Learning to Fall

“Did you see that?!” said a big booming voice. It was Teri’s dad, standing about fifty feet behind us down the hall of the outpatient therapy gym.

My heart sank. I couldn’t look at him. Teri and I were on the linoleum floor. Her crutches were strewn to the side. She lost her balance. It happened quickly; she almost recovered. When I realized she was falling, I lowered both of us to the ground. My hand was still clutching the gait belt that was around her torso. Always use a gait belt and hold on was one of the mantras they hammered into our heads in Physical Therapy school. I had no idea I would learn why so soon after graduating.

I looked at Teri. She was laughing. My heart was in my throat. I had let a patient hit the ground. Granted, it was a slow, controlled lowering after a few failed attempts to right herself, but it was still a fall. And in the world of physical therapy, a fall is a failure. I let it happen, right before her father to boot. She was learning how to walk with Lofstrand crutches. Teri wanted more than anything to eschew her wheelchair temporarily and walk from one class to another during her school day. That seemed so far away.

Nobody was hurt. Teri thought it was hilarious. She was pointing at me and laughing her slow, almost silent laugh, which I saw at least once during every treatment. Between her traumatic brain injury and her tracheostomy, it was difficult for her to produce fluid and audible speech. She got her point across, though. Every time I wore my Doc Martin’s, she made sure to tell me they were “the ugliest fucking shoes in the world.” It endeared her to me more every time she said it. Her words were a perfect manifestation of the lack of inhibition that can accompany a traumatic brain injury (TBI). We learned about it in the abstract in school. I couldn’t have predicted my favorite shoes would be a target in real life. And it makes me wonder now, almost thirty years later, who, with a more well-functioning frontal lobe, thought the same thing but executed the proper mental checks and balances and didn’t say anything to me. In front of other people. Every time I wore them. I digress…

“I did. I saw that,” I said to Teri’s father, turning around from the floor to look at him. Just rip this damn BandAid off, I thought. I had committed a cardinal sin of physical therapy, there would be paperwork involved, and I had let her down. It was bad news.

“That was great!” he said. His face was beaming, a smile stretching from ear to ear. I could convince myself tears were welling up in his eyes. I didn’t understand. We were on the floor, and he wasn’t being sarcastic. English was his second language, and I had worked with Teri long enough to know he was caring and earnest and concerned for his teenage daughter. It was killing him to see her like this. He wasn’t making fun of her. And he didn’t appear to be angry with me.

Teri and I had started to stand up. She used the railing along the wall, and I helped as little as she needed to stand up safely. Her motor planning problems meant it would take some time and a few cues from me, yet she was doing a beautiful job and smiling through it.

My mind was divided between assisting Teri back to her feet and her father’s comment. Great. He thought it was great. In what world is a fall to the floor anything other than a negative? A failure? It didn’t compute.

“Yes, it was,” I replied. I decided to play along, despite having no idea where he was coming from.

“Every time she fell when she was in the hospital, she fell straight back. Today, she tried to catch herself. I’ve never seen that before!” He came over and gave his daughter a hug once she was back on her feet. “She’s getting better!” he said to both of us.

His face, his words, his hope brought relief to me then and tears to my eyes now. Less than a year earlier, Teri had been a typical LA teenager. At sixteen, she and her friends were new drivers, enjoying their new freedom, just like we all did. One day, a group of girls went off campus for lunch. There were too many piled in a car; seatbelts weren’t on anybody’s mind. Laughter and gossip created such a distraction that the driver mistook the gas pedal for the brake and barreled into some large inanimate object. Teri went flying from the car, suffering a life-threatening brain injury.

She made it through acute care and in-patient rehabilitation and landed with me for her outpatient rehabilitation. I was a twenty-five-year-old green-as-green could-be therapist who didn’t know that I knew very little about therapy, about life. One thing I did know is that anybody could have been in Teri’s position. We had all been in a car with too many people and too loud music and too few fastened seatbelts. It could have been any of us.

“Yes. She’s getting better,” I said to her father and to her. “You’re doing great!” I said to Teri. She pointed at me and smiled.

Today, business executives and life coaches would call what Teri’s dad exhibited a Growth Mindset. He saw his daughter’s progress. He chose to see where she was succeeding rather than where she was falling short. That lens of progress over outcome spilled over onto Teri and onto me. Yes, she fell. And she did it better than she had before. The two can co-exist.

This man wasn’t a before-his-time Tony Robbins. No. He was a father who almost lost his cherished daughter to an accident that could have claimed many other fathers’ daughters and chose to look for progress rather than for an expected outcome. For him, to have his daughter advance from a ventilator to laughing at her therapist on a linoleum floor was a win. Hands down. A huge freaking win.

The gratitude for Teri’s father that I had then for showing me a different way to track progress has only grown over the years. At the time, I was relieved that I wasn’t going to lose my job. His reframe provided comfort at that moment. I didn’t know what a gift he had given me.  How could I? I have fallen so many times in the thirty years since I met Teri—big, nasty, life-altering falls. Falls that could be deemed failures. Her father showed me that even if I was on the floor, that wasn’t the only measuring stick. If I looked at how quickly I got up or how gently I lowered myself down or how I stayed true to myself even as the ground was getting closer to my face, I was making progress. And that lens allowed me to dust myself off and try again. Just like Teri did.

A few weeks later, Teri and her father showed up at her appointment with some news. Earlier that day, she had walked from one class to another with her crutches, unassisted. A friend followed closely with her wheelchair behind her. She made it to her seat before the bell, and her classmates gave her a standing ovation. I cried when Teri told me the story. I was so proud of her and how far she’d come. I looked at her father, and he nodded his approval.

When I grabbed a tissue to wipe my tears, Teri wasn’t having it. She laughed, pointed at me, and asked, “Why do you wear those ugly fucking shoes?”