No. I do not own the rights to this photo of the one and only Idris Elba so I am fully prepared for the copyright police to come after me but this is a risk I am willing to take for the second in my series of posts about the people in my life who have made a fundamental and sometimes unexpected impact on my life.

And yes. Idris Elba is one of those people. We’ve known each other for some time now, having met shortly after my second month-long stint in Inpatient Rehab. His impact on my life was many things. Immediate. Unexpected. Sometimes joyous. Sometimes heart breaking (like that time he got married without warning me). Rude.

But Idris’s impact on my life has always been profound. I feel (hashtag) blessed to have him beside me in this disabled life. Well. Not beside me all of the time. Most times under me. But always, always there much like Luther is always in just the right place at just the right time to miraculously solve the complex murder mystery he ran across each time I sat down to revel in his BBC OnDemand gloriousness. Idris Elba is always there for me. Even when I’ve tired of him and would prefer he go off on his own somewhere, perhaps with that wife person, and leave me alone for a little while – and yet he never does.

Idris Elba is my wheelchair.

I was eyeballs deep in The Wire when my first “official” wheelchair came into my life, that ill-fitting loaner they sent home with me from my second 35-day stint at Inpatient Rehab. I’d been measured for a “real” chair but that was on order and it would take some time for it to be delivered. Aside from the general clunkiness of that loaner chair, I could list hundreds of reasons why I hated the thing on sight. I hated that it symbolized loss to me – the loss of using my legs for what legs are supposed to be used for – things like standing and walking and eventually driving. My legs stopped doing some of those things reliably for me such that the wheelchair became more than an occasional convenience. That loaner wheelchair got no name because it didn’t feel like it deserved one. I kept trying to convince myself it was nothing more than a fluke. I didn’t really NEED this contraption, this foreign presence in my very inaccessible 150 year old home.

My mom loved sitting on the loaner chair. She would comment how it was the most comfortable chair in my old house. I sat in an overstuffed chair with my feet up on an ottoman and mom plunked herself down next to me where loaner chair sat waiting for me to stand up and slide my butt into it for carrying me to the stairlift to take a very slow ride to my second floor. The bathroom was up there. And my bedroom. At the top of the stairs sat an old school metal walker that would assist me in getting from the stairlift into the EZ Lite Cruiser that awaited me at the top of the stairs.

All of these new toys were necessary for getting me around in my beloved but not terribly practical old home. Loaner wheelchair played its part. I cursed it for the legs that were always flipping outward in the wrong direction and its seat back that didn’t really fit my body. “It’s temporary,” I told myself, not really thinking about it in the way that it was temporary UNTIL my “real” wheelchair got delivered but in the total denial way that one can still put onesself in when contemplating that first wheelchair.

I got to choose the color and look of my “real” wheelchair. I think the PT who led that process expected me to choose a wild color, a color that went with my funky haircut and colorful compression toe socks but I wanted nothing to do with wild colors. I chose black. Matte black everything. If I had to have a wheelchair, at least it would be sleek and cool and fashionable. I chose matte black, like my soul, I joked to myself. My chair would be a lightweight manual chair – easy to toss in and out of cars for all of the outside life adventures I’d be sure to have. It was officially called a  Quickie 2 lightweight manual wheelchair.

His name came to me almost immediately the second I saw his sleek blackness and general badassery. Just like Stringer Bell, my real wheelchair was all business.

I gendered my wheelchair male almost immediately. Maybe he was a man to me because I wasn’t a big fan of men in general (having been single by choice for more than 20 years). Maybe he was a man to me because some of my best friends were, in fact, men. I know. It’s a conundrum and contradictory but there you have it. But maybe it was really because if I had to have a constant wheeled companion in my life, I couldn’t think of anyone else I’d rather spend most of my waking hours with. Idris Elba would ease my pain. He could hang around temporarily because he felt good. He fit me. I’d let him stick around for awhile just like in the old days when I’d accidentally stumble across a bartender I could stand for more than 24 hours. He wouldn’t admit it but Idris was all in his feelings about my unwillingness to commit to our relationship long-term. I was impervious to his drama.

He felt good, at first but his legs and footplates didn’t elevate so he almost immediately started to cause me odd new issues like swelling of my feet and ankles when I sat on him for too long so I tended not to do that. I used Idris strictly as a transfer device. He got me from one place where I could sit with my feet propped up to another place where I could sit with my legs propped up – like on my bed.

Getting him out of the house was an ordeal that involved two ramps, one of which was the opposite of ADA-compliant. That ramp also took two full-grown human men to get me and Idris down the stairs off of my front porch without allowing both of us to end up in the cobblestone street in front of my house. Going up that ramp was terrifying but nothing compared to going down. That ramp to the outside world was so steep I’d clamp both eyes shut and white knuckle Idris’s arms the whole way down. I avoided needing to use that ramp, so Idris and I got used to hanging around inside the house except for the most necessary outings – typically a visit with Franzi (my beloved physiatrist) for a pump adjustment.

Even my front porch ramp was too complicated for us to manage on our own. That ramp only went down a slight grade to get me from the inside of my house 7″ down to my front porch. Those 7″ might as well have been 700 feet. The ramp ended so close to the top of my front porch stairs that it was nearly impossible to stop us before I risked sending me and Idris down the porch steps in a very bad way. Idris and I got used to being even more indoorsy than I was when I had two functioning legs.

On my third stay at IPR, I realized I had become one of those patients – one of the lucky few who didn’t have to use the wonky-ass wheelchairs patients typically got slapped into when they arrived at IPR. I could see the newbies eyeballing Idris, all thirsty like. He was superior and we both knew it. The thing was, I was in that hospital because we’d become convinced (my medical team and I) that my baclofen pump was malfunctioning. The device I’d gone to surgical extremes to get with the sole goal of improving my mobility wasn’t doing that. Maybe my pump wasn’t delivering that magical muscle-loosening liquid baclofen to my spine properly. Maybe there was a kink in the catheter that traveled from my pump, which lived in my abdomen, to my spinal cord on my back.

