|
 Monday,
29 September 2003
Because every conversation is about my arm, my brace, when I get
to stop wearing the brace, and how I'm cold because it's autumn
and my clothing isn't brace-compatible.
Because I've been an uncharacteristic hermit, and there is nothing
else to talk about besides my damn arm.
Because I have trouble washing my own hair, and because it is impossible
for me to put my hair in a ponytail.
Because I've been watching way too much TV.
Because my dinner tonight consisted of unhealthy, incompatible,
one-handed-friendly foods: chips and salsa, cereal, a slice of cheese,
peanuts, and a cookie.
Because I put the same shirt on three times in a row this morning.
(The first two tries, I put the shirt on backward.)
Thursday,
25 September 2003
The number of _____ in the last two weeks.
doctor visits: 9
different medical institutions visited: 6
hours spent in a medical institution: 26
x-ray sessions: 8
x-rays taken: 40 (approx.)
accessories for my arm: 5
prescriptions filled: 2
The woman who removed my cast was undeniably stupid. She was also
grumpy, defensive, demanding, and uncoordinated. She made me nervous.
Her coworker, a woman named "Elba," seemed a little brighter
and was moderately friendlier. Together, they tried to shove my
damaged arm through a one-inch wide opening in the cast until I
somewhat frantically convinced them that it wouldn't fit. Elba then
came at me with a rotating saw and cut the plaster around my arm
while I gritted my teeth.
As soon as the cast was off, I missed it. My arm wasn't the arm
I'd remembered prior to the accident, and it wasn't healthy or flexible,
like I'd irrationally hoped. Rather, it was red and lumpy and weak;
it reminded me of a newborn baby, and it was just as unhappy to
have left its womb.
My arm's new
clothing is all black and is made of metal, foam, and velcro.
Equipped with a hinge at the elbow, it allows me to flex and straighten
my arm, to rebuild my neglected muscles, and to supply my arm with
air and soap and water. It makes me look like I am part robot, and
is far more eye-catching than the cast.
In the past day-and-a-half, I've reluctantly grown to like my new
armwear. It is a much more lenient parent than the last, and it's
remarkable how many more things I am now able to do, little by little.
Earlier, I used my bad appendage to write down the details of (another)
doctor's appointment before I realized: I'm writing.
Tuesday,
23 September 2003
Regaining consciousness felt something like coming up for air after
being knocked down by a wave. I'd been told that some people sit
upright as soon as they resurface, and that some wrongly assume
they haven't yet had surgery. As soon as I opened my eyes, or perhaps
just before I opened them, I remembered where I was, and I knew
that it was over. I didn't sit up, but it's possible I was still
strapped down.
The faces bent over my stretcher had teal paper rectangles for foreheads
and goggles for eyes. They were wheeling me around the building—in
circles, for all I knew. I could barely speak, but I tried to tell
them about my elbow, and how it was silently screaming at me—the
skin angry that it had been sliced open, the bones angry that they'd
been drilled and screwed. "Hurts," I could hear my weak
voice murmur. I shut my eyes tight, eventually lifting my good arm
a few inches off the stretcher (up and down, up and down) in hopes
of getting someone's attention. After what felt like an unsuccessful
eternity, I opened my eyes, looked around, and realized that no
one was there at all.
Morphine. Percocet. Morphine. Percocet. Drifting in and out of sleep,
a nurse to my right into Martin, into Scott, and back into Martin. My elbow
slowly took control of its temper, watering down its raging anger
to a more tolerable pissed off. It liked the drugs; my legs, however,
completely forgot who they were. I rode in a wheelchair to the front
of the hospital. Fifteen minutes and later, we were in the yellow chariot. I
got home almost exactly 12 hours after having left.
So it seems flipping over handlebars, sanding and chipping your
teeth, bloodying your face, and breaking your in three places is considerably less painful than having
the king's horses and men put you back together again. Today is
the first day since the surgery that I've felt at all close to normal,
"normal" meaning "on codeine, but alive, pretty sober,
and able to leave the house for multiple hours." (Comparatively,
four days after the actual accident, I tried going to work.)
