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These legs were made for walkin'

It has taken me a long time to accept my “new normal,” but I'm a fighter. Using my four-wheeled walker, I walk every day. I could only walk five blocks six months ago; now, I can go almost two miles. I work out with a trainer, stretching, lifting weights, and crunches. I regularly work with physical therapists.

I learned many things, but the most important thing I learned was how to get up off the floor. I learned how to go upstairs and downstairs. I can fasten my bra with my teeth and recite the alphabet backward. I am learning to walk with a cane.

My health care provider approved the purchase of an electronic stimulator for my leg. When I take long walks, I wear two "cuffs": one on my upper thigh and one below my knee. Each cuff sends an electric stimulus to help my leg lift. I find that my gait improves even when I don't wear them. I walk with my caregivers every day, and my legs have become stronger. For the first three months after my accident, my right leg had the mobility of a tree trunk—nothing! Walking is difficult and relearning how to do it has taken me 18 months to get right. Going forward, I plan to learn how to walk with a cane and replace the walker.

Someone has always walked with me when I walked outside, but I crave independence. I want to be able to run down the stairs and jump in my car and do whatever I want. However, since that was no longer an option, I needed desperately to be able to walk alone. I asked my physical therapist what I needed to do. She said if I passed a balance test, she would agree to let me walk solo. I had to stand with my eyes closed for 30 seconds and then turn around as fast as possible without my walker! After I got a thumbs up from her, I had to get past the other members of team Marcy. They all agreed that they would feel OK for me to walk by myself if I were to wear a helmet. (I had a brain tumor removed seven years ago) I told them I would wear whatever they wanted if that meant I could walk freely. The first time I walked out the door alone, it felt like the Fourth of July! People I passed turned and smiled at me. I know I looked a little crazy with my helmet, but people were too polite to ask.

Finally, I wrote a story about my accident and submitted it to AARP magazine. It will come out soon, and I will send it along with a link to my friends, family, and supporters.

I am incredibly fortunate to have so many friends and family love and support. I'm grateful for every card, hug, and email I receive. My sincere thanks to you for being such an essential part of my recovery.

#Youtube

CRUNCH SQUISH SLURP CHEW

Sex, pot, alcohol and ice cream are no longer pleasures that are available to me since my spinal cord injury.

But I have a new pleasure: a serious relationship with Kelloggs Raisin Bran Crunch

For the past 360 days I have eaten it in the same dark blue ceramic bowl

with the same pewter spoon

at the same time --6:30 a.m

My raisin bran is the highlight of my day. I look forward to it, waiting for that first bite of crunchy sugar. The sweet milk. The little black raisins.

I hear my husband getting the breakfast tray ready in the kitchen The anticipation is the best part.. No the best part is the first bite!

I sit up and smooth the white duvet around me making sure that everything is ready.

When Ron first sets the tray down, I take a moment to appreciate how it looks.

I carefully decide which flakes I’m going to pick. Its very important that the first Bite be a good one Because There's no Repeat performance.

Its important That I get a lot of the crunchy bits … the ones that haven’t gone under the milk yet. I take my first bite. I savor the sweetness, the crunchiness. I lean my head back against the pillow with my eyes closed.and smile. I Try to eat it as slowly as possible. I Slurp a little bit of milk from the spoon which is deliciously cold and I run my tongue over the spoon. I don't like anybody to talk to me while I am experiencing the pleasure of the first bite.

The cold milk the crunchy flakes the chewy raisins.......... all together it makes an experience in the mouth like fireworks are going off.

Do you know that feeling where you've been off sugar For a month And then have a bite of a chocolate chip cookie? The high is indescribable. There's nothing like it. Thats what its like.

Now for my second bite, I try to get some of the of the flakes that are below the milk. And I carefully Scoop up a slice of banana. With this one It's a completely different experience. MyTeeth and lips Squish the banana while I'm also crunching And it's incredibly pleasant. I run my tongue across my teeth

There's only one other good part.

When there's nothing left but milk in the bowl I lift the rim to my lips and slurp the remaining milk till its empty. About 10 raisins lie in the bottom of the bowl and I gather them up in my spoon for a final pleasure bomb. I love the hard chewy texture of them.

Now I'm sad that its all over but I'm completely satiated and I push the bowl away .

There's always tomorrow. with only 23 hours and 45 minutes to go.

I used to be able to do the splits...

UPSIDE DOWN...30 FEET UP IN THE AIR..

I had no fear. I've always been a risk taker. That's probably why I am in this wheelchair. I was sliding down that hill a million miles a second without a thought that there could ever be anything that would go wrong with my perfect life. I saw a wall with a pointy top coming up and in a split second knew that my only chance was to put one foot on top of it and try to use it to pivot forward . In an instant I slammed into the pavement on my face and my whole world changed.

