Artie
Due to their busy schedules, it took nearly the entire time between Thanksgiving and Christmas break to film the documentary's introduction. They worked on it every chance they got, usually in the evenings when neither was too slammed with homework or late-night studying.
Artie also had to find time to squeeze in an appointment for another MRI. The new doctor he'd found through the university could see him before the holidays, but only if he managed to schedule and get the MRI results sent over in plenty of time. Luckily, he'd made that appointment and gone and gotten it taken care of. He was trusting that the results would make it there in time for the appointment with the new orthopedic surgeon.
Adulting was hard.
Unlike Sam's documentary, which was going to be fairly short, even after Julie filmed and included scenes from their spring competition, Artie's documentary was truly meant to stretch on for the new couple of years, cumulating with the competition in 2016. It went unsaid between the couple, but unless they remained close for that whole period of time, this project would end up being an unfinished one.
This was truly a scary thing for Artie, when he recalled that he'd all but promised Kitty he wouldn't get serious about another girl in college. That he was supposed to be casually dating, but not seriously falling for anyone. How naive he had been to think that was how this would go? He hadn't expected to like Julie this much. Meanwhile, Artie didn't know if things between Kitty and Ryder were still casual or not. It was possible that, while he was worrying about this, Ryder and Kitty were getting closer, too. He wouldn't know, because that would require him to at least call or text Kitty, and every spare moment he had went to working on this film with Julie.
They were in Julie's dorm on the Thursday night before holiday break, working on the voiceover for the introduction. She had her equipment set up all over her side of the dorm room, taking up a vast majority of her space. Her roommate had been kind enough to leave them alone to work, which allowed them the privacy to try and finish the introduction today, by recording and adding in the voiceover.
Previously, they'd shot a few scenes of Artie wheeling in the falling snow flurries, on the few days of snow they'd had. Julie had done a couple close-ups of his gloved hands on his wheels, pushing as snow fell around him. She planned to do some more like that later, when the weather warmed up again, to capture him 'wheeling through the seasons,' as she'd put it. Then there were shots of him wheeling into and out of the locker room. Him wheeling to the edge of the pool. Him transferring from chair to pool. (He'd been nervous to watch that. He'd never actually seen what he looked like when he transferred, but it wasn't as bad as he thought.) She mixed in shots of his long strokes in the pool, arms reaching expertly in the water. And then some shots of him drying off and getting back into his chair. (Again, this looked better in real life than he'd imagined.)
"So," she said. "I think I like the way this is turning out already. Now, are you ready to record the voiceover?"
He hadn't followed through with sending her his script, just because it had taken him some time to stop and put it down in writing. He'd only just completed this task the day before meeting up to film it.
"Let me read through once first without recording," Artie said, nervously eyeing the printed page he had in his hand. He'd yet to even scratch the surface on this topic with people he knew, and now he'd written down more details than he'd ever really shared with anyone.
Julie was a professional through and through. "Let's do a run-through, yeah," she agreed, sitting back in her director's chair and adjusting the cute blue framed glasses she'd started wearing from time to time, which had prompted Artie to give his eyes a break from contacts every now and then, and also wear his own chunky black frames.
"Hi, my name is Artie Abrams," he began. "I'm a freshman at Ohio State University. As you can see, I'm also a wheelchair user. I didn't start out on this path in life, but I'm here now, and with any luck, I hope to make it to Rio in 2016 to compete in the Paralympics as a swimmer."
He didn't dare to look up at first. He went on reading like she wasn't even there listening.
"For the first eight years and nine months of my life," he went on. "I was a pretty typical kid. My journey began at the start of Thanksgiving break, 2002. My mom was driving me to day two of the state club soccer tournament, where my team would be competing for the title of state champions. But Mom and I never made it there that day."
He finally stole a peek at Julie, looking up from the page. She was leaning forward, perched on the edge of her director's chair, looking intently at him. "How much detail should I go into?" he asked.
"How-However much you feel comfortable with," she stammered, straightening up in her seat and then leaning back again, in an effort to appear casual.
