the varieties of painful experience

I'm always fascinated by the varieties of pain I experience. When I was 13 I tripped and fell while running at full speed playing soccer, landed poorly and broke my left arm--both bones, clean through. May you never see a 45-degree angle in the middle of your forearm.

All things considered, that's probably the most painful thing I've experienced. I remember being largely incapacitated, and unable to see: my vision was just sheets of red, a lot of the time. Then there was a shot of Demerol, and then more pain when the doctor set my arm. It got sort of silly, really. I didn't have any mental training at the time, and in any case there comes a point where pain can just be completely consuming your moment-to-moment experience, whether or not you're consciously attending to it.

Years later, I was crawling to the bathroom with cold sweats from something that is not this but does involve pinching some very sensitive nerves; I found the will to re-arrange everything myself, but the nerves were sore and twitchy for a couple of months afterward. Maybe a year after that my back got all scratched up on a coral reef, and that stung, but the aloe with tea tree oil we mixed up as a disinfectant? that hurt like the dickens.

There was my first concussion, working after my first year in college, and the fractured metatarsal from falling off my bike. Of course aikido has had a lot to offer, with a couple broken toes, a fractured ball of the foot, one or two mild concussions, jabs to the ribs, and one thundering punch that thankfully landed right in the thick bony part of the sternum, leaving me merely stunned and sore, rather than writhing on the floor trying to breathe.

(This all sounds very violent and hyper-masculine, but honestly, my older brother racked up worse injuries playing touch football and kayaking. The longest-healing injury I've had was some muscle tear or something from throwing a football.)

All of which brings us to my current toe experiences. The left toe has been bugging me, but last night during aikido I took a step and in the right toe it was like someone shoving a big splinter into the side of it. Which I assume is what was actually happening, because there's a bone spur on that one, too, so the "splinter" is just on the inside. This was one of those sharp pains that leaves an echo: twinges, mental fear that it will happen again, and a changing feeling of heat and cold on the skin above where it hurt.

This one is actually more bothersome than the soreness on the left, so I started eyeing my calendar for when I could get the right one done.

When you're setting up a new computer server with multiple hard drives, systems administrators check the serial numbers: if the numbers are too close, it means they're from the same manufacturing lot, and you send some back to the seller, because otherwise they'll fail around the same time.

I guess my warranty is starting to run out.

toe-grinding 2: maybe another time

I canceled the surgery today, after seeing the surgeon yesterday. It was turning out to be more extensive and with a longer recovery, and while I was at aikido last night, it occurred to me that I'm not quite ready to give it up for any number of months.

About 10% of humans have an extra bone in their big toe. I'm one of them, and somehow the bone spur is interacting with it? And since the pain is where that extra bone is, there would be an incision in the pad of the toe to grind down the spur and take the bone out. That means 3 weeks on crutches, instead of 2-7 days, and an even longer recovery--even with the regular bone spur on the side of the toe, most patients report it takes at least a year to feel really healed.

I had the surgery scheduled for the 14th, and I'm just not ready to be on crutches for 3 weeks on short notice. Also I live in a second-floor one-bedroom apartment with no couch and steep stairs.

My plan is to stop running: I'll join the local gym and do elliptical or whatever. Stopping running should let me keep doing aikido. And I'll probably investigate some kind of bodywork: I'm not satisfied with this problem suddenly appearing 6 weeks ago, after not bothering me at all for the years since the root injury (fracturing the toe joints). It just doesn't add up, and the doctor didn't seem to have a good explanation for what's going on in there, which doesn't exactly make me want to cut my foot open and start removing bones.

So I'll try this for a few months and see how it goes.

toe-grinding

Something has been Obviously Wrong with my left big toe for a month or so, and it turns out to be a bone spur. A few years ago I had a month where I severely jammed both my big toes several times (aikido, of course), and apparently the reason it hurt so much was that one or more bones fractured. On the left, at least: I expect to eventually have the same problem on the right, which makes me wonder if I should just have them both ground down at once, because...

...while I can go running or whatever 2 weeks after the 10-minute outpatient surgery, I can't do barefoot athletics for 3-6 months.

Months and months without aikido. Hurf.

And yet, the toe is already discouraging me from training, so I might as well go ahead with it. Pfeh.

Stupid impermanence. =)

one more exciting event

Excellent aikido class this morning! Though during the free-training at the end (where we can use any attack and response) the beginner I was training with went a little wild with a punch. I touched it, saw blood on my hand, got off the mat and into the bathroom and proceeded to say "Fuck!" several times.



As best I can figure, he punched me in the face, and my lip got caught in between my top and bottom teeth; thankfully, my teeth didn't through through my lip as I originally thought, though it turns out not to matter for how they treat it (though it might have made drinking more challenging). A mere hour in the ER and a handful of stitches later, I was home. It's a little sore, and I have to watch how I eat and smile, but it's not so bad. The doctor said it should heal to a fairly small scar, but it depends on my skin; and I'm having faith it will heal better than if I'd not gotten it stitched up.

Funny enough, when we're taking falls we know to keep our teeth together so we don't bite our tongue (or lips, apparently), but it's never come up in the context of throwing other people. So there's a lesson learned.

I'm also interested to see exactly how much a minor-but-necessary ER visit costs, which I get to find out because I don't have insurance. I'm not worried about covering it; just annoyed that U.S. health insurance is so broken, and grateful that so far it's not ruining my life.