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Rachel pulled into the Motel and sat for a while. She phoned her office to tell them the good news that she'd just made the biggest deal of her career and that she'd fly back to the office tomorrow lunchtime to tidy up the paperwork.

What she didn't tell them was she'd closed the deal before lunch and then talked her new golden client into a long lunch on her.

He thought she was just being a good sales exec, but that wasn't her reason.

It was still light and she'd engineered her time so she had to stay the night and get the first flight back in the morning. She had a whole evening to herself and since she had just made not only her figures for the year but her offices figures for the month, no one was going to say a damn thing.

She had a quick shower, dressed for dinner and then ate at the seafood restaurant across the road rather than the Pizza place next door.

On her way back to her room she went into the trunk of her car and took out her golf bag. She grabbed a few more elastic baggage straps from her toolbox wrapped them around her golf bag and carried it into her room.

She had another quick shower and put on her lycra jogging pants and the T shirt she always wore to bed. Finally she placed the bottle of wine and box of chocolates she’d bought on the way back from dinner next to the book she was reading.

She sat down on the bed and grabbed her golf bag. She’d never played golf. In fact it was a standing joke in the office that she carried the bag and had promised a thousand customers a round the next time she was in town but had never actually stepped foot on a golf course. But they didn’t know that wasn’t what her golf bag was for.

She took out the two identical putters and laid them down on the bed. She took out four elastic baggage straps and laid them down on the bed. She took out the elastic support stocking that acted as a wood cover and laid it down on the bed. Finally she reached into her overnight bag and took out four leather belts and laid them down on the bed. Another standing joke in the office was she took four of everything with her when she was travelling, even it was only for one night. She had four formal suits, four pairs of shoes, four pairs of jeans and quirkiest of all four leather belts, one for each pair of jeans. Everyone in the office thought she was quirky, thought they knew her, but they didn’t. They didn’t know her fantasies or her dreams or her plans on how to live her life as soon as she had enough money to retire. And they didn’t know with this deal she was nearly there.

She sat and thought of the first time she opened an encyclopaedia and saw the pictures of Polio sufferers, some in their braces and some in wheelchairs. One day she was going to be that way, she knew how to get it done, she knew how much it was going to cost and she was nearly there. In the meantime she could only pretend.

She placed each putter shaft on either side of her right leg with the head point upwards along either side of her foot. She pulled the elastic support tight over the putter heads and her foot and stretched it all the way up to her groin so that hid held the two putters gently against her leg. She wrapped an elastic baggage strap tightly several time around her ankle another below the knee another above the knee and hooked the ends together. She left the fourth one lying beside her.

She then took the four belts and wrapped three around her leg and the putters just above where the elastics where. Though they were waist belts each had appropriate holes to tighten around her legs. Once she had buckled the four belts tightly she took up the slack that had now appeared in the three elastics by applying them all over again.

Finally she wrapped the last elastic around the very top of her thigh above where the putters ended so that it was tight on her groin. She could if she wanted use one of her tools to twist the elastic even tighter but as it was, it acted as an effective tourniquet.

She pulled herself up to her pillow, opened her book, set the TV to the news with the sound off, ate a chocolate, drank some wine and settled down to read her book.

She awoke startled, she hadn’t meant to fall asleep as she knew it was dangerous when she was bound up. She relaxed when she realised it had only been forty-five minutes.

She need the toilet, which is probably why she woke up so she swung her legs off the bed and reached into her golf bag. She pulled out a seven iron and a five iron and used them as walking sticks to first get herself upright and then drag her completely numb right leg to the toilet. She was always amazed at how difficult it was a woman with one leg immobilised to use the toilet. She was happy her plans didn’t include leg braces as she would be completely paraplegic and need a catheter.

When she got back to bed she looked at her lifeless discoloured leg and since she was obviously too tired to enjoy it she removed the belts, the elastics, the stocking and just let her putters drop onto the ground beside her bed. The amazing pain of the circulation returning to her leg almost drove her to tears but she loved it. Once it was over she tidied up and climbed back into bed to pleasure herself on thoughts of retiring and of being whole.

As ever it took her 40 minutes to shower, dress, have breakfast, check out and load the car. It was 9 A.M. on a bright Friday morning and she’d engineered her flight so that she would arrive in the office just after lunch. She would file her new sale and her expenses and having explained to the boss all about how she won the business she would probably be home before 3 P.M. She certainly wasn’t going to tell her boss she was just in the right place at the right time when a major competitor had just screwed up and the business had been handed to her on a plate.

She was still elaborating on her description to herself when she realised the lights were at red at the intersection in front of her. She braked. She tried to brake. She looked at her right leg and even though she was screaming at it to push the brake pedal it wouldn’t move. She looked up and passed out.