Currently: I drop a large percentage of the items I try to hold;
they flutter to the ground or spill all over the floor, upon which
I'm usually told I should've asked for help. (I am tired of asking
for help.) I have a new sling, which I like to call my "fashion
sling." My old sling was a makeshift sling, nothing but a piece
of cloth tied to itself. This
is my new x-ray. I can put on my own socks, make a soy dog by
myself, and my left hand no longer acts like a first-time computer
user when it cups the mouse. (I won't bother listing the things
I can't do.) My face has completely healed, except for a
tiny bit of remaining embedded gravel. My front teeth have almost
, although they still aren't much use for eating.
My cat is miraculously
diabetic (unrelated, but still). And tomorrow my cast
comes off. I'm not sure why my doctor thinks that's a good idea,
but I guess I'm okay with it.
Saturday,
20 September 2003
I waited in a small room with a recliner, two chairs, and a view
of the Empire State Building from 7:30 a.m. until after 11 a.m.
During that time, four or five doctor/nurse-types wearing various
colors of scrubs rushed in and out, asking me the same questions
before making me sign something.
Q: Are you Lisa Renee Whiteman? A: Yes. Q: Have you checked your
arm band? Is it right? A: Yes. Q: When were you born? A: Eleven-eight-seventy-four.
Q: Are you allergic to any medication? A: Penicillin. Q: What happens
when you take penicillin? A: My face and throat swell. Q: When's
the last time you had something to eat or drink? A: Eat, last night
at 9:30; drink, last night at 11:30. Q: Do you have any jewelry
on besides your nose ring? You'll need to take off all your jewelry.
A: An earring. Q: Have you ever had surgery before? A: No.
The surgeon came in around 8:30 to draw an arrow on my right shoulder
and a smiley face on my right thumb. The smiley face is his "signature,"
a nurse later explained, a gesture that I think was meant to make
me smile, rather than make me feel like a 12-year-old.
My surgery was supposed to start at 9:30; by the time I was called
at 11:10, I was almost ready to get it over with. They handed me
a pair of socks
with traction on them, so that I wouldn't slip on the waxy floors.
I handed Martin my glasses outside the swinging doors of the operation
wing, and was led, blurry-eyed, though a pastel maze of round lamps,
faceless shower-capped people holding shiny rods, and stretchers.
The woman leading me, the one who called herself my nurse, had a
clear piece of plastic strapped under her chin. I couldn't imagine
what it was for; it looked like its only function would be to catch
drool. Right after she helped me scoot on the operating table, she
introduced me to her replacement; my original nurse was going to
lunch, she told me.
"Don't talk about food! I bet Lisa's starving. She hasn't eaten
all morning," said the anesthesiologist, a chubby man who wore
an American flag bandanna on his head. I wasn't starving; I felt
sick. "Oh, there's been a change of plans," he continued,
now directing his words toward me. "We're going to have to
put a tube through your nose and down the back of your throat to
help with the anesthesia. It's because of the way they have you
lying on the table." He said it as if it were nothing, an inconvenience,
one flavor instead of another. I was embarrassed by the tears I
could feel forming in the corners of my eyes.
"We're going to give her a lot, fast," he said, after
noticing my response.
I choked on the anesthesia. I tried to fill my lungs, but there
was no oxygen whatsoever. I gasped and tried to say the words, "can't
breathe." I wondered if I was drowning, and whether they knew.
They made an adjustment, I thirstily drank in some oxygen mixed
with my sleeping potion, and I passed out.
Thursday,
18 September 2003
My food is in small squares—pizza, burritos, sandwiches,
fruit—since my sore front teeth make it unbearable to use anything
but my back left molars. I imagine that, when I eat, I look something
like a dog who's been given bubble gum, although no one has said
so. At , I hold a pen in the same teeth when it's necessary to
press "delete" in concert with "ctrl" and "alt."
My coworkers snicker at my new handwriting and offer to take notes
for me, to get me beverages, to bring me food from the outside.
When they're not looking, I clumsily put on my headphones left-handed,
dragging a foamy earpiece across my face; I try to scratch my right
arm with the butter knife I've adopted; I try to scratch my left
arm with the cloth of my chair.
