Author: Elisabeth

Comrades in broken bones.

I keep my URL tag from the hospital on my wrist by way of superstition. My fantasy is in keeping it there I reduce my chances of a return to hospital. When I am no longer fearful that the bone might move, only then will I remove it. What a great day that will be. Like cutting off the dried placenta cord from a newborn’s navel.

This morning my husband removed the brace while I kept my leg steady on the bed and he washed it down in warm water with a face washer. The bliss of having my increasingly itchy leg rubbed down is without words. My husband then dried my leg and rubbed it with moisturiser. My leg glowed. I could see the yellowish bruise as it curled around my knee cap down my calf on the left side, faded now but still tender to touch.

This brace that has replaced the original plaster cast, is a wonderful invention, however ugly, though the orthotics fellow says it is not a new invention. The materials may have been ungraded but the device and its design have been around for aeons.

The brace consists of a skin covered section covered in air holes that the orthotics fellow, whose name is Damian, first heated to soften and then molded to my leg. When it had cooled and hardened, Damian snapped the mold down the centre and peeled it off. Later he cut it in half at the area of my knee. He has since fitted hinges there on either side. The hinges are fixed at the moment with the option of opening them to allow my knee to move incrementally at fifteen degree angles over time.

The brace is held in place with thick black Velcro straps that run up and down my leg from ankle to thigh. The whole lot is then further held in place with two hard plastic strips, velcroed on either side of my ankle. These then fit into a cup into which my heel fits. This last piece is finally kept in place with a shoe. Underneath the brace I wear an elasticised white ‘sock’, a long tube of towelling type stretchy material that covers the length of my leg to protect it against rubbing from the plastic and metal of the brace, which itself is padded.

The sock is tight fitting and snug. It keeps me warm but it does not allow my skin to breathe.
‘It’s the dead skin’ Damian said. ‘Once you wash your leg and rub it down with moisturiser, you’ll feel better.’ He was right.

The world of orthotics is a whole new world to me. The shop in Prahran is located at the grungy end of High Street near Punt Road. I do not imagine they need a high-class show room to demonstrate their wares. They have a captive and regular market. Their goods are in constant supply.

On the two days I was there, on the first to be measured and on the second to be fitted with my brace, Damian told me about at least three other broken legs that were on their way to him, including a woman who had broken both her legs. Two broken legs. Imagine that. She had broken them down near her ankles, Damian said. She will be wheel chair bound.

I find I am getting into a broken leg rhythm. After two weeks my strength on crutches increases daily and I can now hop on my right leg with confidence. The broken leg itself causes little pain most of the time, though occasionally it gives me a twinge. But every twinge passes as soon as I change position.

Once a day now my husband helps me to take off the brace and he washes down my leg. My leg looks strange, like a beached creature from the sea. The bruise is now the palest mustard yellow. It has a sallow look like jaundiced skin.

My husband rubs my leg vigorously with the face washer and although it is blissful for my neglected skin to be rubbed in this way, I am also terrified to keep my leg still. Damian had suggested I do this in the shower while seated on the shower chair, but I am not yet confident enough to let my leg hang down unbraced.

In my imagination the bone could pop out of place at the slightest jar when exposed like this and I am so fearful that I will only undergo the procedure on top of my bed with my leg stretched out in front of me, unable to drop or fall or slip out of its moorings.

I have an odd relationship with my leg, my left leg, as if it is a withered appendage that I despise and at the same time a beloved and fragile infant of whom I must take particular care. These opposing impulses give rise to the odd flash of indignation, the odd impulse to dash my leg onto the ground, to bear all my weight on this one broken leg and go racing up the corridor.

I have this perverse impulse at times when I feel most helpless or when I feel angry, like last night with my husband for leaving the light on in our bedroom when I had been trying to sleep.

In the past I would have gone to turn the light off myself but in my helplessness, it is such an effort to get up, to get the crutches, to hobble to the door, to turn off the light. I have become the dependent one who waits for others to do these things and I was angry with my husband for his lack of consideration, or his temporary failure to recognise my needs.

I can be cranky in my new found immobilised state, far more impatient than I have ever known myself to be. It is hard being waited upon. It is hard when others have control over when you eat, when you can enjoy a cup of tea, when you can wash. The list is endless.

