A month after I finished high school, I got a call one afternoon from Dr. Wilson, a long-time friend of my family who directed the physical therapy department at a large Denver hospital. She needed a favor.
"Bill, I have a patient who needs some help tonight, and I thought you might be able to provide it. Her name is Patricia, she's a student at the University of Denver, and she's a quadriplegic—her arms and legs are paralyzed. She was training for the Olympics as a diver a few years ago when she missed a dive and landed on the diving board head-first.
"She's been my patient several years. Her family is wealthy, she has her own apartment, and she usually has a full-time male aide to take care of her. But her aide's father died this morning, and she's flown home to help his family for a few days.
"I've arranged another aide to take care of Patricia until her regular aide returns, but the replacement can't start until tomorrow morning. Patricia can't take care of herself. I wonder if you might be willing to take care of her tonight. The pay is $100 cash, and I'm sure you can use the money."
I could indeed—it was the early 70s, and that was nearly a week's pay—I was earning $2.72 an hour in my daytime job. I'd worked at a hospital as an orderly during summers and weekends for several years, and I thought I could manage, so I got the address from Dr. Wilson. She told me to show up about eight that evening. However, despite my self-confidence, I hadn't had much contact with paralyzed people before (I worked in the x-ray department), and I was pretty anxious.
Patricia lived in a penthouse apartment in a very nice area on University Avenue, a few blocks from her school. A guy I thought very cool opened the door—she was wearing the long hair, beard, and hippy-style clothes I admired at the time. Patricia was sitting in her wheelchair in a big living room, surrounded by four college friends. She was wispy thin, with the long blond hair that was popular then, a tan California surfer sort of face with prominent cheekbones and a long but narrow nose, and a wry, twisty sort of smile, like an ironic Mona Lisa.
They were passing around a joint. When it reached Patricia, one of the guys placed it between her wrists at the base of her thumbs. She brought the joint to her lips and inhaled. It seemed that while she was a quadriplegic, she still had a little use of several large arm muscles, though not of her fingers. She could breathe on her own, and she could talk fine and had full control of her neck. It could have been worse. Easy to say.
I was offered my share of the joint, and then of the next one. The friends talked and laughed and listened to music for an hour—a new Hendrix album. Then they left. It was nice of them to help Patricia until I arrived, and a lot of my anxiety had gone up in smoke and gone down with a snifter of Courvoisier cognac.
Oh, did I mention that while I had worked in a hospital for several years and seen naked flashes of hundreds of partially clothed people, I was still a virgin? I'd kissed a couple girls and even seen one naked once, but that was it—not even oral.
Patricia and I talked on for awhile, and then she said, "Well, we'd better get me ready for bed. You're new to this, so it will take longer than usual."
"What do we need to do?" I asked as I wheeled her into her bedroom. It was a huge room, or seemed that way to me, with a hospital bed in the middle and a big sliding glass door with curtains drawn across it.
"First I need my shower," Patricia said.
This hadn't occurred to me. She would need to bathe. I had somehow thought I would essentially be taking care of a girl who was confined to bed, just feeding her, turning her, doing this and that. I wasn't sure I liked the idea of bathing her. But then again, what was I thinking? It might be interesting. "How do we do it?" I asked.
"In the bathroom there's a white plastic chair on wheels. Bring it out here. Take my clothes off. Lift me from my wheelchair into my shower chair, then put me in the shower and wash me."
I got the shower chair. Pulling Patricia's tie-dyed t-shirt over her head wasn't hard. She was slim and tan, rather than bony-looking, but not muscled, of course. Paralyzed limbs lose muscle tone and are quite flaccid. Getting her pants off was harder. She was wearing jeans. I had to put my arm around her, lift her a little, and pull the jeans down. It was strange. She was my patient, but she was definitely a girl. Her breasts were tiny, barely pushing out her chest, though she was definitely female and lovely in an attenuated way.
"Careful pulling down my jeans," Patricia said. "Watch out for my catheter bag, or there will be a mess."
This surprised me, but of course, as she was a quadriplegic, she'd need a catheter bag. She couldn't control her urine. The bag turned out to be a small one strapped to her calf. At her direction, I disconnected it, emptied it into the toilet, then got out a new one from a cupboard.
I was surprised to find that she was wearing boxer shorts. The catheter tube disappeared up the leg. "The boxer shorts make it easier to get things on and off," she explained, "and they are less constricting." I lifted her again and pulled them off, sliding them under her little bottom and down her legs. There exposed was her pubic hair and lips, with a slim rubber catheter tube coming out from them, connected in turn to a clear plastic tube.
"Okay," Patricia said, "now you need to deflate the bulb on the catheter and pull it out." Was sort of familiar with this. I hadn't done it, but I'd seen nurses put catheters in men. I got a syringe, stuck it into the catheter bulb tube, deflated the balloon, and slowly pulled the catheter out of Patricia's urethra. It didn't seem to hurt her at all. "I don't usually need it removed," she said, "but it's changed weekly, and this is the time."
I wheeled her into the large shower stall, close to six feet square, with a curtain around it. There was a shower head on a flexible hose.
"I don't mean to embarrass you, Bill," Patricia said, "but if you do this with all your clothes on, you are going to get completely soaked. My usual aide always joins me in the shower. It's easier that way. Just pretend you're in the locker room."
"Okay," I said. I started undressing, feeling rather embarrassed as Patricia watched me, smiling. I was tall, about 6'2", but not much bigger around than Patricia—barely 170 pounds, with a hairless tan chest and white elsewhere. Indeed, we seemed to be close to the same size, but her legs and arms were thinner and of course flaccid. "Just don't let me get a hard-on," I prayed.
But my prayer wasn't answered. I couldn't help it. I started getting an erection when I unzipped my jeans, and by the time I pulled off my underwear I was rock-hard.