Rachel’s head was screaming at her. It kept screaming at her over and over again. She knew she’d been waking and slipping back to unconsciousness but she couldn’t tell why. All she could tell was her head was screaming in pain and in terror.

She eventually awoke with enough mental clarity not to just pass out in seconds. “Oh god I’m blind!” she croaked almost inaudibly. “Oh god I’m deaf”. Just as her paranoia had uttered this last croak she heard a car drive past outside and saw the tell tale shadow of a window blind move across the ceiling. She took a deep breath.

Her head was clearer but it was still full of confusion, she thought she had heard conversations in her sleep but she couldn’t remember what they were. Then she remembered the first one about a leg being amputated below the knee, “never fall asleep when you’ve just cut off the circulation to your leg” she thought, as if she was having a diary moment. Then she remembered the conversation about the seriously damaged thoracic spine including several clear fractures. “Is that me as well?” And finally there was the conversation about….., about…., the screaming was returning and she focused on something close to her head at the same time as she remembered the conversation about the incomplete fracture to C6. She was enough of a wannabe to recognize a Halo upright. She was enough of a devotee to realize the screaming was caused by the fact the Halo was screwed into HER skull.

“You stupid, stupid fool” a amputated leg was a wonderful start she thought, being paralyzed below the chest wasn’t what she wanted but she always knew there were dangers in her games, but she never wanted to be a quad!” “You stupid, stupid fool how can make such a cock up of everything?”

She woke again in the morning and as soon she croaked for some water there were a horde of nurses and then doctors surrounding her.

“Rachel are you awake?” asked the first nurse. “I think so” Rachel replied weakly. A young female Doctor took over the conversation. She described Rachel’s injuries just as Rachel had remembered from the dreamt conversations. There was a blood clot in her right calf that required the amputation of the leg below the knee. There were five crushed and fractured vertebrae high up in her back and there was a dislocation of the neck at C6. “A dislocation?” Rachel thought out loud. “Yes,” replied the young Doctor who then went on to say they didn’t know what nerve damage had been done with the dislocation but the fractures to the spine meant Rachel was “at the very least” totally paralyzed below the chest.

The Doctor then set about discovering exactly what Rachel could and couldn’t feel.
Rachel lay there as the young girl asked her “Can you feel that?” to Rachel’s monotonous “No”.

Then Rachel felt a blunt pain on her right breast. “I felt that!” she exclaimed as loudly as her croak would let her. She could feel her breasts, her shoulders her arms and most of her fingers, not perfectly, almost like when she was playing her games but she could feel them.

“Can I have the physiotherapist please?” barked the young Doctor who Rachel though like the power too much. A large sour faced woman trudged into Rachel’s view of the ceiling and grabbing Rachel’s right arm started moving it like a broken puppet.

The sour faced woman was called Maude, Rachel never actually got the Doctor’s name as she came and went but Maude was there every day pulling, massaging, talking about her kids and her mother in law. She turned out to not be so much sour faced as just fed up with young Doctor’s throwing their weight about. Maude was a genius. Maude was a saint. Maude took Rachel from being a terrified complete quadriplegic through regaining enough movement in her arms to work a computer keyboard. She had gloves on and pointers attached with velcro to use on the keys because her fingers were still refusing to budge but she had got back on the internet. She obviously couldn’t go back her normal sites but she could quite rightly look up assistive devices and the like to get some paralyzed pleasure.

Maude was also the one who told her the halo was coming off and a CTLSO going on. And even better it was Maude who said as soon as the CTLSO was fitted Rachel should be lifted into a wheelchair for the first time.

Rachel had never quite worked out why the young Doctor had forbid her being moved out of bed for the relatively short three months she was in the Halo, neither could Maude but Rachel was no longer an emergency patient she was in rehab and Maude could decide what was best.

Rachel was so traumatized by the removal of the Halo that she didn’t really feel the clamshell TLSO with a SOMI attachment being fitted. The return of the screaming memory of the Halo was still ringing in her fears that she didn’t realize she was be slowly hoisted out of bed. She only returned to the moment when she was dangling inches above a wheelchair and the soft plastic brace had turned into as much of a prison as the Halo. And now her back was screaming and her legs with pins and needles like nothing she had ever experienced.

She felt the soft jar of arriving on the wheelchair travel through her screaming, panic ridden head. She tried to call to Maude. She tried to break free of her prison. She passed out.

Maude’s’ face was not a pleasant sight! “You’re a lot tougher than that lady, and you’re going to have to remember that if your going make the most of you rehabilitation!” she growled. Rachel was taken aback. This was forceful even for Maude. She must have thought Rachel needed some tough love.

