Lance: A Hathaway House Heartwarming Romance

the one thing he wanted back in his life—music. Something he hadn’t shared with anyone yet. Preoccupied, he went into the gym, where he was meeting Shane.
Shane looked up, saw the look on his face, and asked, “Heavy thoughts?”
“How do you tell if you’re sabotaging yourself?” he asked quietly.
Shane lowered the tablet in his hand and turned to look at him. “Now that’s an interesting question,” he said. “Are you concerned?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe? Have you seen anything yet to say that I am?”
Shane grinned. “Nope, not yet,” he said. “But I will be the first to tell you if I do.”
“Good,” he said. “I know Dr. Monroe asked me about it. Or rather, I brought it up, and then he told me to keep an eye on it for myself.”
“In what way could you have been sabotaging yourself?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sleeping for one thing.”
At that, Shane frowned. “That’s not good,” he said. “Your body needs rest, and I need you to be awake and to be alert to do the work that we have to do.”
“I just don’t sleep,” he said. “I’m tired. I go to bed, and then it’s like my mind is wide awake.”
“And I suppose you don’t want to take sleeping pills.”
“They don’t agree with me,” he said. “They knock me out, and then I wake up feeling heavy and lethargic the next day.”
“Melatonin? Or other herbal supplements?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I was thinking about getting up and having a hot shower, wondering if that might help me get to sleep.”
“That would be an interesting one,” he said, “because, if it works, I’ll have to make sure you have somebody with you. But there is a hot tub.”
“For the evening?”
“Again, you must have an orderly with you,” Shane said, “but it’s not an impossibility. It’s just not where we usually start.”
“Right, so you’ll ask me to do meditation and yoga and listen to tapes and things like that, right?”
“Obviously this isn’t your first rodeo,” Shane said with a chuckle.
“I didn’t sleep at the last place either,” he said, as he rubbed his arms gently back and forth.
“Are you cold?”
“I’m always a little chilled,” he said. “I don’t know why though.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Well, let’s get you to work, and that’ll warm you up fast enough.”
Half an hour later Lance wished he was cool again because he was sweating like a pig, and he’d barely done anything. His legs were awkward and stiff. They wouldn’t cooperate when it came to bending at the knee, but then, when he tried to push and straighten them out, they just basically rested against Shane’s legs.
“I don’t want you getting frustrated by this,” Shane said. “We have to start with where you’re at,” he said. “You can’t progress if you don’t acknowledge step one.”
“Says you,” Lance said. “I’m sweating like a pig, and I can’t get anything accomplished.”
“So, we’ll change what you need to accomplish then,” Shane said cheerfully. He had him back up in the wheelchair, and they gently did leg raises with his knee bent.
Slowly, with time, he straightened out that leg and did straight-leg bends, but trying to point his foot? Well, that was an impossibility. “It’s like the ankle doesn’t work at all,” he said. “Too many plates and screws.”
“The plates and screws,” Shane said, “have nothing to do with the joints. They’re all up in this shin bone area and up in your femur.”
“So why is the ankle so stiff then?”
“We’ve got to get some blood flow into it,” he said, and then he nodded. “And that might be something we need to do at nighttime too.”
“What?” Lance said, missing a beat in the conversation and feeling foolish about it.
“A massage,” he said. “But unfortunately it won’t be a nice-feeling massage.”
At that, Lance winced. “So, something that’ll hurt again.”
“Again?”
“I think everything has hurt for the last eight months,” he said. “Not a day goes by where it doesn’t seem like something is crying out in pain.”
“Understood,” Shane said. “Well, we’ll start with this ankle and see if we can get it to move a bit.” He walked over, grabbed some oil in his hand, and started working the ankle. But it wasn’t a relaxing moment. It was painful, and, as soon as he worked some of the joint, he had Lance pushing against his hand, trying to force that foot to move and then straighten it a little bit more and a little bit more. At the end of the hour, he was sweating freely, but he could see that his foot had gained mobility. “I didn’t think a massage could do that,” he said.
“Often these muscles stiffen from disuse,” he said. “You really have to work them all the time.”
“I thought I was,” he said.
“Nope. You’re not walking very well,” he said, “so these joints aren’t moving very well. But we’ve loosened this one up a little bit,” he said, “so I’ll work on the next one, and that’ll be enough for the day.”
“How can you tell when the ankle has had enough?” he asked.
“The skin at the joint itself sweats,” Shane said, “which means it’s done. So let’s work the other one, and then we’ll keep this up over the next few days to see if we can get a better range of motion.”
“You started on the ankles. Why is that?”
“Well, I’d like to start on the hips,” he said, “but the ankles appeared to bother you and are slowing your progress for walking,” he said. “So, we’ll do it this way and then move up to the knees and then the hip joint.”
“I would have thought the neck would have been one of the major ones,” he said.
“All of them are major,” Shane said. And he had Lance once again do a few exercises, pushing against his hand, trying to straighten that ankle back out a bit. Lance swore and cursed, but he pushed, and he pressed, and he worked it. And when Shane finally