I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax;
it is melted within my breast
Very early Saturday morning, two weeks ago, I woke up, groggy, and started walking down the stairs.1 I either missed a step, or lost my footing, and I fell down the stairs. It happened in an instant: one moment I was trudging sleepily down a step, the next moment I was prone on the floor of my basement.
Immediately, my left arm erupted in pain. The worst pain I had ever felt in my life. I heard myself scream, I high-pitched wail I had never produced before. I looked at my arm and it was just wrong: my elbow looked inverted. My wife came rushing down; she had actually been awoken not by my banshee call but by the thud of my body striking the floor. She could see something was very wrong with my arm. We needed to go to the ER. She called her dad, who lives a few minutes away, to come watch our kids so she could drive me in to the hospital. My father-in-law is a retired nurse and a light sleeper. He answered his phone on the first call and was at our home in ten minutes.
I couldn’t control my forearm’s movement at all, so I needed to sling it somehow. We found an old lumbar-support pad that had a strap for installing in cars. I jury-rigged that into a basic sling and got to the car. My wife had to help get my seatbelt buckled.
We got to the ER; my wife signed me in and we…waited. There were only two other people in the waiting room, and though I was triaged quickly, the wait for an actual bed—and any medical attention—was interminable. I was barely able to speak; my arm dominated my consciousness, a severe pain that mixed ache and tear and just sheer agony all at once.
Eventually, mercifully, I was let back into the ER proper. First, a CT scan in case I hit my head. I had to awkwardly hold my disfigured arm upright as I was laid into the CT machine itself. With that done, it was on to the x-ray room for imaging of my arm. It turns out that for x-rays to be of any use to doctors, you need to get the angle just right. This meant I had to contort my arm into 3 different positions. Now, rotating your arm around is normally no problem at all. But for me, then, following the x-ray tech’s orders was a minor spat of torture. I involuntarily groaned as I slowly twisted my left arm with my right hand, trying to get the posture needed.
Finally, we were done, and I was able to get to my bed. OxyContin was ready for me, but the nurse had to be present for me to actually take and swallow it. It took her a few minutes to come back. It felt like 5 days.
On top of hearing myself groaning and moaning every 30 seconds or so, I also found myself gritting my teeth and breathing with short little audible breaths: heee, heee, heee, like pregnant women are told to do in the movies. I wasn’t trying to do this, it just happened. Maybe this is a shock response? I don’t know.
Once I was able to take the oxy, it did help. My arm still hurt, but it was a manageable pain. I finally started chatting with my (very worried) wife. And there was good news: the x-rays didn’t show any break; instead, my left elbow was dislocated. In theory, un-dislocating it was a simple matter: the doctor would just rotate my arm so that my palm was facing (more or less) up, and then he would pull the arm forward (that is, extend my forearm from my upper arm) until the bones popped back into place. But the ER doc wanted to check with the orthopedist on call upstairs.
Bad news: the orthopedist was in the middle of something and couldn’t come down for an hour or two. But he told the ER doctor to go ahead and try popping my elbow back into place. So, that’s the plan. He and a nurse would grab hold of me and pull until I was whole again.
Before they did so, though, they gave me an IV of fentanyl. Once that was in my system, it was time to straighten. As the doctor pulled my arm, the pain rushed back. I tried my best to be as quiet as I could, but I definitely let out some more moans and groans, and my pregnancy breathing was back too. But, eventually, I felt some pop pops and…my arm looked (kind of) normal again. The doctor thought they got it into place. They brought a mobile x-ray machine into my room to confirm that everything was good. A few minutes after they did those images (getting x-rays with a non-dislocated elbow is much more pleasant than the reverse), the radiologist confirmed that everything looked good internally. My elbow was back in place.
The orthopedist did come down about an hour later to talk to me more about next steps. I needed to make an appointment with an out-patient orthopedics office to get fitted for a brace and then, eventually, physical therapy. It was going to be many weeks, maybe months, before I would hopefully restore most of the strength and flexibility of my elbow.
Two weeks out, and my arm is better. The swelling is down (though not gone entirely), and I have progressively been able to use the arm more. My main task is to keep stretching, to try and get as much extension as I can—though my bicep (and whatever muscle is on the inside of the forearm) still feel so tight that I can’t get complete extension. But, slowly, it is getting better.
The whole experience has been pretty awful, of course. And not only because of the pain, but also because of how it’s forced me to reconsider my relationship with my body.
My hands and feet have shriveled;
I can count all my bones.
We—or at least, I—take for granted that our bodies are perfect extensions of our will: when I want to grab something, I just do; my arm obeys without delay, without my even thinking about it.2 Likewise, if I want to walk to the kitchen, my feet, legs, and back facilitate my desire without question or complaint. But when I was lying on the basement floor, with my arm flopped over to my side, this part of my body which had, for my whole life up until that moment, always responded to my will unquestioningly, was now a kind of inert object simply attached to me. It did not obey my will, and worse still, it was screaming at me with a pain that utterly dominated my consciousness.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that our bodies truly are objects, in both the everyday and phenomenological senses of that word: they are material objects, made of matter and bound by the rules that govern how matter works and interacts with itself. This means, of course, that bodies work, to the extent that they indeed work, only in line with the laws discovered by science. Our bodies can’t fly (on their own) nor can they lift 20 tons, because the laws that govern matter don’t allow bone and muscle to achieve those kinds of forces. Our bodies are limited, and even fragile. We—or, again, I—often forget this. But dislocating an elbow proves a swift reminder and a remorseless teacher.
