. Then nothing is. That thin line. How a brushfire can erupt on a perfectly sunny, clear-skied day. How your life can be taken right out of your hands.

 

2

Barrel-chested, bruiser Henry—I always loved that he was so big and strong and brave. Sensitive and kindhearted, yes (my friends say he’s the most “evolved” of all our husbands, the one most likely to join a cluster of women talking, the one most likely to get up at night with a fussy baby), but if you met him, your first impression would be sturdiness. Sturdy is what I must have been after when I married him. Not consciously, of course. But it was probably on my checklist.

As a child, I was slight, not athletic, not known for physical strength, not brave. My grandpa called me Flimely, a Yiddish word meaning little bird. That image of me stuck. I was sweet. Demure. Too small to be taken seriously. Or, at least, that’s how I saw myself. Everyone else saw me that way, too. My sister, Brenda, three years older, was the strong one. It’s how she defined herself. The rest of us believed deeply in that definition, too. I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t big. (Was she born five-eight?)

My mother rewarded me for being me with all the attention in the world. Maybe because I’d nearly died when I was born. Maybe because I was the baby of the family, youngest of three, an accident she forever after expressed gratitude for. (“What would we do without our Judy?”)

We continued to see me as a little bird, even as I was growing up, cutting away, becoming independent, actually showing strength. Then, like many women of my generation, I married and made myself at home in the role of Looked-After Wife. I had a husband. I felt safe. I think I probably saw myself as lucky to snag a man so brawny.

In any marriage, one person becomes the ____________ one (fill in the blank), and the other person becomes something in tandem. (Similar to my sister and me.) Henry would be the protector. I’d be the protected. Husbands and wives (like siblings) assume they do not possess the central quality the other possesses. If Henry is strong, I must not be. He can shield me forever. I did the same thing Patty Hearst did—married my bodyguard. Or maybe I married a person who would join me in re-creating the family I grew up in.

 

3

A knock on the door. The physiatrist bursts in.

“I gave you the Saddam shot!” he says to Henry, with great enthusiasm. His face, his gesturing, everything about him is as spirited as the nurse who brought me into this room.

“What’s a Saddam shot?” I ask, hoping his answer will explain everything—the look on Henry’s face, the feeling that there’s a cold hand on the back of my neck.

“I gave him the mother of all shots! Very potent!” he says. His smile is wide, natural. Another time, another place, I might say he’s charming. “In fact, I gave him two shots!” Later I’ll see there are two small Band-Aids on Henry’s back, covering two injection sites.

“But he can’t move his legs.” That’s me, trying to ask a million questions but not knowing how to ask even one. “What if he doesn’t—?”

“Your husband is going to be all right,” he says. “It’ll just be a matter of time.”

“He’ll be okay?”

“He’ll be fine.”

I glance over at Henry. He’s not saying a word. His expression is flat and abstracted. As if there’s nothing in the conversation he can grab hold of. This husband of mine, who’s usually so attentive, so engaged in talk, who could go on and on for hours with our daughter about the quickest way to drive from our house to Costco without hitting a light, who could talk for hours with anyone about anything that interests him (and most things do interest him)—where is he now?

“Don’t you worry,” the doctor is saying. “We’ve seen this before.”

A little more back and forth between the two of us. And he leaves the room. It’s four o’clock. Two and a half hours since we arrived for the appointment.

Our same nurse—the perky one—breezes back in, carrying paper-wrapped tubes and instruments in the fold of her arms. She catheterizes Henry, gives him a shot of Demerol to “take the edge off,” leaves again, then almost immediately rushes back in.

“Oh, the doctor ordered an MRI,” she says to Henry, “but the MRI machine is in use, and anyway”—she turns to me—“you’re going to have to fill out a bunch of forms before we can even call a transporter, so it’ll be a while before your husband can have the scan.”

“A transporter?”

“Somebody who’ll take him down to Imaging.”

Reading Group Guide

The questions and discussion topics that follow—provided courtesy of the author—are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about Together, Judy Goldman’s inspiring account of the medical mishap that forever changed her marriage—and her life.

1. Together is actually a braid. One thread is the chronology of a medical trauma. The other, the history of a marriage. Which thread engaged you more? Why?

2. Judy’s sister used to tell her children that choosing a spouse was the most important decision they would make in their lives. Do you agree? Judy and Henry got engaged on their third date. How wise (or foolish) was this quick decision?

3. Judy writes: “In any marriage, one person becomes the ____________ one (fill in the blank), and the other person becomes something in tandem… Henry would be the protector. I’d be the protected.” Then, Judy’s and Henry’s roles switched. What has been your experience with you and your partner slipping into each other’s role?

4. Did you think the hospital and rehab scenes were realistic? Have you had similar experiences navigating the medical world? How important is it for a patient to have an advocate?

5. Some readers believe that Judy’s anger over her husband’s medical mishap was justified and appropriate. Others believe she wasn’t angry enough. Which camp do you fall into?

6. Judy writes: “When concerns are immediate and one’s world is confined, the commonplace can feel almost sacred. There are many honeyed moments…” When you’ve faced personal trauma, did you suddenly find yourself having “honeyed moments”? Did the story told in Together feel inspiring to you?

7. Were you surprised that one of the reasons Judy wrote this book was to figure out how to forgive—the physiatrist, her husband, herself? Which do you believe would be most difficult? What has been your experience with needing to forgive someone when it wasn’t easy to forgive?

8. Judy writes about “young love turning into old love.” What is the difference between young love and old love? Did you see evidence of this gradual unfolding in the scenes from Judy and Henry’s marriage? Have you and your partner undergone such a change over the years? Have you witnessed such a change in your parents?

9. When Judy worries about the things she didn’t get around to teaching her children, she quotes Erma Bombeck: “I’ve seen mothers fight to keep from running down the aisle at their daughter’s or son’s wedding, screaming, ‘Wait! I’m not finished with you yet!’” Do parents ever truly believe their child is ready for the world?

10. Do you find memoir or fiction more compelling? Why?

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