Are we breaking or are we healing?
The morning after Canadian wildfires gave DC a code-red AQI, a small glob of blood came out of my nose. For the first time in my recollected life, I had stayed inside one building the entire day. And yet the blood. And yet my throat was raw.
And I was dizzy. Was it cooking with a gas stove with the windows closed? Or was it the dancing? I don’t know. But I’m back in the land of vertigo. I’ve written before about the tiny crystal rocks that line everyone’s inner ears—once again, mine have been shaken loose and are flowing around freely in the outer canal, making me dizzy beyond belief. I think it was the dancing. Seth and I have been practicing a dance that involves spinning. A lot of it. I spin and spin and my head keeps spinning.
At least my broken finger is fixed. For six weeks I splinted it, and yet still when I took off the splint, it ached with fragility. Most concerningly, it didn’t seem to be getting better. Day after day it was the same pain. Finally I went to the doctor for an X-ray. Although it was a finger at issue, they took my weight and blood pressure and asked about my period. Then I waited in the examination room for forty-five minutes. I fell into an uneasy sleep, waking whenever I heard someone walking through the hallway. I heard my doctor’s voice, and a man’s voice, and the doctor said, “You be good to that knee. And keep coming back. Any time it hurts, come back. If it’s better, you come back.” Eventually he came into the examination room and asked about my finger. I told him I’d broken it six weeks prior.
“Six weeks!” he exclaimed. “It must be healed by now.”
But it still hurt. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’d accidentally bend it—even in the splint—and wake myself up from the pain. “We’ll see,” I said. “We’ll get that X-ray and we’ll see.” Ready to gloat that mine was a freak finger that refused to heal. That his blasé confidence at telling me I was fine was off-base, egotistical, and just plain wrong.
I was fine.
When they showed me the X-ray, it was like they’d waved a magic wand over my finger. The bones were perfect. I took off the splint and tried bending it. It still hurt.
“Because you’ve been splinting it for six weeks!”
At some point it had healed—and ossified. But the pain felt the same. At some point the pain had transitioned from the pain of healing to the pain of restriction. But without the X-ray, I had no way to know. It was the same pain.
Sometimes I feel that when I’m ill, I’m actually just seeing the world more clearly. Like with the dizziness. The world is rotating a thousand miles an hour while traveling 67,000 mph around the sun and hurtling 500,000 mph through space. The world really is moving and pulsing, and sometimes I get to feel this pulse. Every time you turn your head, there is a whole new world of information for your body to take in. We have gotten very, very fast at taking it in. Sometimes we need it all to slow down. How are we not all dizzy all the time? And the finger. At some point, a creature had to break its limbs and decide, yes, I’ll keep it this way. Every joint was a mistake. Some ancient animal had to suffer so we could unscrew a jar. Our opposable thumbs were just normal fingers, caught in gravity’s net. Now every time you bend your finger it’s a Herculean feat of strength. You are breaking your bones and putting them back together. My stiff finger reminds me of this miracle.
From my closed window, I can see twenty crows on the roof of the building. They are all sitting in a row, until they’ve had enough of sitting in a row, at which point they get up and sit back down. Sometimes they all fly up at once, squawking terribly, before they return to their posts. I wonder what they’re all yelling about. I wonder if they presage doom. I text Seth, “If I die, finish my novel.” Earlier I read that they found green lightning on Jupiter. In the middle of this hellish storm-filled planet, an eerie green light has pulsed. Ammonia caught aflame. This terrifies me. So do the wildfires. Last weekend, we were hiking through the Blue Ridge Mountains on an overgrown trail with no clear markers, wondering if we were getting lost. We found and avoided three ticks as we pushed through overgrown bushes, with a tenuous confidence in my poison ivy identification skills. When we passed by a group of firemen, we asked them for directions. They were from Texas, so didn’t know. But what were they doing in Virginia, we wondered? They were cutting down young trees to prepare for a controlled burn. Who’s doing this in Canada, I wondered? But forested land in Canada spans the space of four Texases. To carry out a similar fire prevention program would be impossible. There is only so much we can do to protect ourselves.
We kept marching on, hoping for the best. And we came across another, bigger group of firemen. They yelled out to alert each other of our presence. They turned off their chainsaws and let us pass, stepping off the path and tilting their heads. Twenty firemen, our country’s brave soldiers, bowed their heads to us.
Who are we? We are people with fingers that bend and ears that keep us standing. We are the creatures who evolved to become what we are, who are still evolving, because it will never end. Who live four hundred million miles from a green lightning storm. Who are blessed to have windows to keep out the fire. I know how to fix my dizziness. I’ve learned all the maneuvers. But I might just wait a little while longer.
-Denise
PS: It’s been a while since the last post. How long? So long that a broken finger had time to heal and ossify. Seth and I have been busy. We’ve been very busy, for instance, putting together a new wooden trash can furniture thing, and getting the cats off the packaging of said new trash can furniture thing.
Also, we went to Yosemite to exchange vows and rings on a mountaintop.