“Right” Maude chirped as she grabbed Rachel’s wheelchair and pushed her through the door and along corridors as if on some mission. Rachel didn’t ask where she was being taken; she was too caught up in being a devotee, pretender, and wannabe in her first real wheelchair. She savored the realization. This may not have been when or how she planned to be disabled but disabled she was and she had to get on with it.

Maude stopped the chair in front of what looked like a set of upturned cycle pedals attached to a table. “What the heck is that? Am I generating my own electricity now?” Rachel joked as much to calm her own fears as to make Maude believe she was ready to work.

“This is a very special hand cycle” Maude replied. “It amplifies the power put into by anything up to a thousand times so a hair landing on it will move it yards or it can be set to need the strength of the bionic man to move it an inch”. “So you’re going strap my poor paralyzed hands to that and set it to infinity and….” Rachel stopped as Maude’s face was showing signs of losing patience. “What setting are you going to put it on for me?” Rachel asked. “100”, Maude replied. “That should be a good starting point and we can take it from there”

Maude picked up Rachel’s hands and put wrist braces on each one explaining that she would most likely require some type of wrist brace for the rest of her life but she could always prove Maude wrong. Rachel took one look at the beautiful flesh colored plastic braces and vowed to herself she would never take them off. She didn’t tell Maude this.

Maude then placed her hands on the, funnily enough, hand shaped pedals, velcro’d them on tight and stood back. “Do your worst” was all she said.

Rachel looked at her hands and tried to move them but didn’t know how to make them obey. “Concentrate on your shoulders, your hand and wrists are your weakest muscles, your shoulders are stronger” Maude whispered. Rachel focused her mind on her right shoulder and within seconds she produced a slight movement that caused the pedals to start turning. “The trick is to keep them going” Maude said a bit louder as the pedals began to slow down again. Rachel had again been so stunned by producing movement so soon that she forgot to keep it going. She caught the momentum of the pedals just before they stopped and concentrated on first her shoulders and then her elbows. He hands she realized she were going to have to be left for another time. She kept the pedals going for several minutes before her arms started to spasm and then started to fight the pedals. Maude, watching closely pressed a button and the pedals started to slow down.

“What happened” asked Rachel. “Your arms are just tired so I pressed the release button so you wouldn’t hurt yourself. For a first attempt that was good. It shows though we have a lot of work to do but you have plenty of working muscle to build up and use”. “But what does that mean?” “I can’t guarantee anything but it means you probably will be using a joystick controlled chair and possibly able to feed yourself”. “Is that all?” Rachel wondered if the work was going to be worth the outcome.

“That’s my prognosis after three minutes of exercise!” Maude’s growl had returned and Rachel felt it important to finish her sentenced for her. “But if I work harder and longer that prognosis could change!” “Yes”-answered Maude.

Over the next couple of weeks Rachel worked on her own, using the hand cycle, squeezing rubber balls (or at least trying) and attempting every day to lift her braced hands off her lap. She made progress everyday and by the end of the fortnight the hand cycle was set zero, her rubber ball finally had some faint finger prints on it and her hands were hovering about four inches away from her nose before they dropped back onto her lap.

In the third week, Maude decided she was ready to use the main rehab gym on not only for her arms but her legs as well if only to improve her circulation.

The gym was busy, with a lot of paraplegics wheeling about, moving on and off of benches, pushing weights and having every part of them stretched by physio’s This was the most movement Rachel had seen since her accident and this and the restriction on her vision imposed by the SOMI made her head swim for a second and made her feel very alien.

Maude however was in her element, everybody said Hi to her and she asked everyone about this muscle or that pain and gave him or her encouragement. They stopped at a table with six hand cycles on it. Only one was in use, a woman, who Rachel thought was gorgeous was struggling mightily to keep her slow movement going. “What’s it set at?” Rachel asked the woman who was still in a Halo. “100” the woman replied.
“How long have you been on it”? Rachel didn’t know why she asking questions she only knew she was interested in either the answers or the woman. “About three weeks, but only this week have a I got down to 100” the woman panted between pushes. “You?” she asked. “I’m going onto friction today” Rachel replied somberly not wishing to boast.

“My name is Wendy”. “I’m a C5 complete, in fact I’m a C5 smashed to hell”. It’s a miracle this thing is moving at all but it’s keeping me in a joystick-controlled chair so I’m happy. Rachel took this a clear the air statement. I’m Rachel and I’m a C6 dislocated and a virtually every Thoracic pulped”. I’m definitely totaled below the chest but the arms are a mystery”. They haven’t given me a joystick chair yet. I wonder why?” Wendy stopped cycling, and though the conversation had been going on without the two women being able to make eye contact she smiled as if she knew Rachel could to see her mouth and said “they think you can get by in a manual”. At that Maude stepped between them. “You two can stop the chatter and get to work”

Rachel smiled, not really knowing why and got down to cycling, the whole time, Wendy and her spoke about their live’s. Wendy had been a car accident as well. Her husband had died and her stepdaughter was in a coma somewhere else in the hospital. They soon got down to talking about their wishes and aspiration before their accidents.

