Friday, November 29, 2002

THANKFUL DAN Ten weeks to

THANKFUL DAN
Ten weeks to the day since I broke my wrist.  I can now look on the experience pretty much in hindsight and see it, with certain qualifications, as a blessing.  Maybe it’s just this Thanksgiving season, holdover that it is from pagan and pre-semitic harvest rituals and other less elevating sources, and maybe I’m a little emotional because we got to host thanksgiving and have my mom and sister and her husband, and Jon and his wife, two kids (one just ten days old) and his mom as well - a consumatory orgy with five kids under three years old and seventeen adults and nine pies plus four other complete desserts, two turkeys, spiced toasted almonds and crisp sweet persimmon slices and we’ve still got four bottles of the nouveaux left over… yea, it was an evening of indulgences and intergenerational communion, and that made me feel all warm and gooey inside, perhaps more inclined than usual to be thankful for my great friends, wonderful job and life, cool apartment, awesome dog and loving cat, all that stuff that I usually give thanks for…

But it’s ten weeks to the day since I broke my wrist and I do actually feel thankful for several aspects of that experience.  These items of thankfulness vary from things that could have gone worse, to things that just worked out really well, into things that the experience brought to me, elicited from me or something that I think I learned.  So despite further ado, here are 24 Things About My Broken Wrist That I’m Thankful For (in random order):
* I just broke my wrist, not anything that required me to be immobilized or even on crutches
* I didn’t hit my face, lose any teeth, get a big disfiguring scar like I so easily could have
* No brain damage (honestly, this is about how I was when I started)
* Only broke one of my arms - I’ve done both at once before, and I did have a nice heavy five point landing
* Didn’t break my glasses and have to resort to wearing spares and paying for a new primary pair
* Didn’t damage my bike, which I’m so ready to start riding again
* Happened where I could get help fast - cops were there immediately, and a pro bike team, and an ambulence
* My stalwart wife and friends were with me, stuck by me for hours in the hospital, brought me clothes and kept me comfortable
* Another guy with the same injury was in the bed next to me and he was definitely having a lot more trouble with pain than I was; I’m thankful that I was able to take it
* Happened in an area where medical care is good, not in the third world
* Happened in 2002, not 100 years prior when the hand would have been as good as lost for the rest of my life
* Made me slow down and see a lot more of what was going on around me
* My colleagues and supervisors at work really accomodated me
* I had an excellent surgeon
* My wonderful friend Dr. Andy cared for me post-surgery for a long time and made sure I was thorougly attended to
* I’m recovering very quickly
* I have some cool scars on my arm
* When I couldn’t shave, the scruffy beard wound up looking pretty cool
* Wonderful friends cooked and ran errands for us, let us lean on them and helped us through the toughest days
* Learned ambidexterity and now am able to do a lot more important things with my left hand, which is very useful
* Wonderful wife cared for me, bathed me, cooked for me, and cleaned our house while I was immobilized
* Wonderful family members coast to coast sent good wishes and baked goods
* Got free beers at happy hour from more wonderful friends and the cool bartender
* Leftover pain medicine

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Now I’ve seen everything, and

Now I’ve seen everything, and I think I’m a better man for it.  And by “everything,” I mean major life events.  Weddings have been unavoidable, and generally I’ve enjoyed them.  But they always struck me as somewhat fabricated.  People choose, plan, spend years sometimes on the preparations, usually while living together.  By the big day it’s sometimes hard for me to mark the real significance of the event through the tuille and buttercream and personalized napkin rings.  Same with b’nai mitzvahs and confirmations, which come off as even less relevant due to their toploaded elaborateness balanced on a purportedly spiritual - or at least religious - base.  But those are the facile ones.  Earlier this year I finally went to a funeral.  Maybe my essays on that trip will make it to the ‘hut someday, but here and now let it suffice to say that, despite years - decades - of planning and a clear spiritual focus, it was a moving and profound experience.  I’ve sat with the dead and kept their bodies company.  And I’ve held newborns, tiny balls of life, poppin’ fresh so to speak. 

