My Awful Ordeal

I wish I had a happy vacation story to share with you all, but instead I can tell you about my recent injury. I hope you'll get more pleasure reading this story than I did living it!

Early Sunday morning on December 9th, I dashed out of my apartment building on my way to church. The moment I stepped out my door, my foot slipped on the wet ice completely sheeting the path from my building. I landed hard on my left hip and elbow. This is great, I thought, God is smiting one of His faithful believers while atheists are still lying snug in their beds. Yet accustomed as I am to His mysterious ways, I continued on foot to church only to see a small boy sliding on the sidewalk and hear him call out--how's this for irony--"Thank God for this slippery ice!" One day, kid, you'll know better.

Throughout the rest of Sunday afternoon and into the evening, I waited in vain for the pain in my elbow to subside. I actually considered calling the library reference desk for advice, but I decided that they would only tell me to go to my local Emergency room and this was not what I wanted to hear. Finally, I relented. I called my fellow Oak Park resident Bruce Brigell at home and explained my situation. He kindly offered to drive to the nearest ER. Though it was Sunday evening, business in the ER was booming. There wasn't a bed for me, I was told, but they could spare a chair. They sent me for X-rays. The X-ray technician raised my arm to the right height for the machine by propping it up on a box of tissues. Such is modern medical technology. She then instructed me to bend my arm in ways my arm truly did not want to be bent. "Didn't they give you pain killers?" she asked me. No, they did not. The ER doctor eventually wrapped my arm up in a temporary cast and instructed me to bring my X-rays to an orthopedist the next day. He offered to write me a prescription for pain killers which I in a fit of insanity and bravado refused. This was an error in judgment that I would soon have reason to rue again and again.

The next day the orthopedic doctor I was sent to took one look at my X-rays and said he was scheduling me for surgery that day. Apparently some knobby things at the ends of one my bones in my elbow had broken off, and it was better for him just to cut them away rather then hoping for them to heal properly in a cast. I wouldn't even notice the knobby things were gone, he told me. This made sense to me so I hastened off to surgery.

The anesthesiologist completely numbed my arm and put me under a mild general anesthesia that was supposed to transport me to a "twilight state" in which I might hear voices but would otherwise be unaware of my surroundings. While I know many people undergoing surgery would embrace this twilight state for all it's worth, I was determined to have none of it. I would remain fully alert and rational no matter what was pumped into me. As we waited for my anesthesia to take effect, I was fascinated by a weird phantom limb sensation I was experiencing and offered a highly credible scientific explanation for it to my perhaps unimpressed surgical team. We were hanging around waiting for an OR to open, and when it did, the surgery team suddenly sprang into action, pushing me through doors and around corners. I felt like I was being led into the Batcave.

Although I was fully alert and rational during my operation, I couldn't see anything because the surgeons threw a sheet over my head. I complained to them that I felt detached from own body. My anesthesiologist patiently explained that, under the circumstances, this was not a bad thing. I said I wanted to see what the insides of my elbow looked like. "It looks like meat!" replied an unsentimental female voice. In retrospect, I believe that my running commentary during surgery might not have been as welcome or as helpful as I imagined at the time. It's never good to be the only person under the influence of mind-altering substances in a gathering of other people, and that's exactly what I was. My doctor, however, did consent to show me the parts he removed from me after he put them into a little jar. I was suitably impressed.

After my surgery was completed I needed to wait for my doctor to dismiss me. A nurse kept coming into the room and saying, "He still with the parents!" I thought my parents must really be grilling the poor man for details about my operation and the recovery process. I hoped they weren't too hard on him. Actually, it was nothing of the kind. My doctor was tickled upon learning that my father was a former linotype printer since his mother had the same job. He and my parents simply hit it off socially, and the doctor was mostly telling them about himself and his family. The man had been seeing patients or performing surgery for twelve hours straight and still he found a half hour to chat with my parents. Amazing.

I still faced one more obstacle before I could leave the hospital that night: my bed. I was waiting while some nurses checked my vital signs when someone discovered that the bed I was lying on wasn't working properly and couldn't be lowered. This could have been a problem if I were, say, 2 1/2 feet tall, but I am perfectly capable of leaving a bed on my own. It wasn't as if I were on top of some "Princess and the Pea" style heap of mattresses. Nonetheless, the consensus was that my non-lowering bed was a serious impediment to my being released. "I won't be stymied by a bed!" I said indignantly, and I meant it. Rather than wait for my nurses to perhaps build a little staircase for me out of tissue boxes, I simply stepped off on my own.

I was in bed that night in my parent's house when my nerves abruptly awoke from being numbed and set about making up for lost time. If anything, they were working even harder for having been rested. I recalled that the ancient Stoic philosophers believed that the wise man could be happy though on the rack. For the life of me, alas, I couldn't recall just how the Stoics believed a wise man could achieve this admirable state of poise during pain. I supposed that it had something to do with the distinction between That Which We Can Control and That Which We Cannot. None of this was helping at the moment, however, so I went in quest of ice and the pain pills I had at last acquired only to find them largely ineffective. At least I know I won't end up like Rush Limbaugh.

In the days that followed I spent more time with my doctor. He turned out to be a real history buff, and I was happy to give him reading suggestions and even a few books. He told me he once wrote to Thomas Fleming after the historian and novelist referred to Hermann Goering as "Hans" Goering. I agreed that this was an appalling mistake. "Hans" Goering, indeed. I had hoped to bring my doctor to the library for our book sale on Saturday but that turned out to be a snowy day and thus a good day to be an orthopedic surgeon. He did, however, offer to take me with him to the opera one day, so I can't complain.

While I can't say that my injury week has been an especially good one, it has been eventful. It also helped me out a bit. For some time, I've been feeling sorry for myself for nothing. Now, I'm feeling sorry for myself for something. Hey, it's a step up.