I have learned to ask more clearly. My husband and children resent it when I do not, when I throw hints.
‘A Cup of tea would be lovely’ is not the way to ask for a cup of tea.
‘Would it?’ my husband says. ‘That’s nice.’
No, I must say, ‘Could you please get me a cup of tea?’ A clear and direct request.

Have I developed this tendency to hint at my needs or requests from my mother? She is a master manipulator. She rarely asks directly for anything. As a child I was amazed at the way it worked.

On Sunday mornings we walked to Mass in Cheltenham. The church was a good half hour walk from where we lived on Warrigal Road. We straggled in a bunch up and down side streets, our mother in our midst. She liked to point out to us the houses and gardens that she most admired.

After Mass, the thought of a repeat walk home was always daunting. My mother never asked anyone, not as far as I could see, but invariably she managed to get a lift home, while we children wandered back through the same side streets, this time unaccompanied by our mother who reached home at least twenty thirty minutes before us and was already sitting with her cup of tea in front of the fire and reading her copy of The Advocate.

Women of my mother’s generation, I have been told, women who grew up believing their place was in the kitchen attending to the needs of husband and children, needed to develop new ways of getting their needs met that did not include direct approaches for assistance.

I have a touch of this. I can sense it. I do not like to ask directly,
‘Can I please have a cup of tea?’ It seems too demanding, however clear it might be. And yes, I would rather someone offer me a cup of tea.

That way I do not have to ask. That way I do not run the risk of their annoyed expressions if they feel inconvenienced or if they should say ‘no’. My family never say ‘no’, but sometimes they say ‘in a minute’, and the minute can extend into an hour, as I sit waiting as patiently as I can, not wanting to nag.

Don’t get me wrong. I have progressed now to the point where I could make my own cup of tea, but it is the task of getting the tea from stove top to my place on the couch that is such a challenge.

I have no hand free when I use the crutches and so I must support myself on one crutch and carefully pass the full cup from stove top to bench top and from bench top to table, from one flat surface to another, until I can get it to its destination at my table near the couch.

I hear and see broken legs everywhere. Yesterday I received a letter from my writer friend and correspondent, Gerald Murnane. I had written to tell him the saga of my leg and he sent back a copy of an article he wrote for The Metaphysical Review called ‘The Falling’ in which he describes how he too broke his leg on 14 October 1994.

Given that GM was born in 1939, as I recall, he would have been in his mid fifties when this happened, not far off my age now and it happened, it seems, for similar reasons.

GM writes, ‘Before last October, I had never been a patient in a hospital. The only surgery I had ever undergone was my circumcision as a baby (unless I was born without a foreskin) and two small operations for the removal of cysts from my scalp in 1955 and 1990. Neither of these required a stay in hospital. Before last October I could say that I had never broken or dislocated any bone in my body.

‘As of last October I had more than ten months of accumulated sick leave, so seldom had I been ill… So I was someone who needed to be reminded that he was not made of imperishable stuff; who needed to be brought low – literally as well as figuratively.’

The cause of his fall, as GM goes on to describe, is one of excessive busyness, working as he was, full time as ‘the Selection Officer for the [Creative Writing] course at Deakin [university] by day and trying to finish [his seventh novel] Emerald Blue by night and at weekends’.

But the real catalyst was the fact that in 1994 GM’s twin boys had finally left home for good. All year the boys had been looking for a place to rent and finally they found it three days before their father’s fall.

I resonate with GM’s comments here: ‘The crowdedness of our small house was becoming unbearable, not to mention the strain of finding dirty dishes on the sink at all hours and the feeling that we [GM and his wife, Catherine] were being used up. I say this without meaning to speak against my twin sons. However, a time comes when the parents of any animal turn away from it. I used to watch with interest many a mother cat boxing its half-grown kitten over the ears when it was time for the young one to stop trying to suckle and to get out and catch mice.’

After the boys finally moved out, GM and his wife were left with ‘these two empty rooms given back to us after we had lived like Japanese for so long, with our belongings piled up in cupboard…’

The accident happened three days after his sons had left, on a fateful Friday evening, when GM took to moving filing cabinets and their contents. He had ‘opened a six pack of Coopers Sparkling Ale and got to work…At about eleven thirty, I was standing on a chair and pushing a row of books along a shelf near the ceiling of what had been for so long my son Martin’s room and out of bounds to me but was now my new playground. Some of the books began to fall. Instinctively, I reached out to save the fuckers.

