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Reeve remained in intensive care at U.Va. for a month. Then he went to the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, New Jersey, where his therapy began. "I still had an infection in my lungs," he says. "I couldn't eat very much. I'd lost a lot of weight. I dropped from 215 to about 190. My hemoglobin, which should be around 13 or 14, was down to 9. My protein levels were low. I looked gaunt. I was too fragile for rehab yet."
He began to become a student of his own disability. He started to keep track of his numbers--the various counts and levels that monitor his condition. "They would tell me these numbers as a way to motivate me," he says, "because I'm competitive. If you tell me that I'm a 2.7 and I should be at a 4.0, I'll try to do something about that."
At Kessler he began to accept the fact that he was going to spend a long time in an institution. Because of his celebrity, he was given a single room, for which he was grateful, but it made him feel isolated from the other patients. Two security guards were posted outside. Reeve's first "pop-off" occurred in that room. A pop-off happens when the trach is not secure. Unless one is used to breathing off the vent, breathing is impossible.
"It came off in the evening. The alarm is sounding on my vent, and I'm making this clicking noise with my throat--clk, clk, clk--and the security guy comes in and asks, 'Are you all right, Mr. Reeve?' The vent is screaming, and I'm clicking. All he needed to do was put the hose back in place, but I guess his instructions were that his job was security, so he goes off to get a nurse. Now I've missed maybe four, five, six breaths. You don't feel pain when this happens; you feel panic. I only felt a tingling in my knees. I thrashed around. I wanted air. I was like a tuna fish landed in a boat, rolling around with the hook still in my mouth.
"After the nurse came in and fixed me up, I made a joke that from now on I would always check the footwear of the nurses to make sure they were wearing sneakers. I wouldn't want them to slip and fall on the way to the rescue. But the first time... trying to point with my head where the pop-off was...the feeling of helplessness. I've never been helpless."
Pop-offs did not become routine, but eventually he lost the sense of panic when they occurred. Everything new that was part of his treatment came with its own attendant fear, which was enlarged by his imagination. He was learning one of the penalties of living solely in one's thoughts. Merely the idea of being put in the shower terrified him. "I thought, 'What if something happens to the vent in the shower?' 'What if the water gets into the trach tube?' And so on. To get you into the shower, they've got a kind of hammock to which they transfer you from the bed, and you're lying there in a kind of net. I was afraid of being rocked as they moved me. I was afraid of the water getting over me. I don't know what my fear was, but I seemed so vulnerable, like going on this huge, terrifying adventure."