Roy Exum
Somebody once said “patience is a virtue” and, if that is true, I am ready to say if virtue were poison ivy I’d be “broke out” all over.
I am tired of being sick. Since last June I’ve wrestled with surgeries and infections and now, as the birds of spring sing outside my window and the beautiful daffodils I see everywhere add further sap to my spring fever, I am told that my right arm is broken and has been for several weeks.
Never mind that four steel rods are inserted from my upper arm to almost my wrist. Somehow I have surprisingly introduced a new wrinkle to my healing process and in the last several days doctors have told me the reason it has been hurting so bad lately is because it is actually broken about an inch from where my elbow once was.
So yesterday afternoon, as I drove home from Vanderbilt Hospital with the thing in a big cast, my arm was still throbbing with muscles continuing to spasm like scared minnows in a bait bucket.
Suddenly it seemed to be a dandy time for me to take stock of my recent trials and realize it is just like William Shakespeare once wrote: “"How poor are they who have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees."
Back in October, a doctor told me I was “really, really sick,” that the 29 surgeries I had in 2008 were nothing compared to the collection of infections that swirled inside of me at the time. Today all of those certifiable killers but one are either gone or are in remission and I take medicine for the last one like clockwork.
Last December I pleaded to have my right arm chopped off at the shoulder. Today I probably use my right hand too much, but every time I do I give thanks to an Almighty God that I can reach in my blue jeans and feel the difference between a quarter and a dime.
I don’t mean to bore you with my troubles, not at all, but a stunning number of people still pray for me on a daily basis and they need to know that I’m still taking three steps forward for every time I take one backwards. I’m telling you that is huge for me.
I have no idea how the arm got broken, but when the pain got unbearable early last Saturday morning, the Erlanger emergency room people were quick to tell me the Vanderbilt surgeons needed to see it. Maybe when they drilled out the bones to get the pockets of infection, and then pushed those metal rods through, the poor bones were just too brittle. Whatever.
I decided it best not to tell the Vandy MDs that Sunday afternoon, in handgun class, I fired about 50 rounds with the broken arm, but, by then, Erlanger had given me some “dope” and I could manage it. The pain actually started two or three weeks ago, but I thought it would go away if I had patience. I did, but the pain didn’t.
My pain remedy is Tylenol and BC Powders. I detest narcotics; I’d rather sit on a live rattlesnake after what I’ve seen them do to people I love who abuse them. But Saturday and Sunday I took some because the pain, as they say in the trade, had “gotten ahead of me.”
Anyway, they got me “casted up” at Vanderbilt and as I drove home with my arm in the heavy brace, my thoughts soon gave way to the positives rather than the negatives. Golly, I’m glad it’s not my leg, where I would hobble around. And I’m thrilled that, because the steel rods are already in place, I’ll just be in a cast for three weeks instead of the usual six.
The way I figure it this health hole I’m in has become pretty obvious; I’m climbing out of it. I don’t like pain. It makes me snarly and cross, but I hate whining and complaining even worst. Heck, I am not in a wheelchair or confined to some nursing home. While I have a new-found empathy for those who are, I sit in the sun and listen to the birds every day and, brother, I know if I’ll just be patient my Easter is coming.
As I gave myself such a pep talk, zipping east down I-24, I suddenly remembered my favorite story about human suffering of all time. It was told by a very pretty lady who was born with a cleft palate which, as a young girl with a disfigured face, was a whole lot worse than the cast I’ll wear for the next three weeks.
Long ago, there wasn’t anywhere near the acceptance that there is for that today. Often the young and sensitive girl would hide her face with her hand, telling other children she’d cut her face badly on a piece of glass on the playground
The now-grown woman then explained that years before, when she was in the second grade, each child had to pass a “hearing test” to advance to the next grade. (I know, that’s pretty dumb but I’d take it in a heartbeat if today we could educate our young in the wonderful way children were taught back then.)
What happened is that the teacher would call each child, one by one, to the classroom door and whisper first in one ear and then again in the other. If the kid could tell the teacher what she just said, they passed the hearing test.
Our little girl with the cleft palate was scared and held out to the end because she knew she didn’t hear nearly as well in one ear as she did the other. Finally she was the only child left and made her way to the door. The teacher whispered something quirky and the little girl immediately repeated it.
Then that beautiful lady who had grown from being a shy little girl, had tears swell in her eyes as she recalled the moment that she offered her other ear many years before. She said that second grade teacher then whispered seven words that literally changed her life.
As she, so young and self-conscious, twisted her face in a fierce way because she was so determined to hear, that teacher whispered just loud enough, “I wish you were my little girl.”
This broken arm ain’t nothing. Easter is coming.
royexum@aol.com