Run, Spot, Run

The Performance

 by Lorie Lapp as told to Marty Crisp, Campus Life, Sept.1992

It was a hot June day; so hot that my brother had waited until evening to mow the lawn. He was 13, and the lawn was his job, but I wanted to help. Helping was one of my favorite games. I was always happy to pitch in with all my five-year-old know-how whenever Mom vacuumed or Daddy washed the car.

My brother and I were making a turn, with me hanging onto the mower's crossbars, when I slipped on the freshly cut grass. i fell and the mower rolled back just a few inches...over my left hand. I don't remember any pain. I just remember hearing my brother scream.

Right at that moment, Daddy's van pulled into the driveway. He was just coming home from work. He saw what was happening, jumped out of the van and yelled for towels. He wrapped my arm up quickly and my mother climbed into the back seat of the car and took me onto her lap. My older sister came over to the car with a plastic baggie that had something red in it that I couldn't make out. She put it on the floor next to Mom's feet. Dad started the motor and we took off so fast, I could hear the gravel spitting under the tires. Mom whispered, "Hurry!"

She told Dad my eyelids looked blue. I wanted to tell her I had been playing with her blue eye shadow right before I'd gone outside to help mow, but I didn't want to get in trouble.

They told me later that we made the 30-minute drive from tiny Kinzers, in the eastern part of Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, to the city of Lancaster in 15 minutes flat. With Daddy laying on the horn and our flashers blinking, we traveled mainly in the turn lane in the middle of Route 30. We got to Lancaster General Hospital and the doctors took me right up to surgery. They took my left hand too -- the thing my sister had put in the baggie. However, it hadn't been kept on ice, and it was so badly mangled that they decided not to try to reattach it. Part of my left palm was dangling off the end of my arm, and the doctors flapped that over the stump, sewed everything up, and stopped the bleeding.

I spent six days in the hospital. The doctors expected me to have to come back in another month for a skin graft, but my own skin grew out and covered everything, and I never had to go back. That surprised the doctors, but not me. My mom and I had been praying about it every night, so I expected everything would turn out all right.

My Parents Were Always There

Mom did get a funny expression on her face the night I asked her if my hand would grow back again. It made a lot of sense to me. After all, I lost teeth and grew new ones. I skinned my knee, and when the scab fell off, it always looked like I had a brand new pink knee. A new hand didn't seem all that different.

But the hand didn't grow back; and for about a year, I wore a special "hand sock" that my mother sewed for me, which kept the stub of my arm covered. The doctors wanted me to get a prosthetic hook as soon as I was completely healed, but I didn't want one. Hooks were ugly, heavy and awkward. I knew from the beginning that I could do a lot more without one.

Right away, Daddy taught me how to tie my shoelaces with one hand. My cousin taught me how to do cartwheels on the front lawn. Mom taught me how to thread a needle and started me on piano lessons.

I figured my parents practically handled the whole thing without blinking, although my mother later told me she sometimes had to sit on her hands to keep from doing things for me. They wanted me to learn to do things for myself. And they were always proud of my accomplishments. They were there for all the games when I was a junior-high cheerleader. They came to all the meets and cheered me on when I made county level in gymnastics. They took a million pictures when I was on the homecoming court in high school. There was never any question that I'd go off to college and become whatever I wanted.

I Wanted to Help Others

I was accepted to Eastern College in St. Davids, Pa., and I enrolled thinking I'd study business or maybe education. But that first year away from home was a turning point. It got me thinking about my love of music -- how I wanted to use music in my life's work, and, most important, how I wanted to help others. It wasn't a game with me anymore, the way it had been when I was five. Helping others seemed like something I could do with my life that would really matter.

I read about a music therapy program at Elizabethtown (Pa.) College. It would lead to a career working with people in need: elderly people in homes, brain-damaged kids in rehab hospitals, the retarded, the lonely, the ill. It was just the kind of work I'd been looking for, but there were two problems.

It meant transferring to a new college. Going to Eastern was the first time in my life I'd been thrown into a situation where nobody knew me and where I had to meet lots of new people my own age -- an age when no one asks blunt questions but sometimes they wonder about you behind your back. Now I'd have to go to a brand new college and start all over again.

The second problem was getting past the head of the E-town music department. He didn't want me to use piano as my first applied instrument, although I'd done well in my audition. I'd been playing piano since I was seven, and I loved it. I also played trumpet, and had been in various school bands and brass ensembles since I was in the fourth grade.

Dr. Harrison wanted me to specialize in trumpet. He said the pieces of music available for a one-handed pianist weren't learning pieces and weren't written for the right hand. They were all left-handed pieces, written for virtuosos who wanted to strengthen their left-handed performance technique. The phrasing is opposite when a person tries to play such pieces with the right hand, so that instead of calling for strength in the thumb, the right-handed player needs strength in the little finger. Dr. Harrison was skeptical of my ability to reach graduation level expertise on the piano, but he agreed to let me try.

It's a good thing I knew how to pray before I started those last three years of college. I had to pray a lot to get through the days.

"Everyone Is Handicapped In Some Way"

I got into the habit of sticking my right hand and my left stump into my pockets whenever I was around new people, hiding what I'd never been ashamed of before. I practiced two to four hours a day, but sometimes it seemed as though I'd never be the pianist I wanted to be. I rolled chords and did reach-overs as much as I could, but, to my own ears, I sounded tentative.

But I kept on working. One day in my senior year, when I told Dr. Harrison about some of my doubts, he surprised me by telling me that all of his students were "handicapped" in some way -- most of them by being lazy or not sticking to their goals. he told me, by comparison, I was way ahead.

As the end of my senior year rolled around, I worked frantically preparing for my senior recital. I didn't want to use any tapes or props during this 90-minute required performance; but, try as I might, I discovered that a one-handed pianist cannot play a four-part Bach fugue without help.

I was nervous when the Sunday of the recital came. The hall was jammed with more than 100 people, and I could feel them all rooting me on. My parents' expressions reminded me a little of the looks on their faces that long-ago day of the accident: concern, pride, love.

The hall was hushed as I began, but as I moved from Bach to Strauss to Pachebel, the polite applause began to swell and thunder. The performance ended with a standing ovation. Even Dr. Harrison was standing and applauding.

Funny, but that missing hand has probably had the most influence of anything in my life in making me who I am today. It's made me strong. It's taught me that, with God's help, I can get through anything. After all, to lend a helping hand, it only takes one.