pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT THE BODY HOLDS Sitting on my deck drinking a cup of hot tea and checking out the stars. I am very glad to be kicked back at home tonight. Haven't really had much down time this week, seems like, with the exception of Tuesday night, when (lo and behold) Buzzcut and I relapsed and spent considerable time nekkin' on my sofa. It feels good to relax. My last entry got me thinking about how I live in my body, what it holds. My relationship with my body has changed drastically over the years. I no longer believe that I am invincible, for example—an illusion I carried around with me for a very long time. But one thing that still remains true is that I have always been and still am adept at detaching myself from pain. As a child, I was determined to not show weakness when I was being hurt physically or emotionally—especially when my father's Spanish temper was causing the pain. I knew emotional displays (except anger or passion, I suppose) disgusted him, that he respected and expected stoicism from my brothers and me. This is a guy thing, I suppose, one of those Robert Bly Iron Man mythologies that involves facing down the symbolic Army sergeant or father or authority figure or whomever because doing so will somehow make you a man. Ignoring pain is a reaction that was instilled in me as a value—one that ranks right up there with swallowing your emotions and never showing weakness—and I have had one hell of a time moving beyond this flawed definition of what real strength is. When my father assaulted me, I told myself that if I didn't cry, he didn't win, and then usually managed to just stand there with a stony look on my face as I stared at him defiantly (which only made him hit me harder). When I could muster it, I also said "that didn't hurt" with a snarl on my face while fighting every impulse I had to double over and clutch a broken rib. Or whatever. My best trick, though, was reserved for times when my body really hurt. Then I would simply intellectualize the whole thing by asking myself "Pain ... what is pain?" Then I described to myself the nuances of this physiological response in excruciating detail instead of actually responding to or acknowledging my body's responses to being assaulted. I was tougher than my brothers in this arena, more determined—possibly because my reactions allowed me to create some measure of control over a situation in which I really had none. My reactions also stemmed from the fact that—and yes, I know how fucked this is—I admired my father and wanted him to be proud of me. And, since I knew he didn't respect so-called girlish behaviors such as crying, I rejected them in an effort to be the kind of person he did respect. I wanted to show him (and myself) that my being a girl did not necessarily translate into me embodying all of those so-called feminine weaknesses. My father respected people who swallow pain and ignore sickness and exhaustion and hurt and, by gawd, that is the kind of person I was going to be. I bought this message hook, line, and sinker, and believed that adopting these traits would make me a pillar of strength that my father and the world would respect. (Somehow, though, I never bought into the lie that, because I was in a woman's body, I was somehow less than a man. Instead, I thought that society's definitions of women were just too damn narrow and that some girls were just too damn eager to accept a screwed definition of themselves. And lookie, I could prove it!) My father once told me that I am the best boy he ever raised (a truth I really hope he never said to my brothers). And, within the confines of his narrow definition, I am. The problem with buying into his definition, however, is that this is one incredibly flawed method for trying to function in the world. Turns out your body does respond to assault, whether you deny that you have been assaulted or not. It stores all that shit inside you and that shit just sits there festering until it reveals itself to the world in those shoulders that you keep tensed or that jaw that you keep clenched without even realizing it. It just festers there inside you until something causes it to seep out of your pores and reveal it in your aggressive driving or hostile language or, in my father's case, your attempts to break your children in some misguided effort to make them strong, just as your father did to you. My pain seeped out of me the first time I attempted a relaxation exercise and seeped out of me again the first time I got a body massage from a professional—two occasions when I actually managed to relax for what may have been the first and second time in my life—and my body responded both times with uncontrollable, wracking sobs. Ten years ago, I injured my shoulder at the karate dojo. I heard a loud pop, felt everything tear, felt my shoulder fall out of socket (which was excruciating), and experienced that same wave of nausea I experience when a bone breaks. I knew this was a serious injury and so made an appointment with a dyke doctor that I knew socially, someone who specializes in sports injuries. Unfortunately, this doctor had just torn her biceps tendon playing softball and assumed that her diagnosis fit me as well. She checked my range of motion and asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten—a bad question to ask someone who grew up getting punched on a regular basis because we have atypically high pain thresholds. Most people would have reported ten, as it turns out, but I said five (no doubt listening to that unconscious voice in my head that tells me that I will be perceived as weak and will lose face