Chapter 15: The Stimulator
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Valentine's Day, 2023.
I was lying in a hospital bed, one day post-op, with wires running into my spine and a remote control in my hand that looked like something from a 90s sci-fi movie. And I was recording a video on my phone, trying not to cry.
Not from pain. From relief.
See, for the year before that surgery, I was essentially homebound. My Google location data told the story — 92% of my time, I was at home. Not by choice. By imprisonment. My own body had become a cage within a cage.
The spasms were relentless. Six to eight seconds each, rolling through me all day, every day. Imagine someone grabbing your muscles and twisting them like a wet towel, over and over, without warning. You can't plan around it. You can't schedule it. You just live in constant anticipation of the next one.
I had tried everything. Pills that made me a zombie. Pills that made me someone else. Nothing worked.
So I stopped going out.
The logic was simple: I didn't want to be a chore for anybody around me. So I thought best to just keep to myself.
That's what I told myself, anyway. The truth was messier. I was embarrassed. I was exhausted. I was watching the world continue without me from my couch, with Delta curled up at my side, wondering if this was just... it.
Let me tell you what 92% homebound actually looks like, because that statistic is clean in a way the reality is not.
It looks like canceling on people so many times they stop asking. It looks like watching your friends' lives happen in Instagram squares while you're on your couch in the same spot you were yesterday. It looks like ordering everything — food, clothes, entertainment — to your door because leaving means calculating the spasm risk, the catheter schedule, the chair accessibility of wherever you're going, the energy cost of explaining to whoever you're with why you just seized in the middle of a restaurant.
And slowly, quietly, without any dramatic announcement, your world gets smaller. Not all at once. It's gradual enough that you can almost convince yourself it's normal. You tell yourself you're being responsible. Practical. That you're not burdening people.
But you're disappearing. And the scary part is you can do it so efficiently that nobody around you even notices.
Delta noticed. Dogs always notice. She'd curl up next to me on the couch and just stay there, solid and warm, like she was running a one-animal vigil service. I don't know what I would've done without that dog in that year. I genuinely don't want to think about it.
Then someone mentioned the spinal cord stimulator.
I'd heard of them. Vaguely. The way you hear about things you file under probably not for me and move on. This time I actually listened.
My pain management doctor sat me down and explained it the way you explain something to someone who's been let down by medicine enough times to be a hostile audience. He was careful. He didn't oversell it. He said it wouldn't cure anything. He said it was a tool, not a solution. He said it worked for some people and didn't work for others, and we wouldn't know which category I fell into until we tried it.
I respected that. After years of people promising things that didn't deliver, someone saying I don't know, let's find out felt almost radical.
The science is this: the device sends electrical signals to your spinal cord that interrupt the pain signals before they reach your brain. Your cord is already broken — the signals are already misfiring. The stimulator essentially steps in front of that chaos and says: not today. It's not healing the damage. It's rerouting around it. It's the electrical equivalent of a detour. The kind of engineering solution that makes me think the people who develop this stuff are the actual heroes of the medical world — not the ones who discover things, but the ones who figure out clever ways around the things that can't be fixed.
I was skeptical. I'd been promised miracles before. The medical system is full of well-meaning people offering solutions that work great in theory and somewhere between 40 and 60 percent in practice, and you're supposed to be grateful for the partial win.
But I was also desperate enough to try. That's a particular kind of desperation, by the way — not the frantic, dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind where you've already accepted that things aren't going to be perfect, but you're still holding out for better, because you've been in the same bad place long enough that better sounds like a miracle.
There's a trial period first. They put in temporary leads — thin wires that sit against your spinal cord without the permanent hardware — and you live with it for a week or two to see if it works before they commit to the implant. My doctor called it a test drive. I called it the longest week of my life.
Within hours of the trial activation, I felt something I hadn't felt in years: quiet.
My body, for once, wasn't screaming at me.
I sat there in the recovery room and I just... listened. To nothing. To the absence of the thing that had been there so long I'd forgotten what it was like without it. Like a noise you stop hearing because you've heard it so long, and then someone turns it off, and you realize: oh. That's what silence sounds like.
I called my doctor's office the next morning and told them I wanted the permanent implant. They said they'd never had someone call that fast.
The date they scheduled: February 14th, 2023.
Valentine's Day.
I did not pick it. The universe picked it. I'm choosing to believe the universe has a sense of humor, because the alternative is that I'm the kind of person who spends Valentine's Day getting wired into a spinal cord stimulator, and I'd rather it be cosmic comedy than just my life.