"Okay," Artie cast his eyes back down and continued to read what he'd originally put down. "I only have a few memories of the day itself, just memories of getting ready to leave that morning. I guess that part sticks because I really liked wearing my uniform. Mom took a few pictures of me in the backyard before we left. I kicked the ball around the yard a few times with my dad and my sister, too. We didn't know that would be the last time, but I'm glad we did it. I remember nothing of the car ride or the actual accident. I'm told a truck ran a light. The driver wasn't doing anything he shouldn't have done, like drinking or texting. He just ran it by mistake. But his mistake changed my entire life..."
Artie trailed off.
"What?" Julie asked him.
"It's too melodramatic, isn't it?"
"Artie, no," There she went, using his name again, per her habit. She straightened her glasses and, studying the page over his shoulder, saw that it went on for quite some time. "It's real. I want you to include the whole story, as much detail as you can, if you feel okay about doing that. We could maybe add some... I don't know, would you feel comfortable adding, like, some pictures of you in your soccer uniform?"
"We have pictures of the car, too," Artie added. "And of me in the hospital. I mean, I don't mind using any of those, if it will help to tell the story."
"If you don't mind," Julie said.
"No, I don't mind. Anyway..." He cast his eyes down at the page and picked up where he left off. "I broke my back and several ribs, plus my right wrist, and one of my lungs collapsed. My heart stopped on the way to the hospital, but they revived me in the ambulance. The main thing, though, was that the break damaged my spinal cord, but thankfully, that injury was low enough not to impair my hand movements. We gradually found out that I wasn't going to regain any feeing or movement below my waist. We had to wait for my wrist to heal for me to really begin doing therapy and for me to learn to push my own chair. That's when I met Javier, who would be my physical therapist for the next four years. Shout out to Javier, if you ever see this, because you saved my life. Thanks for pushing me the way you did, and thanks for encouraging me to explore my other passions, like music. If I go to Rio and if I win any medals, those are dedicated to you, man."
Artie looked up from reading off the page and noticed Julie was trying to hide the fact that she was crying a little as she took off her glasses and wiped tears away. He just averted his eyes, immediately feeling awkward about the whole thing, just as he'd expected he would. He barely knew this girl. What was he doing?
"So, uh," Julie composed herself and he pretended he'd never noticed. "This Javier guy. We could use that, too. Do you still know him? Maybe he'd give us an interview?"
"He lives in Colorado now," Artie replied, adjusting the glasses he was wearing that day. "We keep in touch. I'm sure he'd record something for me if I asked him to."
Julie nodded. "Well, okay," she said. "You ready to record this?"
"There he is!" Zach almost always heard Artie's wheels coming, which meant that Artie never had to announce his presence to the guy the way others did. Artie was about five minutes late, arriving at their usual meeting spot in the library on that Friday morning before the Christmas holidays.
"Sorry," Artie replied, breathlessly. "I know we have a lot of work to do. Let's get started."
"Did that girl hold you up again?"
Artie paused. "Uh, a little," he confessed.
Zack laughed. "You're fired."
At this, Artie laughed too. "Okay, also," he went on. "The fact that someone illegally parked in my space didn't help either." He then noticed Zack's forehead was cut up. "What happened to your face, man?"
"Oh, someone didn't take care of a bunch of low-hanging tree branches," Zack replied, gingerly touching the bandaids on his forehead. "The nurse who fixed me up was nice, though. She sounded kind of cute."
Artie raised his eyebrows, then remembered Zack couldn't see his expression. "Uh, you win."
Zack just laughed. "Okay, so I have to knock out ten problems," he said. "The assignment says twenty, but if I hand in ten, they said that's plenty."
Artie nodded, then remembered to say, "Okay." It was harder than he could have ever imagined, to work out college algebra problems when you were almost completely blind, as was the case for Zack. Artie described the position of the numbers carefully, with each step. Luckily, Zack was a good student, but it was still hard. It made Artie appreciative, during times like these, that nothing about his own disability had made his school work hard for him.
When they finally finished the ten problems, Zack leaned back in his chair, propped his feet on the table, and thrust his fist in the air in a perfect impression of Judd Nelson in the breakfast club. Artie began to sing the theme song a little, as Zack chuckled, catching the reference.
