The hardest part is the nighttime.

I wake up at 2 am, left leg pulsating, mouth dry. The house is silent except for the muted vibrations from the hospital bed here in the living room. The front lights are on over the stoop outside causing patches of brightness to peek in the windows and leave patterns on the wooden floor. Darkness has comfortably settled everywhere else.

I’m hit with the familiar pangs of loneliness. I don’t want to wake anyone else up, not after all they do for me every day. I feel temporarily comforted by the fact that they’re all upstairs, safely tucked in bed, not far away. And then I feel sad all over again because a flight of steps might as well be a million miles.

I think of my wife, sleeping in our bed alone. I think of how long it’s been since I slept beside her. I wonder if she still keeps to the left side even though I’m not there to take up the other half. I wonder if she’s sprawled across the whole thing, hogging sheets and pillows and the thought of it makes me smile.

I make it through the day okay. It seems there’s always someone around to distract me and when I sit at the kitchen table eating breakfast with my coffee and the newspaper, I can almost forget that I’m sitting in a wheelchair. But then it’s time to get dressed and my wife washes my hair in the sink and wipes me down with a warm washcloth and it’s clear to me once again that nothing is normal anymore.

And when the pain strikes as it always seems to, the circumstances of my reality smash over me like a wave and I helplessly go under. I’m ashamed to hear the sounds that escape my throat, not those of an adult man but of a wounded animal. My howls and my yelps and the tears that spring to my eyes. If I could swallow them back down, I would but so often I have no choice. I yell and everyone comes running which is the only good thing about it.

It seems like enough, no matter what the pain level, just to have them close by. The firmness in my wife’s voice when she tells me it hasn’t been a bad day, just a bad moment, just a temporary hiccup. One daughter coaxing small pills out of a bottle, the other rubbing my shoulder. I think of what the doctor told me, that some people in my position can’t handle the pain and choose to be sedated for eight weeks at a time. It struck me as insane when I heard it but now it sounds incredibly reasonable.

I sway and I cry as my leg seizes up, a thousand burning fires running up and down, an imaginary knife in my knee, twisting deep into the bone. It pierces over and over again until finally, I feel a slight coolness as the Valium takes over. I can feel it moving, undulating down the leg from my hip. I breathe deeply, completely exhausted from the trauma. I never realized you could feel so much. I never realized you could hurt so badly.

And yet now, in the middle of the night, the pain seems far away. I’m restless but I’m alright and it’s the emotions that exhaust me. The scary places my mind goes to – what if I hadn’t gotten to the hospital when I did? What if this never ends? What if I spend the rest of my life on this hospital bed in my living room?

I never felt old until now. I never felt so knocked down and so broken. Remarkable for a man whose life has never been easy. Has been downright hard. And yet here I am, at my lowest point. Crippled and needy, despairing and humiliated. I can’t even get to the bathroom on my own. A grown adult male who needs help to pee.

The house is quiet. I glance at my watch in the dark, listen to its tiny ticks. My swollen toes poke out from under the sheets, my thigh muscles ache, itching to be used. I can make out the outline of the piano in the darkness, I hum a little bit of a song.

In a few hours, the sun will rise. My wife will scramble some eggs, my daughter will administer some antibiotics. I’ll have my coffee and the newspaper. I’ll be distracted and surrounded by the people that I love. I will almost forget what has happened to me.

But right now, the night seems so long. And the house seems so empty. My mind wanders, my leg throbs and my heart aches, so overcome am I by this new version of myself. A version I wish I never knew.