My mom was there. She's always there. Fourteen years of "there" and counting — she was in that waiting room the same way she was in every waiting room before it, with coffee she probably didn't need and a calm she absolutely earned.
Beka was there too. I want to say something about that without making it too sentimental, because I'm not that guy. But she was there. That matters. When you're about to let someone cut into your spine on the day most people are having candlelit dinners, having the right person in that waiting room tells you everything about where you stand.
The surgery itself is outpatient. You're awake for part of it — they need you to tell them what you're feeling as they place the leads, because spinal cord stimulator placement is as much navigation as it is surgery. You're the GPS. You're lying on a table telling a neurosurgeon whether what he's doing is hitting the right spot. Wild. Absolutely wild.
I told him. He found it. They closed me up.
I woke up on Valentine's Day with wires in my back and a remote control in my hand and more hope in my chest than I'd let myself feel in years.
I had no idea until I actually got this procedure trialed out.
That's what I said in the video. One day post-op. Voice cracking. Face wet. I'm not a crier. Ask anyone who knows me. I'm the guy who makes jokes at funerals because somebody has to and I'm already there. But that day, lying in that hospital bed with a remote control and wires in my spine and more relief in my body than I'd felt in years, I cried on camera and posted it.
Because some things deserve a witness.
The spasms dropped by 90%. The pain cut by maybe half. Maybe 50, 60 percent reduction, which doesn't sound like a lot until you've been living at 100% for years. Suddenly, 40% felt like freedom.
Here's what 90% spasm reduction actually looks like in practice. It looks like sitting through a two-hour dinner without excusing yourself because your body decided to stage a revolt mid-entree. It looks like being in a conversation and actually being in the conversation — not half-listening while the other half of your brain monitors for the next wave. It looks like being a person in the world instead of a person bracing against the world.
The remote control lets me adjust the intensity. There are different programs — different frequencies, different patterns, depending on what the day is throwing at me. Bad days I dial it up. Good days I run it lower. It's not perfect calibration. Some days I still get it wrong. But I have a dial now. I have a say. That's more than I had before.
I started going places again.
The numbers shifted. 92% homebound became less. Then much less. Then I was just a guy who went to the store, saw friends, showed up to things. A guy with a life that looked — and felt — like a life.
Thursdays with my dad came back. Chicken tenders. Cocktails with names designed to make me laugh, because my dad is a retired Air Force colonel who flew F-117 Nighthawks and he orders drinks called "Lick Her 43" with a completely straight face, and I love him for it. Those Thursdays had gotten thin. The stimulator gave them back.
I went to Beka's family's thing without running the exit calculations for forty-five minutes first. I showed up to a friend's birthday and stayed past nine. I drove somewhere without a backup plan for the backup plan.
All because of a remote control and some wires in my back.
I love you, but damn.
Here's what they don't tell you about getting your life back: it gets complicated fast.
What I didn't expect is how much grief was waiting for me on the other side of the homebound days. Not sadness. Grief. The specific grief of realizing how much time I'd lost sitting on that couch while the world continued without me. I couldn't be sad about it while I was in it, because being sad about it required acknowledging it, and acknowledging it would have finished me off. So I shelved it.
When the stimulator gave me my mobility back, the shelf fell.
The year I spent at 92% homebound — that year is gone. Those are not recoverable hours. The events I missed, the relationships I let quietly expire through repeated cancellations, the version of myself I was supposed to be becoming during that stretch — none of that comes back. You just have to pick up from where you are and try not to do the accounting on what it cost.
When you've been at 92% homebound, you're protected. Involuntarily. Brutally. But protected. You can't be hurt by the world if you're not in it.
The stimulator put me back in the world. And the world, being the world, had opinions about me.
I want to say I came back out into it with no armor needed. That the device fixed the spasms and I just slid right back into being a full, confident, social human being. That would be a clean ending. Clean endings are very satisfying to read. They're just almost never true.
The truth is messier.
When you've spent years being a chore — and I know that word sounds harsh, but I chose it deliberately — when you've spent years watching people calculate the effort it takes to include you, you develop a theory. The theory goes like this: minimize the burden, maximize the gratitude, and maybe, maybe, they'll choose to stay.
I applied this theory to everything. To friendships. To family. To the women I dated.
And here's the thing about that theory: it makes you patient to a fault.
I can hold my temper longer than almost anyone I know. Not because I'm naturally saintly — I'm not — but because I've spent so much time telling myself that I can't imagine how difficult it is to be with someone with a disability. So I absorb. I absorb the emotional jabs. The moments when my mere presence becomes a weapon in someone else's argument. The times they see the chair and stop seeing me.
