I realized I was the one who needed help. That I was the one who’d sustained the injury. The one who was screaming.”
He picked up the glass of iced water sitting on the desk of the chief of staff and took a drink. “The hell of it was, even after I knew I’d been hit, I still had to be told. My body may have known it, but my mind wouldn’t accept that my body gave in so easily. All I wanted to do was get back out there in the field and do what I was supposed to do, but I couldn’t move, except for wiggling around in the dirt. And the blood … there was so much of it, but it couldn’t have been mine. There was nothing inside me that allowed for the possibility that I was wounded. After all, I was the medic, a healer who’d volunteered to be there, not a soldier in the real sense of the word.
“Sure, I’d had my combat training, but my job was to put bodies back together, not to become one of those bodies. But I was, and I think I realized it for the first time—really realized it—when they brought the stretcher out for me. The people who worked for me were there to carry me off the battlefield.”
“And how did that make you feel?” Dr. Jason Lewis asked. Jason was a kind man, about Marc’s age—thirty-six—with thinning blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Whereas Marc was bulky and dark. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark expression that belied nothing but torture.
“How did I feel? I felt angry as hell at first. Like, how dare they do that to me! Don’t they know that I fix everybody, including the people we’re fighting?”
“But IEDs are impersonal. They’re just meant to destroy whatever gets in their way.”
“Tell me about it,” Marc muttered.
“I don’t suppose I really have to,” the doctor replied. “So what happened after they came to rescue you?”
“They gave me a phone, told me to call anybody I liked. Girlfriend, parent, my brother, who was out there on that battlefield somewhere, trying to save lives.”
“What for?”
“That’s a protocol when they think you’re going to die. I had a back full of shrapnel, nails, God only knows what else sticking in my spine. It’s a bad sign, with so much bleeding, and I was bleeding out. My body was trying to die. There was so much trauma to my spine they didn’t see how I’d survive it.”
“But you obviously didn’t die.”
“Too much self-righteous indignation, I suppose. You go through these stages like after a death—denial, anger, all that crap. And I went straight to anger …”
“And stayed there?”
“A lot of the time, yes.” He shrugged. “Don’t like it, don’t want to be there, but it happens, and that’s something you need to know if you hire me.”
“Do you really think that’s the right attitude for someone who’s applying to head one of the veteran outreach rehab programs?”
“Do you really think it’s not?” he challenged the doctor. “Anger turned inward can be harmful, I suppose. But when you turn it outward on your situation, you can make it work for you. The angrier I got, the harder I worked. The harder I worked, the better I healed.”
“Did it really work for you, Dr. Rousseau? I know you were a top-notch surgeon, and those days are now behind you. You’ll never operate again, no matter how angry you get. How does that make you feel?”
“Mad as hell that someone had so much control over me as to change my life the way they did. I had a plan that got wasted, a life that got altered, and none of it was of my doing, so I’m angry, but I have that right. And like I said, I fight it like I fight all my other battles. It’s just one of the many, I suppose. And I won’t even deny that I’d rather be a surgeon, but that’s not going to happen.”
“See, the thing is, I’m concerned that your bitterness will be a detriment to our patients—the ones who want to make it back all the way or the ones who are fighting to get back as much as they can. I don’t want your anger or your personal preference in being a surgeon as opposed to a rehab doc influencing them. I don’t even want them seeing it.”
“It won’t and they won’t.”
“How can I be sure of that?”
“I don’t suppose you can when all you have is my word. But you do have my word. The thing is, I’ve made it back as far as I can go. Granted, I’m a paraplegic now, but who better to work with the men and women like me than me? I mean, I understand what it’s like to have your life taken away from you and in its place you’re given something that’s going to fight you every day of your life. I know how hard you have to work just to keep your head above water. And that’s where I’m coming from.”
“But will your internal struggles prevent you from recognizing someone who’s in such great depths of despair he or she might be contemplating suicide? Because we run into those patients every now and then.”
“I contemplated it myself for a while, so I know the symptoms.”
“What’s ‘a while’? Define that in terms of duration, if you will.”
“Weeks, maybe. I wouldn’t work at improving, and all I wanted to do was die. I mean, what was the point? I couldn’t have what I wanted—my girlfriend had walked out on me because I was suddenly not what she wanted, my friends shunned me for fear they’d say or do the wrong thing. My family couldn’t be around me without crying. My brother was so consumed with survivor’s guilt he couldn’t stand to look at me—he was an army doc who escaped the field in one piece and he was also the one who convinced me to join up. He blames himself for my condition because he disobeyed orders and ran out onto the battlefield. Finds it very difficult being around me now, even though I understand that’s just the way my brother is. He blames himself for my condition because of it.”
“Because of your disability or your attitude?”
“I’m not deluding myself, Doctor. It was my attitude, but my attitude was precipitated by my disability. So I turned my back on the people who still cared—so much so they couldn’t stand to be around me any longer. They tried and I pushed them away.”
Marc shifted positions in his wheelchair, raised himself up with massive arms, then lowered himself again. “There were questions about how much ability I’d regain, whether or not I’d be able to take care of myself, find a new life, function as a man … It’s overwhelming, and it scared me, and the more frightened I was, the more I just wanted it all to end. But I’m not a quitter and that quitting attitude just made me angry, which pushed me harder to prove I was OK. It’s been a vicious circle, as you can see. Was then, still is. But I get through it.”
“Then you’re not over it?”
“I can cope with it now. But I do need to stay busy and find something other than myself to focus on, which is why I retrained, served a second residency at Boston Mercy Hospital, and why I’m sitting here, applying for this job.”
“Meaning you’re going to take all that pent-up frustration and turn yourself into a first-class rehab doctor.”
“Amazing what a healthy dose of anger can do, isn’t it? You know what they say …” Marc’s eyes went distant for a second, but for only a second. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Well, it hasn’t killed me so far.”
“I saw your records, talked to your chief resident at Boston Mercy General. You did a good job there, but what makes you think you can translate that into doing a good job here, where you’re a full staff member with staff responsibilities as well as administrative duties?”
“I know how to lead, and people do listen to me. And as they say, I’ve got street cred now. If you came into your clinic, who would you rather listen to—someone like you who’s never experienced anything more than a shaving cut, or me?”
“You’ve got a good point, Dr. Rousseau.”
The