Over the next weeks and month’s the two formed a close friendship with Rachel now in a manual wheelchair with her wrist brace’s, her now soft collar and her new permanent TLSO helping Wendy placing her paralyzed arms on her lap or adjusting her mouth control within reach. Wendy for her part, even though she was heartbroken at losing her battle to use her joystick chair because a urinary infection had laid her low for two whole weeks kept pushing Rachel and congratulating her on regaining as much use of her arms as she did.

One late afternoon they met as usual to go for dinner together. “I have news of my stepdaughter” Wendy said. “ I didn’t tell you but she came out of the coma about two months ago”. Rachel looked a bit surprised but knowing how unhappy Wendy had been with her husband before he died and especially with his brat of a daughter who had made her life hell she assumed Wendy just didn’t want deal with this as she had her own worries.

“I’m only telling you now because tomorrow she is being transferred down here for physiotherapy”. “She’s only starting physio now? Rachel asked far too excitedly.
“She’s a C2 complete with crushing to C1”. “She’s paralyzed from the lips down”. “ She’s ventilated and her speech is slurred”. “And I’m her legal guardian, the poor shmuck”. Without thinking about it Rachel placed her hand on Wendy’s cheek and looked at her lovingly. Wendy looked at first thankful then seeing the look on Rachel’s face puzzled and finally she smiled and moved off in the direction of dinner.

They talked about stupid unimportant things through dinner and made their way back to their respective rooms. “Can you come into my room please Rachel”? Wendy asked as they reached her private room door. Once inside Wendy locked the door and spun her wheelchair around and placed it square in front of Rachel’s so they were looking eye to eye. “Rachel, though I was married it wasn’t for love”. “I married out of obligation to my father and his debt to my husband”. Rachel put her hand up to stop Wendy talking. “Wendy, I love women, not only that but I get turned on especially by disabled women and always wanted to be one, I just never thought it would happen”.

For a moment Wendy looked stunned and Rachel feared she shouldn’t have added that last part but she wanted this woman in her life and didn’t want there to be any secrets between them. Eventually as if to confirm Rachel’s fears Wendy’s chair moved back. Her chair then moved beside Rachel’s. “Can you take my right hand with your left hand and kiss it”? She asked nearly crying. “And can you put your right hand on my cheek near my mouth. Rachel, though able to move her arms, was still very clumsy and slow but managed to position everything as Wendy wanted and they both kissed each other hands gently.

Because Rachel’s chair was manual and Wendy’s was mouth controlled she worked out both had removable arms. She stopped kissing Wendy’s hand and took her other one back. “What?” startled Wendy? Rachel locked both brakes, removed both arms and hauled herself against Wendy’s body. She stopped again, took off her soft collar, then took off Wendy’s day collar and leaned over.

It took some effort but she finally had her chest lying partly against Wendy’s, she lifted both of Wendy’s arms and put them around her and put her arms almost around Wendy’s chest and eased her lips forwards. Wendy smiled and they kissed.

When they met for breakfast both were very much in love, talking about setting up a home together and even if they had to or were allowed to look after Wendy’s step-daughter then they would do that together.

About an hour later Rachel saw someone new being wheeled into the gym. That can’t be Wendy’s stepdaughter she’s only about ten years younger than us. Before she had finished trying to calculate how old Wendy’s father friend would have been when she married him she caught sight of the new arrival properly. She was stunning. Every muscle was atrophied. Her chair was severely reclined and her body was strapped in it at what looked like every few inches. Her head lay limply to one side against the headrest showing even her neck was paralyzed and her vent tube was pale blue like a neon light. Her hands were strapped to the arms of her chair and a sip & puff mechanism rested beside her mouth.

Wendy went across to her and after saying a few words and talking to her stepdaughter’s nurse they all turned and came across to Rachel. When they had stopped and Wendy started introducing Rachel to her step-daughter Elizabeth it was soon obvious Elizabeth was unhappy about something and she started making slurred moaning sounds to her nurse. As if she understood perfectly the nurse placed the sip & puff tube in Elizabeth’s mouth.

“That’s the woman!” her voice box said. “That’s the woman in the other car!”
“She did this”!

Rachel choked, her heart pounding and her head bursting. The nurses didn’t know what was being said but Wendy did.

Rachel’s throat began to close, her head started to ache, she felt a blinding nauseating pain down her right arm and at the same time her left arm went numb.

She passed out.