I absorb it because I think, maybe if I don't respond, they'll eventually recognize the patience I've given them. They'll understand what it cost me.
They never do.
That's not cynicism. That's just what I've observed. Patience unspoken becomes invisibility. The things you absorb quietly, you absorb alone. Nobody gives you credit for the things they never saw you do.
There's something I want to say about pain that I don't usually say out loud.
I live in pain. Real, ongoing, daily, physical pain. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies, where someone clutches their side and slides down a wall while sweeping strings play. The quiet kind. The kind that's just always there, like a low hum in a room with bad electrical wiring. You stop noticing it, but it's still affecting everything.
I don't broadcast it because broadcasting it feels like putting the weight on everyone around me. And I don't like feeling like a weight. I've spent most of my post-accident life trying to be the opposite of heavy. Be easy. Be fun. Be Chase, the guy who makes it work.
The stimulator reduced the decibel level. That's the best way I can put it. The hum is still there. It's just quieter. And when it's quieter, I can hear other things. I can hear the conversation at the table instead of my own nervous system. I can hear the music. I can hear Beka.
That's what changed. Not everything. Not pain itself. Just the volume.
But here's what I've had to reckon with since the stimulator gave me my mobility back: I gave myself permission to be out in the world again, but I didn't simultaneously give myself permission to be in the world as my full self.
To say: I am in pain, and I also deserve kindness.
To say: I have needs, and they are not shameful.
To stop apologizing — quietly, invisibly — for existing in a body that requires extra care.
That work is slower than surgery. There's no trial period. There's no remote control. You can't dial it up and see if it helps.
You just have to decide to do it, and then keep deciding, every day, until it becomes true.
What didn't change: the injury itself. C6-C7. Still there. Still permanent. The stimulator doesn't touch the paralysis. It doesn't give me sensation back, doesn't restore the function I lost in that pool on July 4th, 2009. I want to be clear about that because I don't want anyone reading this to think a device fixed me. Nothing fixes me. I'm not broken in a way that gets fixed. I'm adapted. And the stimulator is one more adaptation.
The catheter is still on its schedule. The blood pressure still spikes when something goes wrong downstream and my body can't communicate it properly. The temperature regulation still misfires. None of that changed. The device talks to my spinal cord, not to the rest of the machinery of keeping this body alive.
But it changed enough. Enough to matter. Enough to get me off the couch.
I'm still not over my accident. I want to be honest about that.
I've built frameworks around it. I've found language for it. I've turned it into chapters of a book. I can talk about it at a party and make people laugh and feel something and then move on to the next topic like it's just a story.
But the accident lives in me the way water lives in limestone — quietly, invisibly, reshaping things you can't see.
The stimulator fixed my spasms. It didn't fix the part of me that still sometimes thinks I should earn my place in the room. The part that wonders, when someone is kind to me, whether they're being kind because they see me or because they feel sorry for me and can't tell the difference. The part that stayed homebound in some ways even after the body was freed.
That work is slower. Harder. And there's no remote control for it.
But I'm working on it.
I have Beka, who has a way of looking at me that makes the theory feel stupid. Not because she says so. Just because of how she looks. Like: I see you, and I chose this, and you don't have to earn it.
I had Delta, who never once calculated the cost of including me.
I have Thursdays with my dad, and chicken tenders, and mystery cocktails with names that would make a nun clutch her rosary, and a man who never treated me like I broke.
I have this book, which is me deciding that what happened to me is worth saying out loud. Not because it's impressive. Not because it makes me special. But because the work of becoming yourself — the full, difficult, complicated, sometimes painful, sometimes wonderful version of yourself — is the only work that actually matters.
If someone had told me in 2009, lying on a backboard in the shallow end of a Mississippi pool, that fifteen years later I'd have a device in my spine that lets me sit through dinner again — I would have taken it. Without negotiating. Without asking what else it cost. Just: yes. That. Please.
What I wouldn't have predicted is how much would have to happen first. The years of pain management that was more management than relief. The relationships that didn't work. The isolation. The dark voice, three times a day, for fifteen years. The process of building a person worth saving before the technology arrived to save a little more of him.
The stimulator is a tool. A remarkable, specific, medically improbable tool that I am grateful for every single day. But the tool only works on the person who's ready to use it.
I had to become that person first.
The Valentine's Day thing was just the universe making a note in the margin. See? I was paying attention.
Yeah. I see you.
We're good.
And a remote control in your spine won't do that part for you.
But it's a hell of a start.