The other day, even though I used Jenga-like precision, I disturbed
a finely crafted pyramid of plastic containers when trying to retrieve
a single container from an overhead shelf, almost sending the bulk
of them down on my head. I stood there for probably two minutes,
left arm stretched above me holding the shelf together, my useless
right arm wrapped across my chest, and my voice calling out to no
one, "hello?...hello?" I fumble things that are handed
to me; I sleep with my arm propped on a castle of pillows; I shower
with a plastic shopping bag. Pitiful.
When I wake up tomorrow morning (at 6:30!), I will head straight
to the hospital to again greet the unpleasant surgeon who was part
of yesterday's doctor marathon. I'm nervous, but telling myself
that it's one step away from pitiful, and that the trust I must
bring is not so different from the trust I regularly give pilots.
When I wake up for the second time tomorrow, I'll have what I imagine
to be a squeaky door hinge holding my arm together.
Two things of mine, elsewhere:
My Field
Day story at scissorkick.com
(previously posted on this site).
A
Day in the Life: Brooklyn (online series), including one of
the photos I submitted. (My photo is in "Prospect Heights";
the frames are messed up on this page, so, to see all of the pictures,
use the "previous" and "next" arrows.)
Sunday,
14 September 2003
I was lying on a stretcher, strapped in by three orange seat belts,
clutching a piece of wood sealed in orange plastic. They made me
sign something—,
as they held it on a clipboard in the air—that said I agreed
not to be stabilized in some sort of neck brace. My signature was
indecipherable; sharp mountain-like scratches made with a ball-point
pen. Riding up FDR Drive, I made necessary phone calls, asked the
rescue workers questions, repeatedly squeezed my eyes shut so they'd
stop tearing, and watched the traffic behind us through a window
decorated with a frosty white medical cross. It was my first ride
in an ambulance.
The rescue workers wore uniforms similar to the navy ensembles that
police wear. The workers weren't especially gentle or sympathetic,
and they seemed somewhat uninterested in what they were doing. They
told me my injury was more minor than I'd suspected, and that no
one would mess with my bike, which was locked up outside of the
door to the emergency room. They would be wrong about both.
I was rolled into the intake room, next to a mustached man on a
stretcher who kept spitting into a yellow bucket that was resting
on his legs. We checked each other out and assessed our respective
injuries. A paramedic looked at me and muttered, "Ooh, face
plant...face plant. She needs a suspension bike." A sweet-faced
black woman, wearing what appeared to be a wig, took down my information
and asked me to describe the level of pain I was experiencing, on
a scale of one to ten. "Um...five, I guess...I don't know what
it feels like to be shot or anything." She told me she'd put
me down as a seven, and then interrupted herself to yell at a strange
man behind me to stop touching the patients, or she'd have to call
security.
Once in my curtained "room," I was visited by a series
of people who would ask me the same series of questions again and
again. (Did you pass out? Do you have any neck or back pain? Can
you feel your fingers when I touch them? Can you form these shapes
with your hand? Can you move your arm this way? That way? What happened
exactly?) And I would recite the series of events again, including
varying degrees of details:
I was riding my bike on the Williamsburg Bridge, hoping to take
a few pictures of the blue lasers that were temporarily standing
where the World Trade Center towers used to be. Coasting down the
Manhattan side of the bridge, I was careful to slow down for each
of the yellow metal that punctuate the footpath. At one of the speed
bumps I breaked too hard, leaving my bike behind me as I flew over
the handlebars and landed, , on my elbow and face. I sat up—minus my breath
and minus the noise that the cars below were supposed to be making—and
reached for my shrieking right arm, my bloody face, and my kicked-in
front teeth, checking to make sure all were intact. My inventory
didn't tell me much.
It didn't take long before I was helped by , who reassured me that I would be okay, offered
to make a splint out of his white sweatshirt, and propped up my
bike (which was now curiously several feet in front of me). I don't
know how long he was on the phone with 911, but I remember him giving
the specifics of our location several times, and running down the
bridge to meet the ambulance when it arrived. He chided another
biker who'd stopped to help when that guy had suggested I might
need stitches in my face. Both told me they'd lost parts of their
teeth as a result of those speed bumps. Turns out, I had, too.
