HORSING AROUND IN THE SHOWER

I can still feel his creepy little sausage fingers on my thigh.   Babysitting his kids wasn’t my favorite job, but my parents expected all of us to earn spending money.  The father always volunteered to drive me home and I dreaded the discomfort of the short ride, the forced conversation, the way he leaned toward me with boozy breath as I hugged the door.  Front seats in the sedans and station wagons of the 70s stretched into one long make-out sofa.  Great for boyfriends, bad for rides with creepy Dads.

I wanted nothing more than to bolt out of that car and run into my house.  But I ‘d been taught to show respect to adults, to be, above all, polite.  He was probably in his 30s or 40s – old -- someone who knew my parents, and a neighbor.  And if I thought much about it at all, I assumed, with a victim’s shame, that his veiled sexual advances were connected to something I had done wrong.  Perhaps my braces-filled smile and newly developed body sent an erroneous message that I had yet to decode amidst the confusion of burgeoning adolescence.

A few years before him there had been a family friend who liked to photograph children as a hobby. When I displayed an interest in photography, he offered to “teach” me about developing film in his basement darkroom.  I remember the feeling of my skin prickling, like filings lining up on a magnet, as he moved next to me in the covert blackness and then kissed me, as if I was his for the taking. “Uummmm… that’s nice,” he said and yet I can’t recall anything about how I got out of there, what excuse I muttered as I fumbled at the door.   But I do remember thinking that above all I should be polite.  Good girls didn’t make a scene.   Scroll ahead in time to the roguish professor who sat too close on the office couch while reviewing my “work.”   I sensed only smarmy low-level alarm bells before he grabbed me and shoved his tongue in my mouth.

 

 

The shame of these incidences still burns.  I’ve never mentioned this publically until now.  In those days no one was actively teaching girls to stand up and call someone on the carpet.  No parents I knew gave lectures about pedophiles or molestation or Sunday school teachers who took advantage of their charges.  There were only bad boys, boys our own age who could ruin our reputations.  Danger didn’t come disguised as grown-ups we knew or authority figures.  That kind of power was unquestioned.

 

Years later I told my mother about the family friend in the dark room.  At the time I had merely mentioned that I wasn’t comfortable with him and she had brushed me off, minimized my ambiguous feelings.  I didn’t have the words back then or the vocabulary of experience to communicate all the complex and shameful things I felt. My mother’s face went slack at the dark room story.  I understood her pain in learning that she hadn’t armed her child, or protected me.  In fact, she had muted me and minimized my concerns.

 

“We didn’t know about those things back then, dear,” she said to me sorrowfully.  “The 60s and 70s were a lot more innocent.”  Were they?  Or was it just that in the safety of those suburban neighborhoods, no one wanted to listen for the hissing in the lawns?  But the potential lurked, unnamed, in the Boy Scout leader, the Pop Warner coach, the parish priest and the yearbook advisor, just as surely and pervasively as it lurks today.

 

A friend of mine emailed me the first breaking news on the Penn State abuse scandal.  A few summers ago, a teenaged neighbor molested her son.  My friend’s guilt and shame, the anger and the storm that followed had galvanized her family and rocked the other.  But my friend had moved her family forward.

 

Abuse of power is an age-old story.  But those who wield their authority over a child for sexual pleasure are in a whole other category entirely. There is a special circle of hell for the cowardly predatory Coach Sanduskys of the world.  And yet as parents navigating today’s landscape it is often perplexing to articulate to our children the precise balance, the nuances between caution and fear, wariness and openness, acceptance and skepticism.  How do you effectively teach a young child to respect their elders, yet be continually alert for transgressions?  There is good touching and bad touching.   Expect the best and look for goodness but be sure to keep your guard up.  These can begin to feel like jumbled, mixed messages.  Yet in the end, the truth is simple.  When it’s wrong, you know.  You just know.

 

  

“No one talked about this stuff when I was a kid,” I say to my girls, who then look at me like I’m a Neanderthal’s fibula at the Museum of Natural History.  The point is to remind them when it smells like a rat they need to stand up and box back, tell a grown-up.   Or get the hell out of there.

 

Trust yourself, I tell my kids, call me at whatever hour, use your judgment and your instincts, don’t ever let anyone tell you what you should do if it doesn’t feel right.  We drill into their heads how to speak up, to run fast and hard when the man in the car offers them a ride home.  Don’t talk to people you don’t know, and remember that ”no” means “no.”  But evil doesn’t always come in the form of strangers. Sometimes the people you know can be scarier than the bedroom intruder.  They come cloaked in good intention, they are the familiar faces, the ones you trust with your children, the people society looks up to.

 

I’d like to believe that if I’d known what my kids know now, I would have flung that sweaty sausage hand off my leg and leapt out of the car.   I wish I’d had the temerity at 12 to slap the father in the darkroom and ask what the hell he thought he was doing.  And although I ended the meeting with the leering teacher quickly and subsequently dropped his class, I didn’t rise off that couch indignant.  I never stormed out. There was no Norma Rae moment.  He was my teacher, responsible for evaluating my performance.  And in the absence of being comfortable with naming what had happened or understanding its origin, I never said a word to him or anyone else until years later.  I let my old self down.

 

I’ve watched the Penn State story unfold with the same dark stone in my throat that other parents feel. The fact that is was allowed to go on, that it was pushed under the rug and covered up is beyond inexcusable. But authority figures have faces and voices.  They have credibility and influence.  They can have superpowers.  Finding a voice against that kind of might and celebrity is a big deal.  It requires tremendous strength.

