I was redecorating my dorm room one fateful night last October. I had bought fake vines from Amazon and little posters with peculiar images. I wanted to make it all more like myself. But I fell down from the chair while fixing the last vine. On the floor I hit my elbow, and on the bed, my head. I laid on the floor until my head stopped spinning, until it hit me. Nothing I ever wanted had come easily to me. My enthusiasm would be killed if I did not kill it already.
I spent the night in my bed, like a breathing corpse that didn’t know it was dead, folding my arm in a way it didn’t hurt. I thought to myself, what if I never got up? From my big window I saw the dark of midnight turn to the indigo of a shy dawn, and then the bright blue of a morning.
In the hospital they told me my elbow was broken. It was a ‘comminuted’ fracture, they said. I’d have to get surgery, they said. I was sitting on the hospital bed in those ugly hospital clothes. A nurse came in with blue IV needles and pinched one into my hand, while I cried. Through it they gave antibiotics that felt like fire in my veins. The walls were a boring beige, I could redecorate them too, make it all more like me; make it all more miserable. On a wheelchair, they dragged me for a CT scan. The machine whirred around me with violence and my anxiety told me it would collapse over me.
The next day, they took me to the operation theatre. Before it, four anesthesiologists asked me if I had eaten anything. It was brightly lit, unlike the synthetic incandescence I had imagined. I could fall asleep there, for all time. I wept as all I could hear was the eternal sounds of beeping that felt like an explosion timer. My anesthesiologist hovered over me like a guardian angel, and told me everything would be fine. She would take care of me. I had to count backwards. Hundred. My blood pressure was too high. Ninety nine. She put a mask over me. Ninety. I wasn’t falling asleep. Eighty five. What if I woke up during the surgery? Eighty. She said something along the lines of ‘start induction’, seventy nine.
I woke up two hours later. It was 5:28 PM. They asked me if I was fine, but all I could hear were superimposed echoes. There was blood on my ugly hospital clothes. It hurt so much. In the X-ray room, I couldn’t stand and could feel my mind getting crushed by some invisible pressure. They gave me fentanyl patches, and my mind was quiet. I had food, only to wretch it out, all bile and blood. I could not fall asleep that night either, but I was at peace, probably because I was high.
I went home a few days later, only to find out I would be useless for a while now. I could not comb my own hair. I could not wear my favourite shirt. I couldn’t sleep on my stomach. But I tried. I had my university exams just a month after, I could only do so much. And I could only do so much to not loathe myself afterwards.
It is going to be different this time. It is planned. I am going to get the implant from my elbow removed. I am all fixed up now. No longer haunted by my intrinsic brokenness. I do a half up hair style and put on my Revlon ‘Rum Raisin’ lipstick and head to the hospital with my mom at 8 AM. I am admitted successfully. An anesthesiologist comes for the pre anaesthetic checkup and I am good to go. Although I am a little dehydrated, the nurses have difficulty inserting an IV needle into my fragile veins. They take me to some sort of waiting room on a wheelchair. An ominous fear sets in. On the bed next to mine, a lady screams in pain and pukes blood into a big tumbler one of the nurses holds. She is diabetic, I’ve heard. She had food this morning, which the doctors don’t like. I cannot see well since I am not allowed to wear my glasses, not sterile enough. There’s an old man in another bed asking the nurse every fifteen minutes when his turn will come to go to the operation theatre. He has been here since morning. A child is brought in, he feels cold so they’ve put two blankets over him. He also has a broken bone. I sit and wait and lie down sometimes, for hours it seems. I squint my eyes to see the clock that is on the opposite side of the room. 2:30. I wait and wait and wait and wait. I think about useless things.
My file is right by my bed. Should I see it? I could reach for it, is my IV line long enough to cover such a distance? I will leave it be.
I really embarrassed myself back in 2023 when I went to my physiology HOD to convey that I had left my knee hammer in the clinical room and he replied in a stern tone ‘No, I don’t think so. All our knee hammers have been accounted for. You must’ve lost it somewhere else’ And I had thought the physiology department really embezzled my knee hammer. Turns out, it was with one of my friends, whom I happened to have conflicted emotions about. She was, and is smart and successful, and selfish. I see nothing but a bright future for her.
Finally! My anesthesiologist arrives. She is cute. They put me on another wheelchair and drag me to the OT. There is almost something divine about it. The angelic lighting. The sacred silence. The solitary operating table, the innumerable machines and devices. The desperate need for perfection. The pure air. The lack of microorganisms. Truly commendable. They lay me down. They discuss something among themselves, how they are going to approach my elbow. They affix a blood pressure cuff to my leg, attach something via my IV catheter. She puts a breathing mask over me, it is cold. She asks me to count backwards from ten. She’s confident, not a hundred this time. Everything is so slow and gentle. I hope dying feels like this. Their voices, the beeping machines slowly muffle and disappear as a trance
sets throughout my body.
And nothing.
I am awakened, gasping for air. I cannot breathe.
Voices of ‘Are you okay?’ surround me like a storm. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Every breath I try to take is an enormous effort. I can listen to myself struggle to take in air, to live. I am taken to the recovery room. I am cold. I am so cold. I feel like they have frozen my blood.
‘Are you cold?’ A nurse asks.
‘Um..hm’ I cannot speak.
I am shivering.
They spread a blanket over my trembling body. And under it a tube spewing out hot air. The middle aged woman beside me is crying, wailing. She has come out of knee surgery it seems. She is in a lot of pain, more than I am. She is begging for more pain killers but they say she has maxed out her dose. For some reason, I am crying too. The woman turns towards me and asks the nurse why I am crying. She looks at me with a warmth that surmounts the hot air being blown over my body. They explain to her that I have come out of surgery as well. Even in her own overwhelming pain, she worried about the girl crying next to her. We do not speak to each other, but there are languages other than the ones which can be spoken. We look at each other and share the one thing we have in common, pain. It is a universal language after
all.
My mom comes to visit me. I have always tried to be brave for her, even when I feel absolutely terrified. I feel like I have to be the one perfect thing in her occasionally unpleasant life. But I cannot pretend anymore. I am crying. She cries too.
They give me a transdermal buprenorphine patch for the pain.
When I broke a bone, I knew the fact. There was ample evidence- the tender swelling, the stinging physicality of pain. I could see the cracks in the X-ray. The chronicity of a fracture, the arm sling I wore like a perfume too strong. The world offered its sympathy, held open doors for me, and gave me seats in crowded buses. I was ill, and it was okay.
When I succumbed to my nerves, I did not know what it was. Did it have a name? It must, like all demons do. The psychiatrists called it an anxiety disorder. There was no testimony, except the casual tachycardia, hyperventilation, sweaty palms, and the tsunami of unwanted thoughts that consumed me. No radiological evidence. The insidious phantom pathogen. The world offered its pity, and told me to meditate, or pray. So I hid, changed names, cities, and faces. But a broken bone does not fix itself so easily. Is the human mind exempted from cracks, faults, and anomalies? Is it sacred and pristine? Why does it not have the luxury to be imperfect?
I accepted my fractured mind for what it was. I was not ashamed to have hurt my elbow. Why should I be ashamed to have a heart simply hurt?
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pieces of pottery with gold. So I picked up fragments of myself that had fallen apart, or I had disposed of, held them close, and loved them with the same intensity with which I used to loathe myself. Glued myself together, albeit not with gold, but something just as priceless.
The sun was bright yesterday. I was reading a book on my balcony. A butterfly fluttered and landed on one of the pages- fragile, but whole. Like me.
