Just Pretend You're Dead

This advice has been proffered for two vastly different circumstances.

First, the dreaded grizzly bear attack. I first heard this when I was 6 or 7 years old and preparing for my first camping trip. “Pretend you’re dead” an older cousin counseled sagely. I of course listened breathlessly to my cousin’s crisis cookbook on dealing with everything from the boogie man to that grizzly; wisdom meant to save my life in the wilds of central Ohio. At the time, this little Buckeye girl had no idea that the odds were better that I’d meet the boogie man in those Ohio fields.

I’ve moved west. Black bears are more common in my part of the country than grizzlies although their numbers are dwindling. Now, in the unlikely event that I ever do find myself facing an imminent bear attack, I have that childhood strategy to rely on; curl up on the ground in a tight little ball to protect my mushy parts and lay motionless. The thinking goes that the bear will believe you to be dead and bears are not interested in eating dead food. I don’t know if it’s true or not and I hope to never find out.

The second situation in which I was advised to consider this strategy is the dreaded public “invol.” This is one of those nasty little spinal cord injury secrets that we tend to share only with those that know the secret handshake and password to the club. “Invol” is short hand for involuntary bowel movement. I am a T-10 paraplegic. That means that from my mid-chest down I have no sensation or voluntary control. Code for I can’t tell when I have to ‘go.’

The general public believes that the worst part about having a SCI is that we can’t walk. On my list of all the individual attributes of my SCI that I would change if I could, walking barely makes the top 10. Spots one and two are owned by “one” and “two;” return of voluntary bladder and bowel function. I pee through a tube (a catheter) on a rigid schedule. Pooping is an ugly ritual that I leave to your imagination. However, as the saying goes, “shit happens.” Usually it happens at the most inopportune time. Fear of “going” in public keeps a number of people with neurological injuries locked safely away at home.

It was a frank discussion with another person with a spinal cord injury where the sage advice of my childhood was resurrected. We exchanged tips and stories of life in a chair when the subject turned to the dreaded invol. I shared my one and only story and he told me his. His was more public and contained a higher embarrassment factor than mine. Then, in that way that all the more poignant because it is such a casually spoken bald truth, he said to me “I’ve learned how to deal with it though.” He winked and smiled; “just pretend you’re dead.” We laughed but it stuck with me. This handsome young man, doctor-to-be struck by fate and now learning some of life’s more bitter lessons.

“Just pretend you’re dead.” Maybe spinal cord injury and grizzly bear attacks have more in common than I’d first realized. Both are sudden, unexpected and life altering. If survived, both leave a lot of room for second-guessing and “what if’s” Both tear through any illusion that life is fair, orderly and predictable. I suspect too that there may be some commonality in the area of public invol.