There was a roach on the curtained "wall" next to my stretcher.
"There's a roach," I quietly said, and two nurses frantically
jumped around, trying to kill it. I had numerous doctors and nurses
looking after me; I wasn't sure if it was because they considered
my injury to be particularly urgent, because it was an obviously
quiet night at the hospital, or because I was one of the rare patients
at that hospital who had insurance (which was really the case, apparently).
My favorite doctor let me call him Chris; he looked something like
Andrew MacCarthy and was responsible for breaking bad news to me.
He showed me my x-ray, carefully explaining what part of my elbow
was broken, and that I would need surgery and a permanent pin through
my arm. I told him the x-ray could easily be fixed in Photoshop,
but I'm not sure he understood.
My very patient friend Michael showed up at the hospital shortly
after I'd arrived. He followed my stretcher as it was wheeled to
the x-ray room three times by a gray-haired black man named Malcolm;
he took notes and pictures, and later took abuse from an inquisitive
cab driver, who'd wrongly assumed that he was responsible for my
injuries; and he distracted me and made me momentarily forget about
my stupid pain. (Since Thursday night, several of my friends have
generously offered to be my right arm, to cook and run errands,
and to keep me from being bored.)
Anyway, I'm fine. I'm frustrated that I'm incapable of doing almost
everything, frustrated that someone stole the seats and head/taillights
off my bike, frustrated that I currently have to eat mush because
my front teeth are loose, frustrated that my painkillers steal my
appetite, and frustrated that I'm typing this with one hand. I'm
nervous that I may need a root canal (or three) as my dentist suggested
might be necessary, nervous about what will be my first experience
with surgery on Friday, nervous that, even with insurance, I am
going to be out lots of money, and nervous that I'll be useless
at work for the next few weeks. But I am fine.
A few pictures:
speed bumps and
"towers"
hospital face
elbow
post-hospital
face
Wednesday,
10 September 2003
I buy one semi-decent used car per month, or at least that's what
I spend to live by myself in Brooklyn, New York, in an apartment
and neighborhood that I like. Unfortunately, my landlord(s) want
me to purchase one really good used car per month, something
I suppose I could manage, assuming I eat cereal for dinner every
night and spend my Friday nights drinking store-bought beverages
and listening to the music of the ice cream truck in the street
float up to my window.
Tomorrow morning I'm supposed to meet with my landlords, so that
we can reach an agreement as to what my commitment is and how much
it's worth to both of us. Or. Tomorrow morning I must convince my
landlords that, each month, my apartment is really only worth one
dented discolored car with radiator problems and no fifth gear.
(Though I'm terrible at bargaining.)
Being on the market again is something like what I'm told of online
dating—it's trying to access something 3-dimensional and complex
that's flatly described in a pair of exaggerated sentences. Once
you meet it, you discover the details that were left out, the flaws
that will be difficult to ignore: no closet space?
I just want to curl up in the comfort of the place that's been mine
for almost a year now, the one I had to win
from a sleazy broker, the one whose superintendent
broke my mail box, the one that squirts small
rodents out of impossibly small holes in the floor, the one
that has a constant Puerto Rican party raging on a street that's
being slowly gentrified, one Converse-wearing twenty-something at
a time. I knew that I liked my place, but I didn't realize to what
extent, until I thought I might have to give it up. And one year
isn't long enough to forget what a pain in the ass moving is.
We walked around the west side for an hour, trying to figure out
how to hoist ourselves onto the grassy out-of-use railroad that
was several feet above our heads. In one parking lot, the attendant
yelled at us when he saw us trying to scale a wall. He said something
about getting and going to jail. We foolishly considered trying to climb
on the roof of a gas station by slyly running up some mysterious
stairs, trying to climb a ladder propped against a building, and
asking residents of apartments whether they'd mind if we crawled
through their windows and onto the High
Line. Two phone calls (1,
2)
and one sighting of a man walking in the spot where we wanted to
be, and we were there, in the no man's land of tall grass and rust-colored
tracks and trash, spying on the city in a spot where we believed
we were invisible.
