(16 of 22)
Splint boots are placed on him at night and removed in the morning. They are made of a solid piece of strong plastic and are wrapped around each foot to prevent what is called foot drop. If Reeve did not have that support, his feet would eventually droop; this keeps them at a normal angle. His wrists and fingers have splints on them every night for the same purpose.
He wears only a T shirt to sleep, so the nurses can dress and undress the wound on his backside and so they can do "the bowel program." He jokes that the bowel program, like a TV show, is on every night. "The reason we have to do it in bed is that the people who made my commode chair put the seat on sideways, and when I tried using it that way, it made my decubitus wound much worse. So one of my humiliations is that my bed is also a bathroom. You're given a suppository and what is called a dig-stim, for digital stimulation, which means that a nurse literally puts her finger up in there to make it come out. If that doesn't work, they give you a Fleet enema. I go through that every night.
"Anyway, after the ranging comes the physical therapy. We do something called E-stim. They put me in a pair of bicycle pants like the racers wear, which have electrodes in various parts. Then they place me on a bike, an exercise machine called the Stimaster. The machine puts out 50 volts of current, and it makes me move my muscles, causing contractions and extensions from the ankles all the way up to the butt muscles. I started out only being able to tolerate 10 minutes at a time. Now I'm up to an hour. We're building up strength in the calves, the quads and the thighs."
After that, Reeve is put through neck exercises--sort of neck pushups, with the head lifting up and down and the nurse holding it to provide resistance. Each exercise entails 50 repetitions. Then he rotates his head from side to side, and again the nurse resists. He does chin tucks and shoulder shrugs, in which he exercises what little movement he has in his shoulders; he raises them as high as he can, then brings them down again, also 50 times. He does a similar exercise of the scapula muscles, below the shoulder blades.
"Having a nurse do everything for you is hard," he says. "I feel I'm always imposing. I find myself saying 'I'm sorry.' I've got dry skin, and I'll often say, 'Could you take a towel and just vigorously scrub my face? I'm sorry.' Or, 'I'm sorry, but my nose is running.' But everybody's willing to help. I used to have a hard time asking. I'm better about it now. But the more I can do for myself, the better I feel."
He has to be "coughed" at intervals as well. Coughing gets rid of the mucus in his respiratory system--in his throat or sometimes deep in his lungs. A nurse holds a coughalator to his throat, which functions like a vacuum cleaner. When she removes the tubing to the ventilator, it sets off a high-pitched alarm, as in a pop-off. Then she puts in inhalers to help Reeve's lungs open and breathe.