Again, though, our bodies are not only objects in the everyday material sense, but also phenomenally: they also as objects in our consciousness. That is: we only know about our bodies because of how they are presented in consciousness through our senses. We can see our bodies, we can feel our bodies (feeling one part with another, as when I rub my sore left elbow with my right hand), and indeed we can even sense where different parts of our bodies are in space (the “sense” known as proprioception or kinesthesia). We also, of course, get information about things like pressure and heat from the nerves in our skin. And, well, we can get the alarm bell of pain from pretty nearly all parts of our bodies. We know about our bodies because our bodies appear to our consciousness in all these ways, and more.
In this way, though, our bodies, which very much feel are our bodies, are ultimately quite different from our own sense of immediate self, the unified perception of consciousness, that indescribable point of “I” which lies beyond any particular content of experience and which seems to be the experiencer: maybe Vedanta’s witness consciousness, perhaps Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception. Though the way in which our bodies (when functioning properly) respond immediately to our will makes us think that our bodies are truly ours, perhaps even truly us, seamlessly integrated into our sense of self, the fact is that our bodies are other to us, and when their systems fail or fall apart, that becomes evident.
In the days that followed my fall, my left arm was simultaneously a dead weight that I couldn’t use but also a precious package I had to protect dearly: even the smallest touch on it could generate a searing sensation in the elbow joint. My left arm was decidedly other than me and to me, this object I had to care for but which I could not control. I was forced to confront the fact that, when my body malfunctioned, I was stuck dragging around something like a broken machine. My body, that is, revealed its foreignness to me.
Again, in some ways this is obvious and even trite; we adults all know that one day (spoiler warning) we will die, that our bodies will fail and they will fail us: remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.3 Even so, I think we—or, again, I—generally try to ignore these obvious and very inconvenient truths. We know it’s true, but we assume we won’t have to really worry about that until later, much later. Of course, though, later always comes, and often sooner than we thought.
And that’s the thing: a severe injury or illness doesn’t just remind us of the fragility of these object-bodies we live in, or with, or as. It also calls into question the narrative that we’ve been spinning since our early childhood: the story of who and what we are, the mental identities we have so carefully crafted.
I dislocated my arm because I fell down the stairs. At 42 years of age, with no alcohol or any drugs in my system. I definitely did not think I was the sort of person who could just—whoops!—slip and fall down the stairs. I was too young! I was too fit! I was too strong! But, here we are. It turns out I am the kind of person who can do precisely that.
Injuring my elbow damaged my confidence in my body’s integrity. But falling in the first place damaged my confidence in my self, my sense of competence, of strength, of assuredness. It turns out both my body and my mind are less secure than I thought. It’s not just that I can make dumb decisions and mistakes—I’ve known that for a while!—it’s that even when I’m doing something humdrum, everyday, mundane, I can, all of the sudden, endanger my own life while just walking down the stairs. Whoops.
In the days that followed my fall, I had no trust in my body or my control of it. When I had to walk up or, especially, down, stairs, I took slow, ginger, careful steps. Like a toddler walking for the first time. I was ready for something, anything, everything, to go wrong. For 41 years or so, I walked when I wanted, without thinking about it at all! Now, I think a lot about walking, about putting each foot in just the right place. It’s appalling.
Of course, I’m being a bit dramatic. Maybe a lot dramatic! But not dishonest. I really do feel a slight of trepidation when I approach the stairs. That’s pretty ridiculous, but it’s where I’m at right now. I’m not happy or proud of it, but I have to face it. My fall, my dislocation, has forced me to see my body and the narrative of my life differently. I see the fragility of life in a way I just didn’t before.
But yes, it still is dramatic. Overdramatic, really. There are so many people who have suffered so much worse: multiple bones broken, paralysis of legs, paralysis of legs and arms, horrible infections, death by smallpox, lifelong polio, gunshot wounds, diseases like Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gerhig’s Disease) that literally rob a person of the use of their body (permanently). Or consider the experience of my fellow substacker The Horn Gate, who spent seven months in a constant state of vertigo, barely able to get out of bed, driven to the limits of sanity. Compared to all of this, a dislocated elbow is honestly pretty tame stuff. I know that, and yet this injury has nevertheless revealed what is has revealed, and I can’t easily walk back under the veil. Really, I was lucky to live so naively for so long anyway.
What deeper lessons might any of this offer? I’m still in the midst of it, still in Sinai and not yet across the Jordan, so I may not have much deeper wisdom to impart. But I do think that confronting the foreignness of our bodies can bring the reality of life into sharper relief: our bodies—and the stories we tell about them—are frail and fragile. This story must come to an end. We might fight to survive, but death certainly seems to have a 100% rate of victory.4
Of course, for us post/modern people, this admission of our existential doom can feel like the complete victory of a pessimistic nihilism. But it need not be that. For if in discovering the foreignness and fragility of our bodies, we lose faith in our bodies and in the narratives we craft around them (that is, our minds), strangely we also discover a sense of our selves that is not tied to our body or our narrative—though both body and mind fall apart, still there seems some “witness” waiting behind, or above, or within them.
Even on the cross, with the whole world ending, the spirit still blows, strangely, impossibly, freely. Even in suffering, there is more to consider.5
All flesh is grass,
their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand for ever.
The opening quote is Psalm 22:14
The second quote is Psalm 22:16c, 17a
From the Ash Wednesday liturgy, The Book of Common Prayer, 1976: https://bcponline.org/SpecialDays/ashwed.html
With, we Christians might insist, one notable exception (so far).
The final quote is Isaiah 40:6b-8
Sorry to hear about this , but on the bright side, you got a good post out of it. The question in my mind is how you were able to type with your elbow all messed up.