Kyle explained it to me.
As I lay face up, my back pressing against the pavement, waiting for the ambulance to come, my left arm began to curl into itself, bending at the place where the bones were snapped. In a few minutes, the bend came to 90 degrees, as if I had a second elbow.
I’d felt the curled, bleeding mass cradled against my ribs as I crawled on to the gurney.
Since then, pain has stayed about the same, sometimes more intense, sometimes dulled by drugs, but always feeling like a tightening, a pulling inward, a curling up.
Life is suffering. On the pavement, in the ambulance, and in the ER, I pondered my lesson. In the evening, after the surgery, I sat in my room—alone, in the dark, with a high-floor moonlit view of downtown Oakland.
The pain has been a constant companion, and I’ve accepted the pain, with help from some powerful opioids. After a day or two, the shock and the initial arsenal of drugs I’d received—Fentanyl, morphine, ketamine—wore off. I contacted the surgeon.
The fixing itself was, and is, a miracle. In the hospital, I was pleased by the surgeon’s bored demeanor. This is what you want in such situations, right? His team looked like they’d been bolting bones back together all damned day, and countless days before that. Somehow they sliced my arm open, moving aside arteries and nerves to dig down to the bones, then aligned the titanium plates on each, got enough screws in, and closed the arm up against invading bacteria.
Uncurled.
Which is, I think, part of the discomfiting feeling that goes along with the pain. I still have that wanting to curl up, to protect, but the arm is fixed straight, first by plates and now by a plaster cast, too. And it hangs off my shoulder like an alien. My fingers, emerging from the end of the cast, are painful and barely usable reminders of what was.
Life is suffering. I could accept the pain. I told the surgeon I couldn’t take the hydrocodone. I got him to upgrade so I could renew my expired stash of oxycodone, but after a few days, I was damned if I’d take that either. Both are really crappy drugs; both will, after a brief period of use, put me in state where I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing. I don’t know who else they affect that way.
The hydromorphone is much better, but 19 days now since the injury, I split my time between the pain—while working and caregiving—and drifting on the morphine cloud. I’m usually damned ready for a pill by 5 pm, if I haven’t already had one by then.
Life is suffering. I think the hundreds of hours I’ve spent meditating over the past few years has helped me cope with the pain and to function despite the pain and disability.
I don’t think I’ve learned my lesson, yet, though. I’ve spent some hours contemplating these new feelings of advancing age and frailty. I’ve let go some self-expectations. I’ve gently mocked myself for trying to do things I shouldn’t try to do. I’ve confronted myself for not taking time for needed self-care, and recognized that habit is part of holding on to past trauma. And I’ve also, just yesterday, dealt with my kid being defiant and melting down while simultaneously attending a Zoom meeting on one screen and writing a letter on deadline on the other. With my throbbing left arm elevated above my shoulder.
Today I finished some morning business and put on my rain gear before heading out the door on a walk, up through the City’s Hillside Natural Area, climbing above the cliff behind the old quarry, then through the residential neighborhood that straddles Arlington Avenue, where I admired the big mid-century houses, then down to Wildcat Creek, the rain beating down and turning the road into a slippery muddy morass, with my cast in a sling and my hand tucked into the pocket of the rain parka, emerging by Jewel Lake and the Little Farm, and talking with the client on my phone as I descended through Kensington and the Sunset View Cemetery.
I walked back in the door in time to strip off my wet gear and put on a blue button-down before joining a meeting with the managers of some of our local cities and towns.
An hour later, a bit chilled and shivering, I crawled into bed, watching the rain come down outside the window and feeling my forearm, up on pillows, shrink until it was no longer pressing tight against the cast. I felt at peace as drifted off to sleep in the waning afternoon light.