‘I do not know how I fell. I recall lying on the floor and knowing, as one knows these things in dreams, that something was wrong with me. I recall hearing the last of a stubby of beer pouring out onto the carpet from the ironing board nearby. As I had fallen, I must have clipped the corner of the ironing board and caused the stubby to fall onto its side and to pour out its contents. I recall reaching up and standing upright the now empty stubby.

‘I recall lying where I lay for a minute or two, knowing, as I just said, that this had been no ordinary fall. I recall using the chair to drag myself to my foot. I wrote foot because I had not as yet put any weight on my left leg, which, so I divined, was not quite right. I recall standing up with my hands on the chair and putting weight on my left leg.

‘I recall – and I’ll never forget – my left leg buckling under me as though the bone from knee to ankle was a strap of licorice. I recall – let’s be frank – hopping out to the toilet with the chair as a walking frame and emptying my bowels for fear of what I had done to myself. I recall hopping to Catherine’s and my bedroom and waking her up to tell her that I had injured my leg. I do not recall any pain. God is merciful. Injuries such as mine seem to be painless. You can say I was in shock, if you like.’

And here GM’s story and mine diverge considerably. I was in pain after I broke my leg, the worst pain I can recall beyond childbirth. As my husband drove me in the back seat of his car to the hospital, every time he turned a corner the centrifugal force pulled the bone out in some way, even as I tried to hold my leg in place. The pain was like a hot sword through to the bone.

But if the pain I suffered then as opposed to the pain that GM does not recall suffering is any indicator so far, my progress has been more steady. GM also broke his tibia near the knee cap, but GM’s break required surgery, screws and plates inserted and a bone graft from his pelvis to replace the damaged bone.

So far no such treatment has befallen me. GM’s period of hospitalisation extended beyond two weeks and he was not fully recovered for another three months. I am confident, at this stage at least, that my recovery will not take as long. Touch wood.

I am cheered to be a kindred spirit of one of my literary heroes. We are comrades in broken bones.

You can say goodbye to your dignity here.

I long for this fracture to heal. I long to have my leg back again. Last night as I lay in bed and flexed my good leg up and down, I wondered that I could have ever taken my legs for granted before. How much I need them.

The house is a mess. The carpet needs vacuuming, the sink needs a wipe, the bench is cluttered with things that should long ago have been put away. I wish I were able to rise from this couch and like Mary Poppins snap my fingers and every out of order item would return to its rightful place in cupboards, behind doors, under benches and the room might shine again.

But I cannot. The best I can do at the moment is turn a blind eye. My children, my husband help as much as they are able. Mostly they are gracious in their helpfulness, but from time to time the strain tells on them, too. They get grumpy at all the extras they must do in order to keep this ship afloat.

It is a small thing in the scheme of things, a broken leg, and yet it has derailed my life. Then I am reminded of all those worse ailments and I want to scream for the banality of these thoughts.

My scalp itches for want of a wash. My hair feels drack, the curls on each side cling together and the back of my hair is flattened from lying too much on a pillow. Not that I spend my days in bed now. For the past two days I have taken up residence on the kitchen couch, the one that sits under the bay window and looks out into the garden. It is the place I moved to, almost by instinct, when I first came home and it is where I now choose to sit.

The red bricks in the garden are slick with rain. The pin oak is yet to come into bud. Last year the catkins were already dropping at this time but we have seen a better winter this year; a winter that can be called winter, cold, wet and rainy. A winter that takes away all the delights of summer and replaces them with the cruel necessities of life – the rain water to turn the drought around and relieve us – at least temporarily, of the fear that we here in Australia will eventually run out of water.

This morning I read an article in the New York Times – thank you, Mim – about delirium in the elderly, delirium induced through the experience, not simply of surgery with all its intrusiveness, but in some instances simply on the basis of the hospital experience itself.