Idris and I hung out in IPR while everyone and their medical-professional brother weighed in on what the hell was going on with my pump. Until that fateful day. It was a Friday.

That was the day we finally got me in with interventional radiology to finally figure out how to fix my obviously broken baclofen pump. I went through the uncomfortable scan process that involved 5 different nurses to hold my unruly, not-bending legs on the table while the scanning took place. I remember I had to pee and being very afraid I was going to pee on that gurney before the scanning and investigating was done. All the while, Idris waited in my hospital room patiently to find out he was surely going to be rendered useless. I’m sure he was sad. He’d gotten attached to me. I mean, could you blame him?

Later that day, I sat safely back in my hospital bed, Idris parked next to me all ready for our tearful goodbyes when the interventional radiologist and Franzi popped in to tell me about my broken pump. Except for it wasn’t broken at all. No pump malfunctioning. No kink in my catheter. Nope. Nothing. The pump was working just fine. It was me that was malfunctioning. My body refusing to allow steps to take place even with my fancy intrathecal baclofen pump that was supposed to magically turn me from riding around on Idris all day to getting back to that rollator life I so longed for.

There was nothing wrong with my pump.

And on that day, something broke inside of me that I wasn’t prepared for. All of the sudden all of my logical problem-solving plans were laughing in my face. I was fundamentally broken and then I was even more broken when the torrent of tears started, whilst sitting on Idris getting this terrific news that I wouldn’t need further surgical intervention. I cried from a place inside of me that I didn’t know existed. I scared nurses and aides when the crying wouldn’t seem to stop. They called frantically for Franzi to come and intervene because I was not appearing to have it in me to stop the tears of my own volition. Weekends in IPR were terrible, that cannot be denied, but this kind of crying was more than having too much time to think on light therapy days. This kind of crying demanded fast-dissolve klonipin – the first time in my 53 years of life that I needed an emergency medication to get myself under some kind of control.

Idris watched quietly. He didn’t crowd me. He didn’t demand my attention. He was just there when I needed him, when they forced me to go to therapy with swollen, dead eyes. He carried me where I was forced to go. He whispered to me late at night when all was temporarily quiet on the hospital ward, “We’re going to have to buy a house before we leave here. We’re going to need an entirely new way of looking at our world. We’re going to be together for a very long time. Maybe forever (If we’re lucky). We can do this. It’s business. You’ll get down to it. I’ll help you. It’s business and you know how to handle business.”

I ignored him for a few days until springing into action with the world’s best realtor who found me the place I needed – that needle in the real estate haystack – where Idris and I could be together all on one floor (with an extra floor that was completely unnecessary but disabled beggers can’t be choosers). I was discharged on December 9 and delivered to this new home where all of this new wheelchair empowered life began.

Then, a new full-time job started on January 4, 2021 that I didn’t have a second to consider. Idris and me needed my job even more now that we had to live in this strange new place called the suburbs. If my company wanted me to do something completely different and freaking scary, that is exactly what we would do. We needed to get him a seat cushion upgrade because all of the sudden I was sitting on him for 9 hour work days doing video call after video call. I got him some pads for his footplates so I could stop cursing him for making my feet feel like solid blocks of ice. He is never far from my side and I’ve begrudgingly accepted him.

He enabled my new life. This was a relationship – the long-term kind I’d spent most of my adult life trying to avoid. But lately, now that spending 9 or 10 hours a day sitting on Idris has become my norm, he’s begun to hurt me.

His legs that won’t elevate mean I have to wear compression socks for 9 or 10 hours a day to keep my feet, ankles and calves from swelling to dangerous levels. His inability to recline makes my body hurt. His need for me to use my arms (and my back and my neck) to move us around this crazy new house in the suburbs means I am in constant, high levels of pain. The kind of pain people take serious drugs to relieve but I’m not willing to do that so pain has become my other constant companion alongside with Idris.

Because of this pain and the reality of this life Idris and I live together, we don’t leave the house much at all. We’ve gotten used to it, together, with some kind of strange peace taking over but that peace doesn’t distract me from the constant pain. Pain that he doesn’t cause, per se, but pain Idris exacerbates even when I know it’s the last thing he really wants. He doesn’t want to hurt me. He just wants to enable me. But he’s not Luther and he’s not Stringer Bell so he is, in fact, limited by his metal frame and manual wheels.

Idris has done everything he can do for me. It’s coming to the time when he is going to be replaced. It could happen as soon as next week!

My new power wheelchair is on its way. I’m not saying I’m not going to miss Idris’s manual reliability. I’m not going to say that I’m not completely overwhelmed and intimidated by the idea that this new chair will change literally everything for me. I am going to say how fortunate I am to get the chance to have my life turned upsidedown (again) and maybe this time the upside will outweigh the downside. The downside of saying goodbye to Idris.

He will always be my first. The one that taught me to see him as enabling, not giving up. The one who helped me to finally see that walking isn’t my goal, won’t ever be my goal again, and that’s somehow got to be OK. Lots of disabled people live actual joyous lives without ever even standing up.

Idris was there for me when I needed him. And he’s still going to be around for those times when I might need him again. We’re in it for the long haul – even if he’s about to get upstaged by a whole bunch of amazing bells and whistles. Idris was and is always there for me. That will never change. I’m grateful.

I’m also kind of excited because I’ve read that he’s FINALLY being considered for playing the next James Bond. That will be nice for him, I think. I would hate to think about all of that amazingly useful hotness going to waste.

Photograph: Art Streiber