And now I’ve done a bris.  (I mean, other than my own.) For the uninitiated, it’s the ceremony of covenant, in which an eight-day-old male child is consecrated into a tradition and future of judaic monotheism, receiving a share of the blessing of adonai in exchange for the foreskin off his penis.  I’ve never been to one before.  Till yesterday.  Many good things came together for this auspicious and life-affirming event, not the least of which was getting to see many people I dearly love who should be spending Thanksgiving with me but who, for various reasons, won’t.  Then came the honor of being asked to assist in the ceremony with a critical task: to sanctify and lubricate the event by giving the baby wine.  At the appointed time Jon thrust little Aaron into my arms - Aaron is 3 weeks premature, barely five pounds and still unfolding his face after months crushed in the womb; he’s tiny and light and it was a joy to support him.  I took him into a quiet bedroom with a special pouched pillow covered in satin and pasmanteri, and spoke quietly with him as I set him into the throne of honor in which he would be carried out into the ceremonial space (a kitchen table, in this case).  His eyes opened and wandered over my face and I knew better to think that he was in communion with me, but I knew that I was in communion with him and that was good in its own right. 

During the ceremony I stood at Aaron’s head and dipped my pinky finger into sweet wine, slipped the wet finger into Aaron’s mouth and tickled his palate to make him suck it down.  I kept feeding him drops this way as he was held in position and prepared for the incision.  There was no stone knife; all the equipment was sterile and modern.  I tried to watch while it happened, I didn’t turn away - but it was too quick, I missed it somehow.  First it was there, then it wasn’t.  Just like that.  The child cried, I fed him more wine, and he quieted and sucked it down and kept sucking like a champ.  After it was all over and the crowd was dispersing to the tables of delictables laid out for our enjoyment, I looked again at the moiel’s tools, still on their sterile sheet.  One instrument looked like a hemostat and a tiny spot of crimson had spread beneath it.  Hanging from it was an even tinier strip of pink skin, looking more than anything else like the lox on the platters in the dining room that the others were hungrily scooping onto their bagels.  The child slept.  My pinky finger tingled from the warmth and suction of his tiny mouth. 

Later Charles started vaunting the ribs at Rendezvous Ribs, where you can have the best bbq in Memphis sent to your home for $25 a meal.  The discussion centered on whether that was economically feasible for everybody there, and I suggested that poor people could sleep with a clean conscience but might not be able to eat like Charles does all the time… Charles admitted that his life was one of “pork-filled self-loathing.” That’s a phrase that belongs at every bris, I think. 

Finally, on my way back to the city with Dave, we drove up past SFO where the jets and prop planes approach to land.  There must have been a lot of wind aloft, though where we were the trees were motionless.  Still, two airplanes, a little one and a huge one, were hanging in the sky as if suspended from a hook, not moving forward or down, just dangling in the crisp fall air.  I watched them as we drove beneath them, and wondered what it looked like to be aloft and still.  The world is a strange place sometimes.  And now I’ve seen everything.

CONTRAST BATHS My therapy now

CONTRAST BATHS

My therapy now consists of a variety of uncomfortable gestures designed to increase my range of motion, and twice-daily contrast baths.  I fill one bucket with hot water and one with cold, and I plunge my wrist into each one for a minute, alternating ten times.  After 10 mintues I’m supposed to pull out and massage my scar in a circular motion. According to my instructional sheet this process forces out “stubborn, stale fluids” from my swollen wrist and into the rest of my ostensibly comparatively svelte self.  Blood and lymph, trapped in congested tissues since my injury and surgery, are literally pumped away by the cycles of heat and cold, dilation and constriction, yin and yang.  I feel a tingle in my hand and arm as I move from the cold bucket to the hot bucket, the heat permeating chilled flesh and amplifying my energy, drawing it down, pulling it to my drowned skin; I feel a sting as I switch back to the cold water, an outrush, an expulsion of stagnant humors as the vessels seize and clench against the chill, each finger leaching warmth, the coolness creeping up to my elbow… I find this process strangely comforting and relaxing.  I don’t multitask while I do it; I stand quietly and experience it for one-sixth of an hour.  I don’t know how much it helps my arm but I am starting to think it’s doing my head some good.