Walking, talking and gorging on goodies

“I’ll have another Cinnabon,” she says, in that feathery voice that has always characterized Amy’s speaking style. My youngest sister is making her way back to the familiar terrain of her former life—the span of time before the day she took her wingless flight from Rembrandt’s powerful withers.

Two months have passed since the beautiful paint horse stilled Amy’s ability to simply move through her days, walk at will, drive to self-selected destinations, complete tasks and chores, garden and paint and perform her music, care for a multitude of feathered and furred beings.

Two months can seem an eternity of anguish when you spend your hours wondering whether your loved one will survive the type of trauma that alters lives forever, when doctors can’t promise anything and everyone clings to any fleck of hope.

Once survival is fairly certain, there is consciousness to take one’s concerns. Will she return from the coma? If she does, will she walk or talk again? Will she know who we are, who she is, what her life was like before June 2? Who will she be?

Two months can seem a rush of miracles when your sister begins moving fingers and limbs, slowly opening her eyes to light, recognizing loved ones, whispering words and remembering all but the day of the accident. Gradually, she sits, then rises onto wobbly legs thinned from weeks of disuse and weight loss that shrinks her 5’5” frame to 100 pounds.

She toughs out the transition from machine to self-supported breathing, from mouth tube to tracheostomy, from stomach tube to pureed meatloaf and potatoes by mouth. One by one, sutures heal, surgical openings seal and an appetite for life rises. Always a fan of foods with questionable nutritional value, Amy craves chicken wings with barbecue sauce, potato pancakes, milkshakes, espresso, anything resembling cake or cookies and—her hands-down favorite—Cinnabons.

Feeling some guilt, but aware of her need to regain weight, we indulge each hopeful request, taking delight in how her eyes brighten. We tell ourselves that these are the foods that nourish spirit and help to fund her fight.

The wheelchair gives way to a walker, eventually abandoned to a slightly shaky, stuttering way of ambulating. We extend arms and she totters forward like a child. She laughs and mimics how children fall into the clasp of parents as her fiancé receives her into his arms.

She meets remaining challenges with characteristic Amy-creativity, improving double vision through eye exercises she devised using knots in the wood ceiling of her bedroom. Balance is improved through assisted walks over uneven outdoor terrain. She works to force open her locked jaw with a growing stack of popsicle sticks. She reads for hours, shifting a patch from eye to eye, devouring information then sharing what she’s learned in lively conversations.

All of it requires long hours of deep sleep as her injured brain recovers incrementally. There is numbness here and there and pain in many places, neck fractures that are slow to knit and a rigid brace that makes her shoulders ache with knots like small stones.

We marvel at the miracle of her amazing progress. The doctors and nurses find it equally unexpected. Amy describes feeling a sense of love, coming from family and friends at her bedside or many miles away, a sort of glow that drew her homeward. “Your voices called me back,” she explains. “I could hear you, calling my name. I knew everything would be okay.”