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Making the Cut
Other people cut themselves in some dreadful emotional pathology. I ask myself if that’s what I do. I don’t think so. The first time, I was hurting. I couldn’t turn my head without pain shooting through my neck, my shoulders, my jaw. The next time, my ankle throbbed for days and nights, forty of each, perhaps. When in pain, I slice and look at the red, red blood. How can it be so red? This is my koan. And why does it hurt so little? Why is that pain so vague? This is my miracle. I cut into me to meditate on red and something relatively painless. So back to my shoulder because this is what I’m really thinking about today. The pain in my shoulder. The medical term is actually “discomfort,” my rheumatologist tells me every few months as he rotates my arm. Out to the side, bend at the elbow, up, back, forward, across, down. My torso convulses first one way, then the other in “discomfort” until at last he returns my arm to my side. “What about amputation?” I ask. He laughs and offers me another shot of cortisone. He writes me prescriptions for Enbrel, a drug that I inject into my leg twice a week. It costs an arm and a leg, I always think, and I imagine myself as one of the armless legless jokes. What do you call a woman with no arms and no legs with severe chronic rheumatoid arthritis? Four limbs luckier than most women with chronic rheumatoid arthritis! And this always leads me to my mother’s favourite joke. The two of us laugh together, cripples in a conspiracy of offensiveness, while the others shake their heads and mutter at us about being grateful for what we have. What’s orange and lies on the floor? A crippled Cheezie. If you find it funny, raise your hand. Or blink three times. (And admit it to no one else!) Tasteless. I understand that’s what people think of me. A real amputee would kill to restore his limb, and so to say I want to amputate my own arm lacks sensitivity, discretion, tact, taste. But no doctor will amputate my arm. It looks fine. It’s untouched by gangrene or flesh-eating disease. It’s whole. The nerve endings are intact. I can wiggle all my fingers. |