My cup of tea this morning is a disappointment, not enough milk in it and I do not want to ask my husband for more. Not used to multi-tasking in the way my daughters are, he tackles one job at a time, and they pile up to the point where he feels persecuted and I become even more so. I become reluctant to ask for all the tiny things that make my incarceration on this couch less unpleasant.

It strikes me from the New York Times article that it is this, this restraint and constraint, the unfamiliarity, the sense of helplessness that must fuel dementia.

I fear I have become an old stick-in-the-mud preferring the quiet of home to the hurley burley of life outside. What it is to be trapped inside a body that refuses to function as it once did?

Apart from the occasional purple iris that stands tall above the otherwise bare shrubs there is not much colour outside. The white arum lilies have popped up in abundance along with a few white magnolias. Arum lilies are funeral flowers. The whiteness adds a touch of austerity. My daughter has thrown out piles of withered flowers, which she took home a week ago from the formal. These are mostly in oranges and yellows, still colourful against the black soil, but they lie inert on the ground and reinforce the sense I have of winter time and of death and decay.

I tell myself every day that this time will pass. This enforced immobilisation and that I should make myself enjoy it. At least I can write. At least I have access to the Internet and to my blog and fellow bloggers. At least I am not alone. I have my family. But I hate the transformation I detect in my own usually confident and competent self. I hate the way I can no longer take charge of a situation and get things rolling. I resent the way I cannot tidy my own house, not that I do so much of that these days, but at least before I broke my leg, if the fancy caught me, I could in fact get up the momentum to wipe the benches and put away dishes and clothes.

My older sister visited yesterday and reminded me of what it was like when we were children. In those days she did all the housework, ostensibly because our mother worked away from home for money, but more so, I think now, because our mother did not like house work herself and her oldest daughter was driven to try to create some sort of order in an otherwise chaotic household.

So my older sister took it upon herself – or was she asked, or required – to do all the washing, the cooking and cleaning, a veritable Cinderella. She took on all my mother’s tasks including my mother’s relationship with my father, but that is another story and one to be glanced over, as it might offend.

I ask myself why it should offend. Why is it possible to write in a blog about all manner of disturbing events in life, and not feel the inhibition that I feel should I mention my older sister’s role in my family as my father’s wife?

It is a secret. Role reversals such as these are kept secret because they are outside of the natural order. My sister told me, as much as she did these things, she did them under duress.

One day my father was home sick in bed. He called for my older sister. He needed her help to get to the toilet.
‘Do not be frightened of my penis,’ he said to her. My sister did not want to look at his penis. She could scarcely bear to touch the body of this six foot three man who leaned on her heavily as she steered him to the toilet.

This memory came to her after I had asked her a series of questions about what it had been like for her when we were children.
‘All the times when our father walked around the house naked’. I remember this too, the sight of his aging, naked body.

Why is it that children find it hard to see their aging parents naked?

In the hospital, as the nurses wheeled Elsie back to bed after a shower on the shower chair, her nightgown hung loosely down across her knees but bunched up around her waist at the back. I watched her stout and naked torso glide past me, stuck like a pink pudding on the base of the wheelchair, mottled with cellulite.

Why should it disturb me so much? Is it because we hide our bodies from one another as we age, such that the sight of the creased and wrinkly skin is reduced to the face, the wrists, the ankles only? When we see the full figure of aged nakedness, is it a reminder of the garden in winter, the bare trees, the sense of death on the horizon.

I do not know. I only know that the sight of Elsie, part naked in her wheel chair, caused me to want to cast my eyes away, just as I wanted to look away as she vomited into the green kidney dish hour after hour. A line of black stuff belched from her mouth and I thought of a film I had seen as a young woman, a film by Federico Fellini, The Satyricon. To me this film is all these human indignities.

‘You can say goodbye to your dignity here,’ Lois said to me when I protested at the possibility of having a young male nurse help me with my shower. No, I was not yet ready for that. As it was, I needed help only to drag the green plastic rubbish bag up the length of my leg and seal it with tape to keep out the water. Once ensconced on the shower chair I could manage the rest by myself. I did not need this bright young man to see me naked, to wash me down, to cause me to feel like an object under his averted gaze.

It is the objectification of one’s self and one’s body that disturbs me. The dehumanisation in medical treatment, as in childhood sexual abuse. The one is designed to help, however much it might fail, the other to exploit.