The healing power of the paper clip

When I was a student working in acute inpatient rehab, I had an 80ish, very country man with Parkinson's disease. He woke up one morning declaring that a miracle healing had happened. He could move better and roll over in bed, but he was most excited to show me how he had learned to button his shirts. He had taken a large paper clip and unfolded it into an elongated "S" to use as a button hook. I tried, but I couldn't improve on his invention by adding a built up handle or giving him a "real" button hook. My lesson here was that the ideas generated by my patients are far superior to anything I could suggest.

Years later, while helping a friend who was recovering from abdominal surgery, she showed me how she could get on and off the toilet pain-free. She didn't have anything to push up on and didn't want to invest in any equipment because she was expecting a rapid recovery. She sat on the toilet backwards. Backwards. I'm still amazed that I've never seen anyone do this before or since. She straddled the toilet and faced the wall. When she was ready to get up she just leaned forward and pushed up on the tank.

Just this week I saw a lady with muscular dystrophy who had half a dozen or so homemade gadgets. She used rubber "thumbs" from the office supply store to add grip and texture to the end of her implements, including the joystick on her power wheelchair. She had several yardsticks and dowel rods in her house with different tips to manage switches, reach objects and open/close cabinets. She had an opened coat hanger with a loop on the end to turn on/off lights. She turned the mouse on her computer upside down because it fit her hand better--so she had to learn that right was left and up was down. She played Bejeweled faster than I could, and she was using an upsidedown and backward mouse! The ingenuity and unstoppable spirit that she had shown was amazing!

Which brings me back to the paper clip guy. To my eyes, he wasn't moving or functioning any better. But he felt better. This man who grew his own food and built his barn, had no respect for my commercially produced button hook. But he found healing in a paper clip. Because it came from within him, it had meaning and power that I couldn't touch. The healing was in the creativity, the ingenuity, and power of generating the idea himself.