"So, can I ask you something?" Artie couldn't believe he was doing this, but Zack had never explained and he was feeling curious. "What happened? I know you weren't born blind."
"Yeah, because I don't do this..." Zack did his Stevie Wonder impression, moving his head from side to side and looking upwards. "Unless I want to mess with people. Then I do that."
"Well, I wasn't born with my disability either."
"No, I gathered that," Zack said.
"How?" Artie wondered.
Zack shrugged. "Just a hunch I had about you," he said. "Anyway, I have this condition called Retinitis Pigmentosa. It's genetic, but my parents didn't know they both had the gene 'til they had me. And we didn't know I was gonna go blind until I was around 12. That's when they realized I'd always been night blind. Then my vision started to go gradually during my teens years. I drove a car for a couple months, til we realized I needed to stop or I was gonna hurt someone. Right now, it's still not totally gone. I still see shadows and outlines. But it probably will be eventually."
"Wow..." Artie didn't know what to say. Being on the receiving end of the story was new for him.
"Okay, your turn," was Zack's reply.
"A car accident, when I was eight," Artie supplied, as Zack just nodded, letting Artie leave it at that.
"That was a lot simpler to explain," Zack observed.
"It really was," Artie admitted. "Do you want a ride today?" Zack lived near campus, at home with his parents, and Artie gave him rides anytime he could.
"No, thanks, Dana is meeting me here," he said, referring to his longtime girlfriend who was also an OSU student. "You going out with Julie tonight?"
"Not tonight," Artie admitted, for he was picking up Sam and he had other plans for the rest of the day. Julie didn't have class on Friday, so she had already hopped a plane to Arizona for the holidays.
"Well, hey, if I don't see you, happy holidays, man."
"Happy holidays," Artie said, shaking hands with the other guy before taking his leave. It was pretty cool that someone actually paid him, just to hang out with this awesome guy and help him out.
"So, if this doctor contradicts the doctor you've seen since you were eight, you're just gonna go with what he says?" Sam asked, incredulously. He was waiting with Artie at yet another appointment.
Artie knew that Sam had a lot of other things he could be doing. He was missing a swim practice, for one thing, and it was the last one before break, at that. At least finals were over now, and Artie could rest in the assurance that his friend was not blowing off school to be there.
Artie also knew Sam, no matter what the circumstances were, wouldn't be talked out of being his "Emotional Support Human," or at least, that was the term he'd used.
"Possibly," Artie said. "I guess it all depends on what he says and how well he can explain it." He sighed. "My doctor's getting older, Sam. I just wasn't sure if I still wanted to trust him. Could you please sit down? You're making me nervous."
Sam had been pacing. When Artie said that, he immediately sat, leaning forward on his knees then and taking out his phone to play with it. Artie just shrugged and did the same, until finally the doctor, who had been reviewing Artie's new MRI, appeared.
"Mr. Abrams," he said. "I'm Dr. Sheffield. Very pleased to meet you. I'll get right to it, though, I've reviewed both this MRI and the one from September. In three months' time, I've already seen further progression of this curvature, and I don't like what I'm seeing."
Artie's jaw dropped as Sam jumped to his feet to look at the two pictures that the doctor put on the lighted wall. "You're... you're saying it already got worse?"
"Yes, and bracing may slow that down but it wouldn't change anything," he said. "In my opinion, surgery to revise the rods and screws is indicated. In the meantime, I do recommend you get yourself back into regular therapy. The university has a clinic that could take you on as a patient. I'll write the prescription for that, and we can talk about when you'd like to schedule the surgery."
The color left Artie's face just then. Sam's, too, for that matter. He promptly sat and put his head down, between his knees, as though he was feeling faint just then. Artie looked from his friend back to the doctor.
"Well, can it wait until summer?" Artie wanted to know. "Because I have a whole semester of classes, I have a job... I can't just... stop everything right now."
"With therapy, for now, I think we could hold off until then," said Dr. Sheffield. "But I do think it's going to be essential for you to do this, if you still want to pursue your plans for the Paralympics."