The View From Standing Up

This week, after five months in a wheelchair, I started learning how to walk again.

I had no idea what that actually meant.

Walking is one of those things you never think about until your body stops knowing how to do it. You stand up. You move forward. Your brain gives the order and your body follows.

Until it doesn’t.

Five months ago, I hit the ground and tried to stand back up.

I knew immediately something was very wrong.

So I laid back down.

And I remember telling myself one thing:

Ben, you are going to be positive about this.

I had no fucking idea what I was asking of myself.

Since then, I have been airlifted off this mountain three times. On one of those flights, a pulmonary embolism stopped my heart. I was resuscitated before being flown down.

There is no version of recovery I could have imagined that included any of this.

And there is something else I never understood until now.

Learning to walk again is fucking hard.

Not metaphorically.

Physically.

The muscles are gone. The balance is different. My knee barely bends. My ankle doesn’t move the way it should. Movements that were automatic for fifty-two years now require concentration.

My brain remembers walking.

My body is still catching up.

Today I put a shoe on my right foot for the first time since the accident.

That sounds ordinary.

It wasn’t.

Five months of muscle loss have changed the weight and balance of my leg. Without the strength that used to control it, everything feels heavier. Add a shoe and it becomes a pendulum I have to relearn how to manage.

How far to lift my foot.

Where to place it.

How to shift my weight.

How to catch myself before I tip.

For fifty-two years, I put on a shoe without thinking.

Today it changed the physics of walking.

That is the part nobody tells you.

You aren’t just retraining a limb.

You’re relearning where your body exists in space.

The timing of everything matters.

The embolism. Cardiac arrest. Hospitalizations. Procedures. Missed therapy. Canceled transport. Systems that didn’t communicate.

All of it landed during the exact window I should have been rebuilding strength, motion, and balance.

Meanwhile, the bone kept healing.

Last week I was told the fracture has healed well.

That should have felt like a finish line.

It didn’t.

An X-ray can confirm bone healing.

It can’t confirm recovery.

My knee barely bends. My ankle is still locked. Months without consistent rehabilitation have left stiffness and scar tissue.

The bone healed.

Now I have to make the rest work.

On August 27 I see a knee specialist. One option that has been discussed is manipulation under anesthesia. I would be put under while the knee is moved through a range of motion it can no longer achieve on its own. I’ve been told the recovery afterward can be extremely painful.

And I can’t help looking back.

Missed appointments. Canceled rides. Gaps in therapy. Broken communication between systems that were supposed to be coordinating care.

How much of this was preventable?

I don’t know.

But it’s part of the record.

Recovery has also become more than a part-time job.

I spent all last week coordinating this week.

Appointments. Transportation. Physical therapy. Occupational therapy. Referrals. Confirmations.

Then watching pieces move, get canceled, or fall apart after everything was arranged.

All of it while also dealing with a lawsuit surrounding the foundation, trying to work, rebuilding my body, and trying to keep a life intact.

Eventually, you become your own case manager.

Nobody trains you.

Nobody asks.

The fucking job just appears.

And some days the desk is a wheelchair.

For the last two months, most of my life outside the house has happened from that chair.

You notice everything from that height.

What is actually accessible.

What only pretends to be.

Cracked pavement. High counters. Bathrooms that don’t fit the symbol on the door.

You notice how people talk to you, or don’t.

You notice when they talk to the person standing beside you instead of talking to you.

You notice when you disappear from the conversation entirely.

Then you stand up again.

And the world changes height.

Today brought another version of that shift.

Less than thirty minutes before 11:00, I learned I had an appointment I didn’t know existed.

I made it.

Then I traveled down the front side of the mountain to Redlands for another specialist visit.

Another trip down the hill.

Another doctor.

Another part of my body.

Today it was my left hand.

My index finger and thumb have remained severely restricted since the injury.

That matters in ways I’m still learning to understand.

I build things. I write. I type. I draw. I play guitar.

A hand is not a small fucking thing when your life runs through it.

Today we took new X-rays.

The strange part is that some of the most dramatic injuries are not always the limiting ones.

My clavicle was badly broken.

It has healed.

My leg has healed.

The bones did their job.

But function is another story.

Healing and working are not the same thing.

The hand specialist told me today that occupational therapy and focused therapy for my hand are mandatory. He is putting that process in motion in addition to the physical and occupational therapy I have already been dealing with locally.

He also told me he could request pain management for me because, after all of this, I still do not have it.

So that becomes another layer.

Another referral.

Another appointment.

Another phone call.

Another step in a process that has never felt linear.

There are still questions I don’t have answers to.

What can be done for the stiffness in my hand.

What recovery looks like for my knee.

How much movement I can get back.

What my body is going to require next.

I’m not going to pretend I know before the doctors do.

Some things are facts.

Some things are unknowns.

Right now, I have both.

These Field Notes are becoming a record of that distinction.

Not the polished version.

The record.

The X-rays. The appointments. The helicopters. The failures in coordination. The people who showed up. The people who didn’t. The things that worked. The things that didn’t.

And the small victories that would have been invisible five months ago.

Putting on a shoe.

Standing beside a wheelchair.

Taking a few steps.

Meeting someone at eye level again.

I used to think recovery meant healing.

I don’t anymore.

Healing is biological.

Recovery is reconstruction.

It’s learning what still works.

What doesn’t.

What can be rebuilt.

What has to be relearned.

What you fight for.

What you accept.

And what you refuse to give up.

I never expected walking to be one of the hardest parts of this.

But maybe that’s the fucking point.

You don’t understand the structure of an ordinary life until it breaks.

Walking. Driving. Opening a door. Using your hands. Putting on a shoe. Getting to an appointment. Going to the store without planning it like an operation.

When it works, it disappears.

When it doesn’t, it becomes everything.

Five months ago, I hit the ground.

I tried to stand.

I couldn’t.

This week, I stood again.

Not the way I used to.

Not without pain.

Not without help.

And not without a long road ahead.

But I fucking stood.

Change isn’t what happens to you.

It’s what you build when going back is no longer an option.

This week, I started learning to walk again.

That feels like something worth writing down.