A funny thing happened to me on the way to buying turon.I fell. The fall was full, accompanied with flailing arms, a jacked up blouse, torn jeans, flying shoes, and a tattered ego all over the place.
As in most accidents, I am hard-pressed to remember why it was that I fell. I always thought that if people knew how they fell, how they lost things, how they made mistakes, etc., these events would not have happened at all. For that is the nature of accidents, they come upon us from out of the blue. They come in at moments when consciousness coasts along routine. They come in when we need to be reminded of something. They come in to force us to admit to things already. They come when we are comfortable in our lives and maybe, just maybe, they come to remind us of how tenuous everything actually is. But I am getting ahead of myself, and this story.
So, to get back to the fall . . . I landed on my thumb, back, hip, left leg and twisted my ankle. I had fallen on a tiled path and the tile had managed to rip into my pants and gash my left leg. I remember lying down there wondering how I would possibly be able to lift myself up. My toes were bloody and the twisted foot was difficult to untangle from the tile. And here’s the most surprising thing--no one came to help me.
I fell in school, and the bell had just rung so there were many people on campus, and for some strange reason, I felt it would have been more comforting if someone had at least laughed at me. Instead, what I had received was indifference. A woman had just flown and landed near a tree with a thud. I presumed the noise would have at least registered somewhere. It would be a few minutes later when a student became brave enough to shout from faraway (God forbid he would come close to a fallen woman!), “Are you okay, Ma’am?” I said I was all right, and in spite my not yet having stood up, he believed me and walked away.
The next few days would be an exercise of bearing pain, knowing my body and defining healing. I went home at once and washed my wounds away with wound wash. I went to my husband’s book of medical emergencies and learned about the concept of RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation). At this point, you might be wondering why I did not go to the hospital right away. I could only tell you that I grew up believing that the hospital was the last place you would want to go to. My father would always say, “Doctors never tell you what’s right with you; only what’s wrong.” And so, whether consciously or not, I was raised to believe that self-healing was a possibility. And more than that, I believed wholeheartedly in time’s healing power.
And so I spent the first day simply on ice and went to work the next day. This all would have had a happy ending and this could have been a story of how my body overcame all difficulty and how it is a story that would prove true all that I had been raised to believe. But then, what I failed to account for was the age of the body that had borne the fall. Forty-eight hours after the fall, the hematomas began to appear all over my body. Still adamant about not going to the hospital, I went to my acupuncturist instead.
Before you go “oh no” on me, let me just tell you that acupuncture is an ancient method of healing and that I had seen it work wonders on my body. It’s incongruous, you’ll say, how a woman unwilling to go to a hospital would prefer to have many needles pinned to her, and I’ll grant you that. But what makes acupuncture appealing to me is its vision of the body in its entirety.When I entered her clinic, she did not look at my foot right away. First, she looked into my eyes and asked me to tell the story of how I fell. After which, she looked at my back and felt for my heart rate. She looked at my palms and eventually looked at my foot. This was her diagnosis: “You fell because you were weak.”
Oh my goodness, talk about feeling as if I had fallen again! Because it did feel as if she had gotten straight to the heart of the matter. She asked me what I had been eating the past month. I tried to remember and she merely said, “Let me guess. Salads, right?” I had been trying to get rid of my summer poundage and had gotten on the low carb ride so, yes, my diet consisted mostly of salads. My body was asking for more sustenance and fuel for its daily needs, thus the turon splurge. I was reminded again of how important it is to listen to the body and, even more importantly, to accept it for what it is.
And so the procedure began. She put needles on my back to help my circulation, as my back was hot, but my feet cold. She put needles on my legs and the injured leg was filled with sensation. She put a needle on my head as well as I was suffering from a migraine she attributed to my anger that no one had helped me get back on my feet. And as always, at the end of the session, I felt much better, although I could still hardly walk. This inevitably would bring me to the hospital, where I was predictably scolded for taking so long to come in. X-rays were ordered, and I was put on medication. Eventually it would come out that there was no fracture and that all was well. And yet the pain remains.
I sit here now, a fallen woman, and am left to make sense of the lingering pain. On one hand I am certain that the pain that has remained is just about the body overcoming the remaining trauma of the fall. The acupuncturist warned me that it would take three months to fully recover. But more than that, I keep going back to the pronouncement that I am weak. Probably because I know I am. And that’s a whole other story…
(Photo of fallen woman by Frank Kovalchek/Alaskan Dude via Flickr Creative Commons; photo of acupuncture needles by NetDoktor.de via Flickr Creative Commons)
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