Breaking my wrist

So, wanted to capture a bit of how this felt...

I broke my wrist trying to learn to snowboard, about a month ago. I mean, really broke it-- "distal radius fracture." They took x-rays when I got to the clinic at the base of the hill, set my wrist and put it in a half cast, and told me I'd need to see a doctor and probably have it operated on when I got back. Which I did. I broke it on a Thursday around noon, went back to the hotel and stayed there until the next day, when I took the bus back from Tahoe. I wasn't able to see someone then so I saw someone on Monday, and had the wrist operated on that Friday. Cut me open, put a plate and screws in there to hold the bones in place. Becky drove me to the clinic (picked me up at 5:30 am!) in Fremont, and picked me back up at 10:45 or so after it was over, dropped me off at home. Viv took me to the airportat 5:30, and I flew down to L.A. to Mom's house that evening (Lillian, Nick, and Allie had all flown in the previous few days, originally I was going to fly Wednesday with Lillian, they picked me up). It was Mom's birthday, she turned 90.

So, anyway... I was on Percocet (Oxycontin + Aceteminophen) for several days after the operation. It hurt a lot, not to the point of tears, but to the point that I really couldn't think clearly. The Percocet helped somewhat. I was really tired, and sleeping all the time (this was true ever since the injury). My typical day was wake up at 11, eat a bit, sleep from 1-4, eat a bit, doze in the evening, then go to sleep about 10. I'd stopped taking the trazodone the day I broke my arm, and didn't take it again until about a week after the operation. I took the Percocet a few times a day for the first few days, and then tried to wean myself off it towards the end of the week, stopping on Saturday I think.

Anyway, I'm going into this detail as background. It's not really what I want to capture, but it's probably relevant. The main thing that I wanted to relate is my state of mind during that week and part of the next. The main things were 1) not being able to think, because of the pain, and 2) a strong, emotional, direct perception of mortality.

Death everywhere

So... the most notable thing about that week was that I felt very aware of mortality, mine and that of every living thing around me. This was a very emotional, felt experience, not an intellectual one. It's usual (at least at middle age) for me to think about death in a 'second hand' way-- about family who've died, or the deaths of animals or other living things, and while there's some emotional color to this, mostly affection for people who are no longer with us, it's mostly a mental story around the theme of losing others. But this was different. It had the feeling of seeing something clearly for the first time, of going to a new place and understanding it by actually being there when before you'd just heard stories or seen pictures. I felt I had a glimpse of what approaching my own death in old age might feel like (should I be so fortunate). And being so tuned in to mortality, I was seeing it everywhere. I was reading in the NYRB about a philosopher who wrote articles considering the impact that knowledge that human society exists after we're gone informs our value judgments now. He proposed thought experiments, such as if (as in a movie I once heard of) there was a disease that made everyone in the world sterile, so that humanity would cease in 100 years once the last human had passed away. He said this would affect your judgments about what to value in your life, what activities were worth pursuing-- that even if you have no offspring, no relatives, your knowledge that humankind will outlast you counts for something. So, death. There were science articles I read about hospice care and the dying. Death. There were my memories of seeing Mom when we went down to visit, in particular when I entered the house and she was sleeping on the couch-- she looked so small and frail, and it was so unusual to see her asleep. Death. There were the usual articles about climate change. Mass death. Everywhere I looked, there was mortality.

I was continually aware of my body, how I had broken it, and how it was injured, and would repair itself but not ever be quite the same. How the pain never left me, and how I was inextricably tied to my body-- there was no going into a world of imagination, of mental preoccupation, for me, I was mentally grounded in the here and now. Normally, I think of myself as the things I do, or my values, or thoughts, or memories, or personality-- mental states. But during this week I thought of myself as a bag of tubes, slowly breaking down, repairing itself but not quite as fast, not as complete, again and again, the accumulation of small failures until the final one that was my end. I thought about how, at age 55, I could still anticipate recovery, getting to a point where I had most of the use of my arm and hand back, where the pain was gone (or, since I couldn't quite imagine it then, mostly gone), but that in 10, 20, 30 years, I would not have the comfort of this assurance that things would get better. In fact, it seemed clear to me that I would continue to injure myself, and at some point things would not get better much at all, they'd just keep going in this new state. I imagined living with my arm in pain, unable to really move my wrist or hand at all, for the rest of my life. "Imagine" again makes this sounds like the kind of thing you daydream about, or spin a story to yourself about, but it wasn't like that. It was like experiencing a new reality where this was, in fact, the case, the fact that must be acknowledged and reckoned with. Since I was currently in pain, I was going to continue in pain; since I currently did not have use of my arm, I would never again have use of my arm; since I was currently unable to think, was just a bundle of tubes, I would always be a bundle of tubes.

In fact, it seemed curious to me that I had ever imagined that I was other than this, that my personality, thoughts, values, amounted to anything significant. I was a body, which did things to maintain itself, and would do so until this body got so damaged and weak it could not maintain integrity and succumbed to breakage or bacteria. And I looked at plants, and saw how they're green shoots, then healthy plants, then damaged plants, then dried broken shells of plants. This was my path, this was my children's path, this was the path of all living things. We're all growing briefly, then breaking, then dying. I thought of all the food we eat, the animals being killed, the pain of death, breaking apart, being eaten. One huge world of things living and fading and dying... That's what we are.

This wasn't depression, I probably need to add. I know what that's like, and this wasn't it. Depression is a constricting of your world until you and your unhappiness are all that exists. Everything is about you, everything is about your inadequacy, your unhappiness, your frustration, your limits. It's a very restricted and self-reinforcing mental state that makes you unable to engage with the world. In fact it's kind of all mental state, you're not in touch with your physical state (except lethargy, and perhaps tension) at all. These feelings were not that. They weren't about me. I wasn't angry with myself, or irritable, or tense. It was all about being a physical, living creature, embedded in the world and subject to the rules of all living things in the world. That's what I was. That's all I was, it seemed. It wasn't anything to be happy or sad about, it just was.

So, now...

So, this faded a few days after I stopped the Percocet and started taking the trazodone again. Whether it was the change in drugs, or the lessening of the pain (still significant, but lessened to the point that I could occupy my thoughts with something else from time to time), or the passage of time, I don't know. What I have now is the memory of how this felt-- I don't have these feelings any more, my mental state is back to normal. I guess that's a good thing.  It does make it easier to function, or perhaps the ease of functioning makes it easier to have a mental state that's not so tied to the present moment, to immediate reality, and hence to the brute facts of life. But it did make a strong, vivid impression on me, and I'm afraid of losing that. I felt that I had a truer sense of the value of life, the value of health, the short time we have before we die. It was an emotional connection with these things that gave me a whole different idea of what and who I was. I'm losing that connection, and I'm starting to lose that sense of myself as a creature, and am back to being primarily a personality loosely connected to a body, somehow free from mortality. I expect it will come back when I near death, and most of those around me have died, and my body is failing.  I wonder how I'll feel about it then.  Maybe these memories will help-- "oh yes, I've been here before."