if I acknowledge my pain). The doc said "yeah, mine felt the same way too" to nearly every symptom I described, diagnosed me with her injury, and sent me home with Naproxyn and a sheet of daily strengthening exercises. I spent the next six weeks or so attempting to do the exercises she prescribed, but my arm really wouldn't work correctly and practically any movement I made caused my shoulder to slip out of socket (which was still excruciating). The damn thing just wouldn't stay in place and moving any part of my body inevitably resulted in some serious shoulder pain. Lifting weights was also so painful that it left me light-headed. I told myself that I was injured though and what you do when you're injured is work through the pain and build your strength back up; you grin and bear it. I knew that to be true from playing basketball right?, and so kept trying to do the exercises despite the fact that I was not seeing any improvement or reduction in pain. After six weeks or so of exercising and popping liberal amounts of naproxyn that did not even begin to touch my pain, I decided to make an appointment with an orthopod who specializes in shoulders. He examined me, asked me to rate my level of pain on a scale of one to ten, and assured me that no one could walk around for six weeks with a torn rotator cuff. This doc decided that I had also torn some soft tissue—probably my trapezius muscle and triceps and biceps tendons. And he told me that I must be one of those people who just have loose sockets and hence have a greater range of motion than most, but building my strength back up would help keep my shoulder in place. Then he sent me to a physical therapist, who had me throwing progressively heavier balls against a tiny trampoline and catching them (which was excruciating) and doing resistance exercises with weights on chains that I pulled in all sorts of different directions before applying a mixture of ice and isopropyl alcohol to my screaming shoulder. And I told myself that, as with any sports injury, I was just going to have to work through the pain until I got my strength back.. I saw the physical therapist for maybe another six weeks, but my pain never improved and my arm just plain didn't work anymore. I couldn't move it backwards at all and you could forget my ever grabbing the passenger-side seat belt. I was not getting stronger, my shoulder was still falling out of socket (which was still excruciating), and my arm simply would not move in several directions. So, finally, I asked the physical therapist if she thought I should return to the shoulder expert and ask what my surgery options were. She said that no one could not walk around for that long with the kind of traumatic injury that would require surgery, then encouraged me to continue building up my strength and applying ice.She also began attaching electrodes to my shoulder and massaging my arms and shoulder while telling me to relax. I said I was relaxing, but my hand never dropped to the table when she let it go. Meanwhile, another six weeks or so passed and I was still in a significant amount of pain and was very tired of living with a shoulder that fell out of socket on a regular and excruciating basis, so I made another appointment with the shoulder expert and, this time, insisted on an MRI. He told me that the test would confirm the location of my soft tissue damage, but would almost certainly be a waste of a thousand dollars, since no one could lift weights or walk around with the kind of traumatic injury that would need surgical repair. I insisted on the MRI anyway and told him that I just wanted to know with certainty what we were dealing with. By this time, I was holding my entire body differently in an effort to keep myself so stiff that nothing in my shoulder could possibly slide out of place (and people who have known me a long time tell me that my posture has remained this way ever since my injury). I was also holding my shoulder significantly higher than the other one while my arm practically dangled at my side. I have the actual MRI report somewhere and could list the injuries in medical jargon, but, to make a long story short, I damn near ripped my arm off my body, shoving my arm bone through my rotator cuff—an injury they said I could not walk around with. I also detached my trapezius and biceps and triceps tendons, and had micro tears in the muscles in my shoulders, back, and neck. The doctor said I should not have even been able to lift the weights that I was using on a regular basis and that this kind of traumatic injury could only be repaired by a total shoulder reconstruction. In the course of preparing me for the surgery, he also described the kind of pain I could expect. The first week, he said, would be unbearable, but he would keep me so doped up that I wouldn't know this. Instead, I quit my pain medication the day after surgery after deciding that the pain I felt from jerking the stitches around as I barfed had to be worse than any pain I would experience from being drug- and barf-free. He also insisted that I have to have a caregiver with me for the first week, so my friend and mentor Shakespeare came to town to help me and was surprised when I met her in my driveway. What's that LeRoi Jones line: "I am inside someone / who hates me." Lawdie lawdie lawdie, do I hold a lot of fucked-up, destructive shit inside this body. But, as my friend Zulu says, if there is a nuclear war, she is placing her bets on me surviving it. Sometimes I wish I still believed that, too. 1:06 a.m. - 2005-03-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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