 

Eating over at a friend’s house the other night their adolescent daughter was headed out the door to a party, dressed to the nines.  I jokingly teased her father that he would need to purchase a weapon to keep the boys away.   “Windpipe, eyes, groin and then stomp on their instep,” he said reflexively. “Huh?” I replied.  “I’ve taught both girls where the vulnerable points are if they get in a situation.” So, naturally, I made him show my girls those moves on the spot.

 

I’m going to hope and pray that if one of my daughters finds herself in a car being driven home by a creepy father she will do better than I did.  I’m going to hope that she and every kid in her generation can find their voice in the moments they need it most.  And not only when they experience abuse, but also when they see it happening around them.  As parents we need to use the stories like Penn State in ways that can educate, not terrify.  It’s up to all of us to help.  The alternative is the cost of the shame of silence.

WHEN REHAB MEDICINE IS CUT – YOU HURT TOO

Gabby Gifford’s amazing story and the release of her book and home video have put rehabilitation medicine and its heroic professionals—the doctors, nurses and therapists—temporarily in the public eye. But I have no doubt it will soon fall back in the shadows of public consciousness.

Medical rehabilitation isn’t sexy.  There’s no rush of the emergency room—no gurneys or defibrillators or physicians yelling orders in an environment of barely-controlled chaos.  There’s no discovering cures or fashioning a human heart out of stem cells.  And, while George Clooney would make a handsome rehabilitation physician on TV, the networks aren’t lining up to film a pilot involving a rehab hospital.

Rehabilitation does not provide instant results; rather, it is a long, hard road.  It is a near-relentless struggle over the course of weeks, months, and even years to help an individual who has been severely injured get back as close as possible to where they were before their injury.  It can involve countless hours of hard work and determination just to remember the word for an apple, to gain the motor skills to hold a fork, and the ability to dress oneself again.  

It’s a journey that most often involves families and friends.  It is a road that my children and I walked with my husband Bob when he was severely injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq.  But consider this:  at some point every one of us will need expert rehabilitation care for a loved one or ourselves.  How many of us know someone who has been in a car accident, or had a stroke, or broken a hip?  As I move through my 50s, I’m more keenly aware of my own pressing mortality, the fact that anything can happen to myself, my loved ones and my family members.  It’s simply a fact of life. 

It was impossible not to think of our own journey when I watched the home video of Rep. Gabby Giffords working hard and making such great strides.  Many things are possible on the journey of recovery.  I see them at work every day with Bob.  But none of my husband’s achievements and his “getting back to himself” would have been possible without rehab.  

Sadly, the type of quality medical rehabilitation care that Bob and Rep. Gabby Giffords needed—and the type of care that you or your loved ones may need in the future—is at significant risk due to current proposals in Washington proposed as part of deficit reduction.  These cuts will reduce patient access to care and threaten the viability of rehabilitation providers.  Thousands of people in need of medical rehabilitation will no longer receive these services.  Training as well as therapists and medical jobs will be cut – hospitals will have no choice.  

Patients in rehabilitation hospitals are often at their most vulnerable.  It’s an emotional and scary time, usually following an injury, sudden event or illness.  Most Americans already face very real limitations on their access to inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation care – their insurance runs out or benefits stop before their treatment needs end.  The average insurance plan for traumatic brain injury covers six weeks of rehab.  That barely begins to scratch the surface of an injury that can take years to heal.  

Patients and their families should not unfairly bear the burden of balancing the federal budget.  Cheaper is not better.  Who would ever choose to see their catastrophically hurt loved one in a nursing home instead of a rehab hospital?  But that will be the result if these cuts are approved.  

Talk with these people, as well as our returning wounded veterans, about how overwhelming the access and financial challenges can be.  At a time when our population is aging and returning veterans are in need of services in their local communities, services will be slashed or eliminated. Rehab is darn hard work—placing challenging policy and additional access obstacles in front of these patients are not in anyone’s interest.  

It’s easy to put medical rehabilitation at the back-of-the-bus in medicine.  But we need to fight cuts that will eliminate access to high quality care for your spouse, your grandmother, and your child.  Otherwise, society and each of us will pay in many unanticipated ways, including higher costs, reduced quality of life for the disabled, and higher levels of intense stress for families and caregivers.  

Rehab saves lives and families.  It saved mine.  In my lowest moments, it was the energy, motivation, expertise, and commitment of the professionals and caregivers in rehab hospitals that got me through.   I have a very clear memory of walking onto the floor of Bob’s inpatient rehab hospital, my spirits at their lowest ebb.  I had run out of gas, and my shoulders were hunched in a C-curve.  A voice piped up from behind the desk.  “Come with me Mrs. Woodruff,” the young physical therapist commanded.  She shut the door behind her tiny office, “ has anyone asked you how you are today?”  she inquired, as I burst into tears of gratitude and release.  She then proceeded to give me a ten-minute shoulder massage that I will never forget.  Her kindness and compassion humbled me that day.  And it lifted me up.  She had extended her care beyond simply focusing on the patient and offered it to an exhausted caregiver. That’s just a tiny slice of the magic that takes place in rehab hospitals.  We can’t allow these much needed resources to be vastly diminished. 

With the skills and support of the therapists, nurses, doctors and caregivers in medical rehabilitation hanging in the balance, I want to lend my voice to wake Washington up.  It may not be a sexy, but it’s a critical one.