Thursday, June 01, 2006

Cast Off

I was no stranger to pain, and he knew it. So he should have believed me when I told him about the burning. 

I have been clinically diagnosed with an unusually high degree of pain tolerance.  My bad break a few years ago took me to levels of hurting like I’d never known before, and I pretty much dealt with it.  Of course, there were a lot of drugs in my system too, but regardless, I do believe I’ve learned to put up with serious discomfort when the circumstances demand.  And my whole point is this: this, I learned in grade school, when I kept falling down and breaking stuff.  Like my arms.  I’d had casts in kindergarten, second grade, fourth (both wrists at once that time), and then sixth.  Well that seems like too many, actually.  They sort of ran together.

Regardless, every couple of years or so, I’d break my arm, and in the process I learned more each time about what pain was and what I could do to endure it. 

The doctor who saw me through those broken arms, was Dr N.  He was the image of the kindly orthopod – tall and craggy and calm and a little befuddled.  We got to know each other pretty well as he repeatedly set, monitored, and uncasted me.  It was a healthy relationship built on a foundation of broken bones.  Maybe that underlying fault presaged his disbelief when I started to complain. 

I’d fallen again – this time, from my bicycle, while cornering through a stagnant puddle full of slick algae.  Dr N greeted me avuncularly, x-rayed me, confirmed the fracture, and initiated treatment.  When it came time to put on my cast, he asked me a novel question: Whether I’d like to try the latest experimental model, one of the very first casts made of fiberglass netting instead of plaster.  Till then, all my casts – all casts, actually – had been plaster, which was great for renaissance frescoes but not so hot for young boys who were sometimes clumsy or careless.  I often needed to have my casts repaired reapplied once I’d damaged them or gotten them wet.  Fiberglass, Dr N assured me, would be lighter, sturdier, and unaffected by water.  I could even take a shower with it.  Seemed like a winner to me.  I signed up to be Dr N’s fiberglass guinea pig. 

The new cast stank like a burning car as it went on, but after that it was very easy to deal with – light, comfortable, and strong.  Under its protection my bones knit right up and in six weeks I was ready to get my arm back, so I returned in innocent ignorance to the Dr N’s office – an office that had theretofore always been for me a place of succor and rehabilitation.  Little did I know what was in store for me.  But, to be fair, neither did Dr N.  As he wheeled in the saw with which I was so familiar already, no one suspected the consequences that would ensue. 

The saw had a circular blade, about four inches in diameter, and was ringed with small, somewhat blunt teeth.  With its big electric motor it looked a bit fearsome, but I knew it really wasn’t – rather than working by spinning rapidly, tearing up its quarry in violent gouts of plaster and atrophied flesh, it actually just vibrated, turning slowly, shaking and digging through anything rigid but imparting only a pleasantly ticklish sensation to my delicate self.  Dr N positioned my arm and his saw, turned on the equipment, and set about his business.

He started near my hand on the inside of my arm, and worked his way toward my elbow.  Within seconds I senses something amiss.  “It hurts,” I told him.  He stopped.  “What hurts?  The fracture?” “No, the saw.  It’s hurting me.” “Don’t be silly, Daniel – we’ve done this before.  You know it doesn’t hurt.” “This time it does.” “Well, it’s got to come off, so let’s take a deep breath and get through it.”

He didn’t believe me.  Not at first, anyway.  But as he continued to drag the vibrating metal disk through the rock-hard fiberglass, it grew progressively harder to discount my obvious discomfort.  By the time he completed the first cut his smile had evaporated altogether.  I was writhing in my seat and tears were flowing.  Still, the cast wrapped tightly around me; I needed one more long cut along the outside of my arm and a short one near my thumb before I was released from its grip of fiberglass.  But before Dr N went further, he gently touched the sawblade to ensure himself that my outburst was the mere whining of a coddled child, not evidence of a larger problem.

“Yow!” He’d burned his fingertip.  Turns out, the fiberglass was so much tougher than the plaster, that it had heated the sawblade significantly – hot enough to singe his own flesh, to say nothing of mine.  He wasn’t smiling at all now, and he even grimaced a little as he steeled himself for the remaining cuts.  “Hold tight,” he said softly as he took the blade along the outside of my arm, and then made the final slice at the web of my thumb, trying diligently to keep away from my skin.  I gritted and groaned as the cast finally opened like a clamshell. 

The flesh thus revealed was, as expected, withered from disuse and pasty and soursmelling.  It also exhibited long gashes up either side of my arm, and a short one between my fingers and thumb – all seeping blood and as tidy as if they’d been drawn with a ruler.  A searing hot ruler that had been pressed hard right into my arm.  We all stood there looking at my wounds for a few moments, and then the doctor sprang into action, swabbing and cleaning and bandaging me.  He apologized profusely and I, a child in recovery, accepted.  And that was the last time I saw Dr N.  The scars, however, lasted 20 years. 

MORAL: Don’t be so sure it doesn’t hurt.  Being wrong lasts a lot longer than being right.