ROPEIK: A leg up

It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your leg is?

At this moment, I can honestly say I have no idea. For the past couple of months, my left leg has been quite literally out of sight, out of mind. If it's stretched out hidden behind my laptop screen, like it is now, I can't get a fix on its exact location. If it's under a blanket, I might search for it with my right foot and find I was two feet off. No pun intended.

I know it's there, of course, and I do have a general idea of where I left it, but if I can't see it, the most hardwired part of my brain &- the part that controls the nerves that are supposed to connect to my errant limb &- just isn't quite certain.

I'm a classics major and a student of journalism. My most intensive forays into science to date are the fact that I downloaded the Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking remixes off of YouTube. Nerves are cool, I guess, but high school psychology was a long time ago, and until the first day of my current little life detour, all I could have told you with certainty about my neurological system was that axons are a thing.

Over the past two months, however, I have learned more about nerves than I ever would have wanted to in a million years. I have learned about Brown-Séquard syndrome (first from my doctors and then in a follow-up session with Wikipedia) and why it's doing what it's doing to my lower two-thirds. I've learned the names of bones I can't pronounce and the difference between flexors and extensors. I've learned I have what one physical therapist called a "sexy diagnosis" &- the kind of thing you might see on "House."

Basically, here's the deal: A partial cut to the left side of your spine affects nerves on both sides of your body, because half the nerves cross over and half go straight down. On the left side, the nerve damage was deep and direct, cutting off control of my muscles and numbing everything but pain sensations. On the right, the motor is fine, but any pain sensation is gone, including temperature. On the whole, my right leg feels like it's asleep, but my left leg feels like I slept on it, in the way that cuts off circulation and means it takes a few minutes before you can move again.

Sexy, right? Except instead of minutes, I've spent the past eight weeks retraining the muscles in my left leg to get back up to their old tricks. I have to admit it's been pretty amazing watching myself go from being unable to move or feel my left leg at all on day two to being able to try using just one crutch to walk in physical therapy. All the doctors say I will probably walk unaided in due time.

So on the whole, things are looking up. I've learned a lot about the way my brain and muscles and nerves work, I've gotten more exercise than ever before in my life combined and I've managed to find an untapped well of resilience within myself. It's all very interesting, to say the least. But in the back of my mind, I can't help thinking it would be a lot more interesting if it was happening to someone else. Maybe on TV.

There was a time when I felt like a witness to my own circumstances, when I devoted a lot of energy to detachment. One of my main problems-turned-coping mechanisms was the conundrum of how to refer to The Leg. "Bad leg" is strictly forbidden in hospital vernacular, but my brain seemed somehow resistant to calling it "my leg," at least at first, until I had a bit of a better physiological lock on it. So it became "the leg," or to some of my physical therapists, "our friend" and "the boss." It became it¸ not just an object but an anthropomorphized entity. It developed a personality &- and sometimes an attitude. "Bring that guy over here," my therapist would say, "and try not to use your hands to help." "He won't come with!" I'd say, as my top half moved and the leg remained behind.

Of course, at this point I've pretty much mentally re-assimilated the leg into the rest of me. It's been a better team player lately, doing what it's told, picking up its toes, not freaking out in spasms (think uncontrollable nervous jiggle) more often than is warranted. Now, it's usually just an it, not an it. But there are still those moments when it gets out of sight, when that familiar feeling of absence returns, and it doesn't matter how much I've learned about nerves. All I can do is think of my leg as a little troublemaker who needs a stern talking-to before he'll behave again.