Numb
About midway through the day, I felt it; a prickling tiny pain in the ball of my foot. Again?
Lately, I've had a problem with hairs puncturing the skin of my feet. First was in Sweden; a friend's dog was the culprit. The result was a limping trot through the park with friends; my expression that of smiling, frozen agony. The next time, I thought my new clogs had scratched my foot but instead, a 3/4" hair had embedded itself in the shape of a horseshoe on the top of my instep. The other day I couldn't get to a bathroom fast enough to rip off my sock, expecting to find a roofing nail protruding from my sole. Nope, just an eyelash, less than a 1/4" inch long, with maybe 1/16" penetrating my skin.
When I worked for the Shriner's Hospital in Boston, I had the opportunity to read many a medical journal. My favorite was The Journal of Trauma. One unforgettable article dealt with the amputation of an elderly woman's foot. Her Achilles tendon was irrepairabably damaged by embedded dog hairs. DOG hairs. Apparently, her habit was to sit in her easy chair and rub her wire-haired terrier with the back of her ankle. Over the years, thousands of hairs worked their way into the tissue, eventually causing the tendon to ulcerate and ultimately resulting in the loss of her foot.
How, I asked myself then as I still do now, had that old woman stood the pain? One hair in my foot and I'm limping like Quasimodo. This woman had thousands.
This got me to thinking about numbness.
The more schooled of you will be tempted to mention diabetic circulation issues and peripheral numbness, but humor me, please. What if she just ignored the pain, like so many other people do? What if she just wrote it off as "I'm getting old and my ankle hurts" instead of applying a little brain to analyze the situation?
Numbness has become an epidemic.
Bodies: Folks with teeth broken off at the gumline are smoking and drinking like no tomorrow. I thought breaking teeth was a torture method... perhaps these folks can only tell the truth? Dude in the supermarket topping 400 pounds struggles to push his cart loaded with eggs, whole milk, and chorizo. That black spot on your forehead that was the size of a dime last month and is now the size of a quarter? Just put cover up on it. My own mother walked around for two weeks feeling like she had a brick on her chest - she was having a heart attack the entire time but just ignored it. I just can't breathe, that's all. Nothing big. Just an elephant sitting on my sternum.
Noise: A tube TV left on will drive me slowly insane but a mariachi band blasting at full volume doesn't stop the family who hired them from talking or wake their sleeping baby. Somebody honks their car horn and I'm still crawling back into my skin ten minutes later; my neighbors passively let their chihuahuas bark at top volume for hours inside their house (I can hear those little fuckers from inside mine). A woman pushes a shopping cart with a red-faced toddler braying 120 dB five inches from her face; I have to put in earplugs in order to concentrate because of the work site radio being played from a quarter mile away.
The World: All four of your car tires are almost flat and with two little kids in the back seat, you probably don't have two pennies to rub together, yet there you are, ruining your tires, wasting gas and endangering your kids. Two million gallons of oil spew into the Gulf but you shrug, tucking into that shrimp dinner. Never mind that it tastes just a little bit funny. China infuses everything they make with melamine but god help me if I get in your way when you're heading to Wal-Mart. Your dog's had that sore in his ear for three or four months but it's not getting worse, so why take him to the vet? That rotting patch on the roof of your house? Oh, it was like that when we bought it. And by the way honey, I forgot to pay the homeowner's insurance last month because we didn't have enough in the bank account. I know there's a storm rolling in. Don't worry about it.
Me? I can tell my blood sugar level from the way my thoughts flow. At night, when all is still and dark, I can feel the arthritis in my toes, red osteo-wasps layering their nest of bone over my joints. I've felt the ventricles of my heart torque from my mitral value prolapse and have gritted my teeth against the cold steel aria of the pins and plate in my pelvis. Right now, I can feel the bone in my jaw going through a final post-surgery growth spurt; it's an itch, a blazing spark of cell division as my body relentlessly repairs itself.
I'm not complaining. I'm just aware. Really, really aware.
Daily, I resist screaming: "Look what you're doing! Your kids are fat, you're taking the elevator and teaching them to be lazy, you're too dumb to know that sign shouldn't have an apostrophe, and you'd never notice that show on TV about alligators is interspersing footage of Nile crocodiles just to make the action more entertaining. What's in your head? What are you thinking? Are you thinking? Is anything going on in there at all?"
My point is: Open your eyes! Live IN the world. Live IN your body. Look and actually SEE. Turn that TV off (they're mixing Shermans in that show about Panther tanks now), put down that chicken pot pie and listen to silence for 10 minutes. Okay, 2 minutes. What does your heart sound like? Are you tired? Are you sad, angry or happy? Can you really afford that flat screen TV? When was the last time you actually had a conversation with your kids that extended past "When do you have soccer practice?"
Don't be a ghost drifting through your life. Don't wait until later.
Be present: Feel all the pain, all the fear, all the joy.
Be awake: See the beauty, the mundanity, the terrible ugliness.
Be integrated: Reality and dreams can co-exist.
Be alive.