Today was shower day

Before I get into the tub, my nurse peels off my compression kneesocks and my feet are surprisingly gross. I never see them because I have to wear the compression socks all the time. When my bare feet touch the cold porcelain, the nerves in my feet make it feel like I'm being electrocuted with ice. My feet are swollen. My orange pedicure from a few months ago has peeled off. My feet are red and swollen. There is nothing pretty at all about them. I wiggle my toes and this reminds me of being in the ambulance and the paramedic told me to wiggle my toes. I couldn't do it and I panicked but then I was able to wiggle the toes on my left foot.

I used to not like Shower day. I have shower day twice a week. It s a drag having to go upstairs, walk into the bathroom, have the nurse take off my clothes and sit on the cold plastic bench in the tub. I felt all naked and vulnerable. Because I was sitting down I had to look at my fat folds. But then when I am in the tub and the warm water is coming down over my head I feel like I'm under a warm waterfall and then I feel happy.

Before you read this I’d like to warn you that there are a lot of punctuation and spelling mistakes. I dictate what I want to say and sometimes it comes out all wrong hopefully there are no grammatical mistakes. My mother was an English teacher she taught me to cringe when something was wrong..I take a hell of a lot of pills. about 35 a day. I used to not be able to swallow pillsat but and I’ve gotten used to it. it’s so much easier with applesauce I can take four or five at a time if they are sitting in applesauce. I always get a visionl of Jonah the whale with his mouth wide opem and the pills and everything elsw going down with them. I jave pills for keeping my legs from going spastic, pills to relieve the tingling feeling that I get from the nerves. I have pills to relax the muscles in my back and I have pills to increase my thyroid. I have Hills to decrease my anxiety and I have pills to increase my mood. pill’s to soften mystool and piu;;s how to regulate vitamin D in my body. It’s kind of a drag having to remember them after each meal and it’s a little irritating to have to take them but Ron and my two nurses never forget so I’ve let the responsibility go. You’re probably curious about what they do. one of them comes at 7:15 Monday through Friday and the other one comes on the weekends.I wake up at 5:30 and Ron brings me my coffee and cereal. then Daniella arrives at 7:15 They work for 1 hour … They wash my face and give me a lovely face massage and apply morning creams and make my bed .it’s really quite nice. then they ask me what outfit I would like to wear for the day and that’s a laugh because I have a stack of t-shirts and a stack of sweatpants so it doesn’t really matter to me what I wear. then I get on the floor and do crunches and bridges with them. in the remaining time I usually practice walking a few laps around the living room Before they go they take my blood pressure and give me my morning pills. After they leave I do squats and toe raises and I sometimes practice getting up out of my wheelchair without using my hands. I also do 30 minutes on my recumbent bike Then I have physical therapy, occupational therapy, and psychological therapy on different days of the week. For 7 days a week I get up at the same time and go to sleep at the same time. I Used to absolutely hate ritual but I’ve gotten used to it and it does get me up and get me going in the morning whether I like it or not. tomorrow I’m going to write about accepting myself as a quadriplegic. thank you for reading

toes on fire

It feels like a thousand red ants are swarming betwen my toes and steel wool is being dragged between my fingers. These are the eletrical impulses I feel from disconnected nerves. Its called neuropathy and I take a high dose of Gabapentin to lessen the pain of the nerve damage which has happened as a result of my spinal cord injury. I take 35 pills a day.It feels like I'm lying on tennis balls but when I reach my hand under my back there is nothing there. It feels like there's a rope or wire tied around my chest. Flashback to six months ago: I arrived at the rehab center all alone having waved a sad goodbye to Ron through the rear window of the ambulance. I wouldn't see him again for at least a month. I was leaving San Francisco General after a week of recovering from my neck surgery. They checked me in and said you get a day off today to get settled in but tomorrow you work. the next day I was thrown right into activitities.At 6:30 AM I was served a meal of powdered eggs , grits and coffee and handed my daily schedule. It was was arranged around meeting each of my therapists. What makes Santa Clara so special as a rehab center is that there is a team of people who routinely share their thoughts so that there can be a cohesive recovery programt. I had an art therapist, social therapist speech therapist,a breathing therapist, physical therapist an occupational therapist, on top of all that there were extracurricular things too like pizza night, "Las Vegas" night and ice cream sundae night. I met with each one of these therapists for about an hour. I got breaks for lrunch and another afternoon break and then I was given free time until dinner. At the end of the first day, the head nurse, "Nurse Ratchett" started me on a bowel training program. She gave me an enema and told me that it probably wouldn't kick in for an hour but it didn't kick in until the folloqwing day at the gym. Very embarrassing.I won't tell you all the details but after a week I was a successful graduate from the bowel program. I was able to poop every night on command. I hated physical therapy because it hurt so much. I called the gym "the hurt locker" and my therapist the "princess of pain". I couldn't feel anything from the waist down I had no sensation in my legs.The first night that I was at the rehab hospital I was lying flat on my back while a young doctor pricked me with pins over every square inch of my body.that was a very odd experience. It took her over an hour to do this I felt like Gulliver in the land of lilliputian when he was being tie down. this doctor was so young and this procedure was so strange that as the pricking wore on and my patience were off I asked her if her Superior knew that she was doing this experiment. to be continued..."Life at home"..... >

“Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” Lewis Carrol

This is one of my favorite quotes from ALICE IN WONDERLAND. When I woke up in San Francisco General I remember hearing a doctor say that my neck was broken and that they had successfully fused the third and fourth vertebrae but they wouldn't know for sometime if I were completely paralyzed. Then I was given Dilaudin and I don't remember anything else until waking up in my hospital room. I was sharing a room with someone else and I could hear moaning behind the curtain. I couldn't move anything except the toes on my left leg. I began to cry into my pillow and then began sobbing. When I stopped crying, I tried to about think what to do. I steeled myself to make the phone call to several close friends. The call to the friend who had gone through photography school with me was one of the hardest to make because she knew what this would mean to me as a photographer. We were both stoic on the call and just as my voice started to break we hung up. I didn’t cry again until a week later when I got to my rehab center room. This time I had a room to myself. After the door closed, I sobbed boo-hoo-hoo my-life-has-come to an end tears. I thought I was done crying until the next day when the resident social worker came into my room with my file, sat down, crossed her legs and said "so tell me how you feel." I thought are you kidding?. I said "I’m OK" and then I burst into tears. She sat with me until our time was up. It was four more weeks when I returned home from rehab that I cried for the last time. That was the middle of October and that was the last time that tears rolled down my face. my housekeeper was standing with my family on the sidewalk holding balloons and flowers. then my therapist came over to give me a private welcome home session and I lost it . I replaced my crying with eating. It was the only pleasure I had. And I ate and ate. Enjoying my cookies and cheesecake and bread pudding‘s, I was feeling sorry for myself and also rationalizing that no one could really see my body if I was sitting in a wheelchair anyway. Now I’m 15 pounds overweight and depressed about that. I heard that it’s almost impossible to lose weight when you are in a wheelchair. So I just think of what the Queen of Hearts would say.

" nobody knows, how cold my toes, how cold my toes are growing" Winnie the Pooh

It actually feels like razor sharp icicles stabbing into my toes. I have extensive nerve damage in my fingers and toes. I take a high dosage of the medicine gabapenton which keeps it from becoming too painfuit . The medicine thankfully gives me tremendous relief from this pain. But even with the medecine it often feels like I have a sock full of gravel on my foot when there isn't one or a glove on my hand when it doesn't exist. The bummer is that you're not supposed to drink alcohol and sad to say Ron is not a rule breaker. Since I can't reach higher then the kitchen counter from my wheelchair I can't sneak any either. The spinal cord is a tubelike structure in which messages are sent to and from the brain. Because of my incomplete fracture of the third through the fifth vertebrae the messages are not getting through. And because they are not getting through to tell the muscles what to do, there is deterioration and weakness. But nerves can be regenerated and the brain can be retrained. My daily therapy is all about regenerating the nerves and retraining my muscles to pick up messages from the brain . Through daily practice I am reminding them what it means when I tell them to push or pull my legs while walking. Every day I lie on my bed and a physical therapist or my caregiver or Ron holds my weak leg to give it some resistance while I try to pull it to my chest or push it forward. Since verbal cues are extremely important they say pull, pull! or push push. I often laugh . I am literally learning how to walk again like a one year old. I practice three times a day going from one end of my living room to the end of the dining room and back again. Every time I take a step I say aloud " PULL!" taking a step up and then" PUSH!" stepping down and putting my foot on the floor. I try to think about marching and keeping an erect posture all the while balancing while holding on to my walker. Sometimes I do three laps before I have to sit down and rest. It's incredibly exhausting ... learning how to walk again. We all take it for granted just as we take for granted speaking our native language.

