Tue Dec 24, 2024 - 9:00 am ESTTue Dec 24, 2024 - 8:39 am EST
(LifeSiteNews) — The most important things I do on workdays are make my husband’s breakfast, pack his lunch, and drive his electric wheelchair out of our shed to the foot of our outdoor staircase.
Also crucially, I lug a metal ramp to the step leading down to the pedestrian alley, and then to the one between the pedestrian alley and the public sidewalk. Mark drives his chair down the ramp, then up the ramp, kisses me goodbye, and zooms off to catch the bus to work.
Without me, he couldn’t do that.
Although last Christmas he could walk with a cane, now Mark cannot walk at all without support on both sides. Thanks to our double railings, he can just manage the 16 steps down from our apartment to the powered chair and, when he comes home, the 16 steps up to the self-propelled version. He has cuts on his hands from miscalculating his way through doorframes, and he must steel his nerves every time he approaches the shower. We drained our emergency savings to remodel the bathroom, but we assumed he wouldn’t need a wheelchair in the shower. Thus, he drags his feet along while hanging onto grab bars.
Despite that, the beautiful bath — or, rather, the shower — room is my pride and joy, for we chose a standard company over ones that specialize in “disability” rooms resembling hospital facilities. It has its unamiable quirks, but at least it does not — obsession of many a British homeowner — detract from the value of the property. That said, we don’t want to sell our home — despite being advised to do so — because we like our neighbors.
The many kindnesses of our neighbors have included carrying our recycling boxes to the curb when I forget, taking in our laundry the time I was late, and even (in the case of the barber next door) cutting Mark’s hair as he sat in his wheelchair behind and below our terraced apartments.
No, we do not want to leave our neighbors.
So what’s the problem? Well, Mark’s very rare and non-malignant brain tumor sent out equally non-malignant yet also disruptive explorers to colonize his spine. This is so rare that nobody thought to scan his spine until, after months of a numb tailbone, he thought to mention the phenomenon to his oncologist.
The scan revealed a small mass at the base of his spine and tiny ones elsewhere, and although radiotherapy reduced their size, it could not stop or heal the damage they had caused. By Christmas 2023, Mark needed a cane, by Easter 2024 he depended on a rollator, and by Pentecost he was in a borrowed wheelchair recovering from a bad fall.
But my goodness are we grateful he hasn’t died!
As long-term readers may recall, this is Mark’s eighth “extra” Christmas. He was first diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2017, he suffered five operations, he almost wasted away before doctors paid attention to his dropping weight, and he received Final Unction twice. After a dramatic climax — yelling in his post-operative delirium that Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart will triumph — Mark settled down to a snakes-and-ladders life of improvements, disappointments, and new treatments.
Living to see yet another Christmas is a gift.
This Christmas will go down in our history as “The One When Mark Was in A Wheelchair.” We live in hope that we will not have to amend that title to “The First.” The healing of spinal damage is one of the great medical unknowns, we have been told, but meanwhile Mark does his prescribed exercises and forces his brain to tell his feet to take him up and down our outdoor staircase. He has deepened his devotions, first to Sr. Wilhelmina Lancaster, and then to Cardinal Mindszenty, through whom he hopes for a canonization-worthy cure. (Thus, we would be grateful if, in your kindness, you ask the intercession of Servant of God József Mindszenty on Mark’s behalf.)
It is also a Christmas in which Mark is legally disabled, which in Scotland carries some benefits — a bus pass, state-provided wheelchairs, occasional physiotherapy — to ameliorate the disadvantages. It also carries the dubious advantage of having a personal stake in the national Assisted Suicide debate. Disability rights activists like Liz Carr are terrified of legalized killing, and I have grave doubts about doctors, judges, and MPs who would prefer death to disability.
More positively, it also carries the opportunity to show Christian fortitude in adverse circumstances. Our neighbors know that when Mark picks his way down the stairs on Sundays, he’s on his way to Mass. And our fellow Catholics can attest that when he gets there, he’s all smiles.
I hope also that we’re a good advertisement for Christian marriage — which leads me to another reflection, especially as I think about other people in wheelchairs I see on our street as they putter along alone or wheel behind a dog.
Perhaps the most important thing is not getting out the electric wheelchair and the ramp, however good this is for Scotland’s economy and Mark’s self-esteem. Perhaps the most important thing I do on workdays is kiss him goodbye on the public sidewalk.
Dorothy Cummings McLean is a Canadian journalist, essayist, and novelist. She earned an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Toronto and an M.Div./S.T.B. from Toronto’s Regis College. She was a columnist for the Toronto Catholic Register for nine years and has contributed to Catholic World Report. Her first book, Seraphic Singles, was published by Novalis (2010) in Canada, Liguori in the USA, and Homo Dei in Poland. Her second, Ceremony of Innocence, was published by Ignatius Press (2013). Dorothy lives near Edinburgh, Scotland with her husband.
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