Lately, I've had a problem with hairs puncturing the skin of my feet. First was in Sweden; a friend's dog was the culprit. The result was a limping trot through the park with friends; my expression that of smiling, frozen agony. The next time, I thought my new clogs had scratched my foot but instead, a 3/4" hair had embedded itself in the shape of a horseshoe on the top of my instep. The other day I couldn't get to a bathroom fast enough to rip off my sock, expecting to find a roofing nail protruding from my sole. Nope, just an eyelash, less than a 1/4" inch long, with maybe 1/16" penetrating my skin.
When I worked for the Shriner's Hospital in Boston, I had the opportunity to read many a medical journal. My favorite was The Journal of Trauma. One unforgettable article dealt with the amputation of an elderly woman's foot. Her Achilles tendon was irrepairabably damaged by embedded dog hairs. DOG hairs. Apparently, her habit was to sit in her easy chair and rub her wire-haired terrier with the back of her ankle. Over the years, thousands of hairs worked their way into the tissue, eventually causing the tendon to ulcerate and ultimately resulting in the loss of her foot.
How, I asked myself then as I still do now, had that old woman stood the pain? One hair in my foot and I'm limping like Quasimodo. This woman had thousands.
This got me to thinking about numbness.
The more schooled of you will be tempted to mention diabetic circulation issues and peripheral numbness, but humor me, please. What if she just ignored the pain, like so many other people do? What if she just wrote it off as "I'm getting old and my ankle hurts" instead of applying a little brain to analyze the situation?
Numbness has become an epidemic.
Bodies: Folks with teeth broken off at the gumline are smoking and drinking like no tomorrow. I thought breaking teeth was a torture method... perhaps these folks can only tell the truth? Dude in the supermarket topping 400 pounds struggles to push his cart loaded with eggs, whole milk, and chorizo. That black spot on your forehead that was the size of a dime last month and is now the size of a quarter? Just put cover up on it. My own mother walked around for two weeks feeling like she had a brick on her chest - she was having a heart attack the entire time but just ignored it. I just can't breathe, that's all. Nothing big. Just an elephant sitting on my sternum.
Noise: A tube TV left on will drive me slowly insane but a mariachi band blasting at full volume doesn't stop the family who hired them from talking or wake their sleeping baby. Somebody honks their car horn and I'm still crawling back into my skin ten minutes later; my neighbors passively let their chihuahuas bark at top volume for hours inside their house (I can hear those little fuckers from inside mine). A woman pushes a shopping cart with a red-faced toddler braying 120 dB five inches from her face; I have to put in earplugs in order to concentrate because of the work site radio being played from a quarter mile away.
The World: All four of your car tires are almost flat and with two little kids in the back seat, you probably don't have two pennies to rub together, yet there you are, ruining your tires, wasting gas and endangering your kids. Two million gallons of oil spew into the Gulf but you shrug, tucking into that shrimp dinner. Never mind that it tastes just a little bit funny. China infuses everything they make with melamine but god help me if I get in your way when you're heading to Wal-Mart. Your dog's had that sore in his ear for three or four months but it's not getting worse, so why take him to the vet? That rotting patch on the roof of your house? Oh, it was like that when we bought it. And by the way honey, I forgot to pay the homeowner's insurance last month because we didn't have enough in the bank account. I know there's a storm rolling in. Don't worry about it.
Me? I can tell my blood sugar level from the way my thoughts flow. At night, when all is still and dark, I can feel the arthritis in my toes, red osteo-wasps layering their nest of bone over my joints. I've felt the ventricles of my heart torque from my mitral value prolapse and have gritted my teeth against the cold steel aria of the pins and plate in my pelvis. Right now, I can feel the bone in my jaw going through a final post-surgery growth spurt; it's an itch, a blazing spark of cell division as my body relentlessly repairs itself.
I'm not complaining. I'm just aware. Really, really aware.
Daily, I resist screaming: "Look what you're doing! Your kids are fat, you're taking the elevator and teaching them to be lazy, you're too dumb to know that sign shouldn't have an apostrophe, and you'd never notice that show on TV about alligators is interspersing footage of Nile crocodiles just to make the action more entertaining. What's in your head? What are you thinking? Are you thinking? Is anything going on in there at all?"
My point is: Open your eyes! Live IN the world. Live IN your body. Look and actually SEE. Turn that TV off (they're mixing Shermans in that show about Panther tanks now), put down that chicken pot pie and listen to silence for 10 minutes. Okay, 2 minutes. What does your heart sound like? Are you tired? Are you sad, angry or happy? Can you really afford that flat screen TV? When was the last time you actually had a conversation with your kids that extended past "When do you have soccer practice?"
Don't be a ghost drifting through your life. Don't wait until later.
Be present: Feel all the pain, all the fear, all the joy.
Be awake: See the beauty, the mundanity, the terrible ugliness.
Be integrated: Reality and dreams can co-exist.
Be alive.
posted by Skullgal at 9:23 PM
3 Comments:
No real words... just "wow". Yep. I've been trying to comment for five minutes and all I can say is "wow". Very thought-provoking :) Unfortunately, I'm gonna need a while to process my thoughts before I can express them.
Amen a thousand times! Someday I'll be largely off the Internet.
Word. Lovely blog post, m'dear.
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