During the first stretch, we saw many of the buildings we'd considered
scaling, and acknowledged the wisdom of dismissing them. We stepped
through jaggedly cut holes in fences and slid on our backs between
sheet metal barriers and gravel, discussing and guessing at what
point our mothers would've decided it was all too much and turned
back. We ambled slowly down the tracks, stopping to take pictures
and lean over railings to watch the people below. We picked up and
examined bizarre debris, evidence that humans had been there before
us. (Of course they had, but the place looked so forgotten that
it was easy to pretend we were on a post-apocalyptic scavenger hunt.)
Dismounting the High Line proved to be harder than mounting it.
Some people we'd run into had suggested that we jump to the top
of a building, and, from there, jump to the top of a truck. However,
the only building and truck we found were a Tomb Raider distance
away, so we backtracked and kept looking, until we found a rusty
staircase we'd been told about. It wore a No Trespassing
sign posted for our benefit, and some of the stairs gave underneath
our weight, but it was the high, barbed wire fence around the base
of the stairs that made them intimidating. One at a time, we swung
our bodies around a giant girder, hooked our arms around a barbless
part of the fence for balance, inched our way down, and jumped.
The security guard on duty yelled after us, but Michael
hung back and said something the guard must've found charming, and
he let us go.
Monday,
08 September 2003
In the shower, with only half my vision, I notice a dark blur scurry
across the white tiles in the corner to my left, moving up the wall
at a good clip. I don't need my glasses to know who it is, but I
grab them anyway so that I could remain informed of his position.
It occurs to me that this is progress, as I imagine that, in the
past, I might've let the creature have the shower to himself.
My glasses become opaque with fog and slip off my shampooed head.
I rub their lenses in vain and push them back on over and over,
with my gaze carefully fixed on the now stationary brown oval. I
can't see him very well through the fog or the blur, so I'm grateful
that he's decided to cower, and that he's not rushing toward my
feet in the current at the bottom of the tub.
Out of the shower, with full vision, I notice that the brown oval
isn't a roach at all, but a defect on the edge of the bathtub that
has posed as a roach, giving me a false sense of security. Sadly,
it's not the first time that it's fooled me.
Sunday,
07 September 2003
I can remember details of the past few days, but trying to recount
the sequence is like trying to put a broken vase back together.
In no order, I: met a new superhero (a man with red tights and a
cape) who was being followed around town by a video camera; walked
the High Line
(an out-of-use elevated railroad on the west side of Manhattan);
watched Ghostbusters in Central Park, sitting on hard ground veiled
by a thin blanket; bartended at a party/art opening in exchange
for tips; went to a (different) art opening in the garage of a house;
biked around Brooklyn (which is like biking through tiny countries,
as often as the people and surroundings change); saw a friend's
band play; inspected and renting a new apartment; played tennis rather badly;
played fussball rather badly; looked at stars on the Manhattan side
of the East River; danced in a hip-hop club; took three rolls of
film; and hung out with (and introduced) old and new friends.
Everything that I meant to get done but didn't do has turned into
an intimidating monster, one that is good at growing up fast.
Wednesday,
03 September 2003
I couldn't get to sleep last night. I rarely have trouble, because
I tend to deprive myself of it; yesterday, however, I was full of
sleep, like a warm pot of coffee. As I lay in the dark, for some
reason I thought about the elements of my
house—the TV news anchors who talked about a strange section
of the East Coast, a subtly warped bathroom mirror that makes you
distrust your reflection, a sand snake at the base of the attic
door, bathroom wallpaper full of pink poodles that behave like humans,
spooky pot holders with the faces of plastic children sewn in, and
walls of disintegrating photos. The elements took turns, as if selected
by a spinner in a board game.
I thought about the crocheted grocery list with the plastic orange
pins; as a child, I would always slide the pins over "whiskey"
and "beer," for my grandmother to discover later. She'd
tell me I was a silly girl.
I thought about the smell of their house and how I used to think
that was the smell of the North. When I climbed into bed last night,
it occurred to me that I now live in the North, but my place does
not smell at all like my grandparents'.
