Rosa Parks

All day at work my knee is killing me, and sure enough when I get home and take my pants off it there is a giant blister that hadn’t been there the day before. It looks like I can no longer put off the wheelchair. All weekend I alternate between it and the crutches. Sunday I don’t leave the apartment, and I call in sick on Monday. In the middle of the afternoon the phone rings with a familiar number, and when I answer it there an equally familiar voice on the other end.

“Hello this is Luna from wound care, is Seann there?”

She says Dr. Taggert has her mornings free to see and asks if I want to come in for an appointment. “She won’t be casting you,” she says. I say yes, of course, that sounds great, when? She says how about tomorrow. 

There is frost on the grass when I wheel down to the bus stop, but luckily the sidewalks are dry. This is the first time I’ve used the wheelchair outside the apartment and my arms start hurting instantly. The hill down to the bus stop is very steep, and I use my good leg as a brake, which also hurts by the time I get down there. If I’m this worn out before I even get onto the bus, how am I going to get through the day? 

The driver puts down the ramp and I drag myself aboard with some difficulty. He says there’s no charge; it’s Rosa Parks Day. The morning is so foggy I can’t see the river when we cross it. I get off at Burnside and catch my second bus. I’ve made this trip so many times with my scooter or wearing the cast that it’s become second nature, but the wheelchair changed everything. I feel self-conscious taking up so much room, feel like an obstacle. Luckily the bus isn’t crowded so I’m not actually in anyone’s way. I just feel like I am. It’s difficult not to feel self conscious, though I know there’s no need to.

Tents have been erected on the corners surrounding the hospital to give shelter to the strikers. A truck has set up a table with coffee and donuts, and a row of portable toilets lines the street. I don’t see anyone I recognize so I just slowly make my way down another extremely steep hill to the hospital entrance.

They’re open but most of the lights are out and there’s hardly anyone inside. I roll up to the counter, feeling very small, and tell the woman who knows me, “I’m back!” 

“Any COVID symptoms?” she asks.

“I missed you too,” I say as I wheel past the Starbucks, whose non-union workers are hard at work pouring blackberry sage refreshers for the scabs. 

The lights in the office are out but I hear someone fiddling with the door handle. “I don’t know how to open this thing!” Dr Taggert laughs. “I’ve never done it before! Oh, hello!” she says, finally having figured out the latch. She’s the only one in the office, aside from a gorgeous Black woman behind the counter I’ve never seen before. I almost wish her a happy Rosa Parks Day, but fortunately I stop myself. 

Taggert introduces us. “She’s the new Luna. Or will be, once this strike is over.” It’s been a month with minimal headway being made but she sounds certain that it will end soon. I’m less optimistic.

She has me sit in room one. I tell her about the knee wound. She looks at it and seems a little concerned, but after poking at it a bit decides it’s not as bad as it looks. I take off my shoe and she peels off the makeshift dressing I slapped over my foot wound.

“Oh wow, this looks great,” she says, and shows me the dry bandage. “Look! Nada!” She gets a knife and starts carefully cutting at the scab. “I’m not seeing anything under this but skin. The wound is gone.” 

While she continues to cut and clean the area, I ask how she’s doing and she says not too bad. “We’re kind of sheltered from the madness in here,” she says. “Just running the chambers.”

“Making sure not to blow up any children, I hope.” 

“Oh God, isn’t that horrible,” she says. 

Last Friday a hyperbaric chamber in Michigan exploded with a five-year-old boy inside, burning him to death and injuring his mother. “You know what started it?” she asks. “A toy. They let him have a toy in there. Can you imagine? You see how careful we are here. Of course the place wasn’t accredited, one of these boutique places. And you know what he was being treated for? Autism!” 

She goes on to says that, insanity about using oxygen to treat autism aside, places like that don’t even use enough pressure to be effective on anything other than altitude sickness. I tell her the tragic story of Landmark’s Legendary Affaire, which she has somehow never heard. “That’s why we remove all our patients’ horseshoes,” she says.

She’s cheerful and chatty, and after my surprising good news, I am too. But as she re-bandages the wound area, she lectures me again about how I have to accept the fact that I am never going to be able to go back to living the way I used to, in other words, being able to walk. Part of me refuses to accept this can possibly be true; surely there must be some sort of shoe or surgery that will allow me to use the foot for more than just balancing? I don’t want to run marathons; I just want to be able to stroll around. I wish I could talk to Dr. Thompson about it; she’s always much less dire and reactionary. Taggert says she just got back from Hawaii. Maybe I can find out what days she works and make an appointment with her.

When Taggert asks if I want to come back next week, I tell her I’d rather wait another week. I feel resentful at her for squashing what little hope I can summon. She says to call Luna when I’m ready to schedule, and to just keep doing what I’m doing, then says that when she went to Costco the other day there was a line of people all the way back to the snack aisle. “Everyone’s cart was totally filled with toilet paper! It’s like the pandemic all over again! Did you know that our toilet paper comes from Canada? And everyone’s freaking out because of the stupid tariffs. So what could I do but fill my cart with toilet paper.” 

I ask why she doesn’t just steal it from work like everyone else does. “Nobody will notice,” I say. “They’re all on strike!”

As I wait for the elevator, the fire alarms go off and all the doors slam shut. A female robot says that there is a Code Red in the cancer center, which is a whole other building, so when the elevator arrives I just take it down to the ground floor and head for the lobby like usual. The lights are on now and there are a lot more people here; you would never know that thousands of supposedly essential frontline workers are fighting to be fairly compensated.

It takes me a long time to struggle up the hill to the bus stop. At the top I say hi to the nurses crowded under one of the tents with their picket signs. They are bundled up and crowded around a gas flame and they look like they are freezing their asses off. Cars honk in support as they pass, the blaring horns playing an appropriately irritating requiem for America.