"I'LL THINK ABOUT IT TOMORROW" Okay this is what happened. I was just out for a walk at noon on a sunny September day with my red cashmere sweater tied around my waist and wearing my favourite jeans. I was very happy and listening to Michelle Obama’ s book ‘Becoming ‘ on my earbuds. After I passed the dahlia flower garden next to the Conservatory, I called Ron because I was tired and asked him to pick me up at Stanyan and Fulton. He said he would be there in 10 minutes but please to meet him one block down from Stanyan since it was too busy at that intersection. I said okay and started walking but then realised that I might not be there in 10 minutes so I decided to shortcut through the forest. It was a narrow path with dead leaves and twigs path and I started sliding down it still standing and going a bit too fast. It was a hill . The hill had me going faster than I thought and I ended up at the top of a retaining wall dropping off down to the sidewalk about 5 feet below. I was going too fast, the kind of too fast where your head is going faster than your feet. That coupled with the fact that there was a wall which had a pointy top made the whole thing a bad nightmare. I remember seeing the wall coming and seeing the top was stuck up in the air like a church steeple. I said ‘oh shit’ and then the the last thing I saw was a flash of white (my running shoe in mid-air). I have no memory of falling. Then it felt like I was slammed in the face by a truck…there was nothing in my life that had ever felt anything like it. I didn’t feel any pain. Next, I was spitting out cement on the ground. I opened one eye and saw my hand lying very close to my face. I tried to wiggle one finger and I couldn’t. I said “0h f——“ I could hear cars on Fulton driving by me but they couldn’t see me because there were parked cars between us. I tried to yell for help but only a tiny squeak came out. I lay there for what seemed like a long time before a young woman knelt down beside me. She quickly called 911 and I could hear her talking to them as if her voice was in a tunnel. I said to her ‘would you mind getting my phone out of my back pocket and calling my husband Ron’? I was surprised that I remembered his phone number. He arrived at the same time as the ambulance. I’m sure it looked worse than it was because I had cut my head and there was some blood. I remember a young paramedic leaning down asking me if I knew what city I was in. Ron arrived as they were putting me on the gurney. They told him I had no movement in my arms or legs. Then they cut off my favourite jeans and t-shirt. i was so happy that my red cashmere sweater had been around my waist so they wouldn’t cut it. The ride to the hospital was incredibly bumpy and in my condition very painful; I asked the paramedics if they could give me some pain medicine and they said no they were not allowed to. I used to think that it would be fun to be in an ambulance with the siren going off but it wasn’t fun at all. I couldn’t wait till we got there because I was in such pain. When we arrived at SF General, the ER doctors grabbed one side of my blanket and the paramedics grabbed the other and one of them called out 1–2-3 and in unison they heaved me onto the ER gurney. That distracted me from focusing on my pain because I wondered how did they know who would call out the 1-2-3? What if two people called it out at the same time? The next thing I remember was something white coming down to my face and thats it.Hours later. they told Ron and me at the same time that it looked like I would be paralysed in all 4 limbs..a quadriplegic..but nowadays the correct term is tetraplegic . I was still a little loopy from the Dilaudin and this news was too terrible to take in so I decided that I would “just think about it tomorrow.” to be continued…..

my recovery

the only silver lining of m accident is that i dont have to do dishes anymore

la la la

I DON’T WANNA CHANGE MY SHIRT!

I was in the middle of shooting toddlers for Pampers Wipes. The little girl was a long way from where I was shooting since I was using a telephoto lens. The Art Director sitting on the floor next to me whispered that she would like to see a different color shirt. I picked up my megaphone and called out “will someone please change the little girl’s T-shirt”?

A crowd of photo assistants, stylists, and the studio teacher gathered around her. Several minutes went by. Her mother joined the group. I was getting impatient because we were behind schedule. I picked myself up from the floor and walked the 20 feet up to the crowd. “What’s going on here? I said.....”.whats the problem?” They said apologetically, “well, she doesn’t want to change her T-shirt.....she likes the one she has on”.

Oh, really?

Her mother had mentioned to me earlier, that she did not like to be dirty, so before anyone knew what happened, I took the cupcake she was holding and smeared it down the front of her shirt. There was shocked silence. Her mouth opened wide and she let out a wail which could probably be heard in the next studio. I said to her, “oh, no...let’s get that dirty shirt off of you right away! I pulled the stained shirt over her head, then said “here is a nice clean pink one for you and a brand new cupcake!”

My father (a military man) once told me that you can win any battle if you know your opponent and use psychology, surprise and speed. She did give me a big hug at the very end of the shoot though.

You’re not my Mom!

One of the hardest things to do while working with babies is to get them to get up close and feel personal engaging with professional actors and make it look realistic.

“you’re not my mom”

While on this Pampers Baby Wipes shoot in Miami, I came up with this idea: .I had the real mom lie down on the ground and have her baby sit on top of her..then when her baby feels safe and comfortable, and realizes that this its is not a trick, she relaxes and very very slowly the actor can engage with her. Then I shoot and crop the mom out.

Here I am below explaining to this mom what I want her to do.

Notice also the purple flowers in the background...The stylist brought all those in, freshly bought the day before....We leave nothing to chance.

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A post shared by Marcy Maloy (@marcymaloy) on Jan 19, 2020 at 1:01pm PST

#familyphotography #familylifestylephotography #familyphotoshoot (at Piedmont, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5LlppeBDkX/?igshid=1reoysmk6s0ph

#familyphotography #familylifestylephotography #familyphotoshoot

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