Breaking Bones And Hearts

As I sat tonight nursing a slightly torn tendon, I started to think about injuries, remembering a recent Facebook post by a friend asking if it was worse to break your heart or your bones, and I started to count the bones I have broken or have had broken by others. I thought also about tears, gashes, and dislocations. I don't think I have lived violently, but there are internal and external legacies that stay with me like old friends gossiping in the night, dull and consistent.

I started early on this physical odyssey, pulling a skillet of hot grease off of the stove onto my head and arm when I was two or three. I broke my left wrist for the first time in the sixth grade. I was with a group of older boys who had tied a rope to a tree branch that extended out over the beach on the shore of Lake Erie. The tree was on the side of a hill, so you could race along its edge then swing out over the beach and reach the water (at a height of ten feet or so) if you were daring. I watched as they propelled themselves in perfect arcs, letting go just in time to land well out into the lake. I supposed I was taunted to try, and I got a head start and flung myself as hard as I could over the small cliff. I must have held on too long, for I went too high and too short. When I did let go, I came down on the beach with my head smashing my wrist. Afraid of my father, my colleagues let me walk the half mile home alone broken wrist in hand.

I broke a smaller bone in the same wrist in High School, and went six months before telling anyone, not wanting to miss any sports. When I finally told my mother we had to go to a specialist who drilled the two ends of the bone hollow, scraped a little bone from my hip, and put it all back together hoping the bridge would spur more bone growth. I never gave it a chance though. I had been told I would get a special cast that would allow me to play football, but when I got home I found out that my plain plaster cast would not be allowed. That night, a few weeks after the surgery, I got my father half a dozen beers or so, got him to sign a waiver I had brought home from school, then went out into the garage to cut my cast off. It took me most of the night, and I broke my wrist the next day in practice. I never told anyone again, and it has been broken since.

I have had several surgeries on my knees from football and motorcycles, and I guess they will need to be replaced sometime in the near future. While recovering from my first ligament surgery, I told the nurses that my leg hurt and I wanted to see the doctor. They teased and mocked me a bit when I continued, telling me they thought football players were tougher than that. When the doctor came and was dismissive, I raised such a fit that he agreed to take the cast off and take a look. When the cast popped open I could smell the infection. Today, instead of a nearly invisible line, I have a nearly inch wide scar.

A few years later, I fell asleep driving to the oil rig I was working on. When they found me the next day wrapped around a telephone pole, I had broken all the ribs on my left side, my elbow, my tibia, dislocated my hip, and ripped open my forehead. After a week in intensive care, the doctors told me that I must have broken several ribs earlier in my life as they could tell from the X-Rays. If my mother hadn't been in the room I would have corrected them - my step-father had broken them. He also had given me a few scars back then, a neatly curved one on my upper lip where he had waited until I wasn't looking and punched me while I was drinking a beer. The inside of the can cut my lip deeply, and it bled all over. He got angry and told me to stop bleeding or go take care of it. I sat and stared at him, and for the first time he backed down while I finished the beer bleeding all over his sofa.

There have been the diseases too, though they leave no visible record. Malaria, typhoid, and hepatitis were my reward for living and working in a refugee camp, and I would go back in a second if I could. I had malaria three times, and came back to the USA with yellow eyes and Hepatitis A. Each instance was a week of fever and delirium, carrying little recollection or significance now.

Over the years, I have broken my knuckle a few times, dislocated my thumb on a perilous, drunken tumble down a dozen concrete steps, reopened a nasty cut over my right eye a few times, tore cartilage, broken my nose three times, and have enjoyed a periodic bout with gout (possibly the worst of them all). There are a half dozen other minor scars, too negligible to call out. And now as my tendon talks to me, I wonder if it hurts or if I can no longer tell the difference. I am constantly aware of some part of my body complaining about something, though I can usually tune it out. I haven't lived a violent life, but my body does bear witness to a bit of abuse. All in all, I am thankful I haven't been infused with titanium yet, and that I lived my life without a great deal of fear. As for the broken heart though, that is a different story.........