Tuesday,
02 September 2003
It couldn't have weighed more than two pounds, but it felt quite
powerful in my hands as it thrashed around with all its strength,
like a fish on land. In our struggle, one of us had knocked over
a big plastic container of water, which moved over the dirty floor
and slowly seeped into the cloth of my handbag and camera bag. I
could feel the tiny creature's fangs and claws in my flesh, but
I refused to loosen my grip, as I verbally instructed the man and
the woman how to best open the carrier so that I could put it inside.
"You're bleeding," someone said, and I looked down at
my empty hands, which were leaking a dark, thick red in the places
my skin had been pierced. There was a messy-looking gash across
my left wrist, evidence that the wise kitten had . The fluttering woman gave me a crumpled bunch of
paper towels so that I could clean myself up. Then she got out a
remarkably dirty bottle of peroxide and poured it over my wounds
as I held my hands over the trash can.
The deli on the corner of my block is one of a thousand like it.
It's long and narrow with anorexic aisles that can accommodate one
person at a time. It serves as something of an emergency grocery
store, crammed with dusty cereal boxes and soup cans that are stacked
as high as the ceiling, with no square inch going to waste. People
hang out there, on the black- and -checkered
floor tiles at the front of the store, watching the TV that's singing
in Spanish, talking to the people who work the counter. Just outside
of the front door, on the corner, there's always a tough-looking
pack of guys who are secretly kind and polite if you ever need to
talk to them. Both inside and out are cats: lazy, shy, skinny, friendly,
pregnant, young. They walk through the propped-open door at will,
lick at cans of cheap cat food, exterminate mice, rub themselves
against the legs of strangers, and reproduce.
Several months ago, I went to the deli with Elizabeth, in hopes
of convincing the owner to let us take his cats to have them fixed.
We promised to bring them back, but he didn't trust us, and he argued
that the store needed cats, and that "if you 'fix' all the
cats, there will be no cats anymore." We left without any cats.
It's post-kitten birthing season now, and the deli shows it; most
of its full-grown cats have disappeared and have been replaced with
5-week-old versions. Sometimes they're easy to overlook, sitting
among the non-perishables and curled up in empty boxes. Recently
I found one in a box that had been taped shut, apparently so it
wouldn't escape onto the street. (We played the game "Marco
Polo," it, yelling and yelling, until I found it.)
It was a sick kitten that inspired me to cage the kittens and carry
them to a rescue service. It was friendly and orange, it had an
infection in both eyes, it hosted a party of fleas, and it wheezed
when it breathed. I'd gone by to ask permission the day before,
and the owner shrugged and said, "Take as many as you want."
I brought the carrier the next day and negotiated with who originally told me I couldn't take them, but who
eventually offered to help me.
Even though she was considerably older than me, her nickname for
me was "Mommy," as in, "Here's a paper towel for
you, Mommy," "Do you want me to pour more peroxide on,
Mommy?" and "I'm glad you're going to help the sick one,
Mommy." It was her idea to put the sick one in a box by itself,
and to poke holes in the sides so that it could breathe. She stood
behind the counter and stabbed the cardboard fourteen times.
With two kitten siblings in a carrier, a box containing a sick kitten,
a camera bag, and a handbag, I made my way to the clinic in Manhattan.
The kittens were quiet, for the most part, although whenever I made
eye contact with , it hissed at me. Elizabeth was waiting for me
when I arrived, and immediately took the kittens off my hands and
placed them in their new, temporary homes, in a glass and wooden
tic-tac-toe board that resembled Hollywood Squares. I noticed that
some cats had a single round green sticker on their square; Elizabeth
explained that green dots indicated which cats were mean. I suggested
that she put five green dots on the devil cat I'd just brought her.
I'm told that they will eventually have homes, and that, until then,
I can come by and get hissed at whenever I want.
I performed my sonnet on Saturday,
just after transporting the kittens. Me, trying to take a picture
of the Brooklyn Bridge, annoyed at the sky as it spit back at me,
fourteen
lines. I'm told it went well, and it felt like it did, but I'm
nervous about seeing myself on camera. Until I see the tape, I can
at least pretend it went well. Being in front of the camera
is much scarier than being behind it.
He left a note at my old house in Raleigh, apparently. It's odd
how significant the is, when you're used to having no contact at
all.
Monday,
01 September 2003
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