In roughly seventeen-and-a-half hours my left hand might be freed from the psychological prison that is my cast.
I’ve discovered the way to break down a person’s spirit and disintegrate their will to live: lock their dominant hand into a restrictive skin and forbid them to get it wet. Setting aside the initial pain of a cracked bone and having to sit through with the re-runs of Neighbours in the emergency waiting room, rocking a cast is one of the more soul-grinding realities you can face. What is on my arm is not a medically necessary bone-setting structure; it is a stench-trapping cylinder of frustration.
If my life were a book (and, god willing, one day it may well be) the past five weeks of my life would be documented within a chapter called The Tube of Misery.
This off-white medical version of paper mache has made life pretty tedious. My left arm smells like a wet towel used to dry a stray dog which was swimming in swampy ocean water, except that wet towel was left on the backseat of a hot car and wrapped around a four-day-old cheese sandwich. What happens when you have a cast on your body is that your musk is trapped in what seems like a slightly-moist sleeping bag. There’s not enough space between the skin and cast to let the dead skins cells air out properly, but there’s just enough room to let the smell waft out. An effect of this is that the skin in the middle of my cast has flaked off, but with nowhere to go has lingered, mixing with my sweat to make a sort of dead skin cell paste. The skin close to the either end of the cast is dry and flakey, and will crisp up and dislodge on its own, making my arm an unintentional slat shaker filled with what looks like dandruff. I’ve had to start wiping the residue off my desk a couple of times a day.
As you might have guessed, this doesn’t make me feel particularly attractive or hygienic.
Hygiene has been a real hurdle for me. I mean, showering is hard enough without adding the extra hurdle of wrapping my arm in plastic. It sounds like a trivial task, but after five weeks the prospect of having to shove my arm into a grocery bag is similar to someone gearing up to plunge their arm into a cow’s vagina to yank a calf out: you do it because it has to be done, but you don’t like it (although I imagine the latter option might have a moisturising effect on the skin). This daily task of gloving up has altered the way I look at beauty. For example, after a few days of recycling my bag today I thought to myself, “it’s the weekend, you go treat yourself to a new plastic bag to put around your cast”. Tres glam.
I also can’t drive, can’t write and hack at vegetables I’m trying to cut up for dinner like I’m a white teenage heroine attacking the villain in a low-budget horror flick: imprecise, sporadic and ineffectual stabs between over-exaggerated sobs. This tunnel of dead skin and crushed dreams also literally crushes my dreams; being so uncomfortable in bed that I can’t sleep.
But the worst aspect of this arm Alcatraz is how it impacts what I put into my mouth. When the rest of your world is falling apart the only thing that can pick you up from the swirling cesspool of toilet water that your pathetic existence is the prospect of decent schnitty. Imagine how quickly your fragile happiness disintegrates into loose stool when you are hit with the realisation that you can’t cut into the one thing that is keeping you from slamming your head into a brick wall. I had to rely on the kindess of coworkers to cut up my schnit. A bar manager at my trivia pub actually cut up my steak for me. I have to spoon food into my mouth with my right hand, which is as graceful as Bambi’s first steps. Because of this, my scooping abilities have been severely reduced. I can’t scrape a plate like I usually would, which is a whole new kind of torture because I am forced to stare at the food I failed to eat. It’s humiliating.
To make matters worse, my parents dropped in one weekend and surprised me with a bike (side note: Dad has this fantastic knack for making friends with quirky characters and acquiring random second-hand purchases for no good reason on a whim. In this case, the guy Dad befriended used to go to school with his mancrush, does up old bikes, and grows a shit-tonne of kiwi fruit. Within a few weeks of meeting this man, he had turned up at my house with kilos of kiwis and a bike). This was excellent. The bike even had a bell and a basket in the front for unwrapped baguettes, potted posies and a small puppy – the only things you can realistically put in a bike basket, so years of television watching have informed me. But because of my cast, I’m unable to ride said bike. My father, in effect, had just unknowingly become the biggest clit tease imaginable… Now that was a sentence I didn’t expect to write when I woke up this morning.
But, for all its flaws and inconveniences, this cast has given me one thing I couldn’t have given myself in any other way: a legitimate reason to complain. Complaining is the closet thing I have to a hobby. As you might have already gathered by now, one of my most cultivated skills is taking something positive, dissecting it into fragments, reading far too much into each shard and putting it back together to resemble the most negative concept ever comprehended. A fun family gather? More like a terrible night’s sleep on the spare mattress of my parent’s house. A delicious desert? More like a butter-laden wedge of guilt. A compliment from a casual acquaintance? More like an uncomfortable few seconds of scrambling for an insincere compliment to hit back at them, delivered in such a manner that it sours the relationship like milk left in the afternoon sun.
I’m very good at inventing things to complain about, but it becomes exhausting at times. So when I have a genuine reason to whinge and grumble, I’ll grab it with two hands. Except in this case I can only grab it with one hand, because the other one is in a cast… Do you have any idea how disheartening that is?!
Just a Thought 