CRASH AND BURN IN THE TIME OF COVID….

You wonder, perhaps, if you will ever read the ending to Cary and my Khopra Ridge adventure in Nepal two years ago. I wonder, too. Life has been topsy-turvy for all of us since February, with appalling results, chaotic news coverage, mixed messages, and a country in shock. Books have been written and conventions have been held about the psychological damage to every segment of the population. We’ve heard it all. We need change and we know it. Drastic change.

Against this bizarre background we have all tried to see an upside to our collective suffering and hope that good will come out of it. With all of this in mind I headed for our Upper Langley community garden a month ago to pick some arugula for salad. Things were looking up, people were wearing masks and distancing, and maybe, just maybe, we would ramp up tests and start a program of contact tracing throughout the country. I picked up a knife in readiness to cut the arugula, and, suddenly, I stepped in a rabbit hole on the hill leading up from the garden shed. I shot backward with the ferocity I had shot forward last summer when I sustained a broken hand and compression fractures in the thoracic area of my back. This time I landed on the shed floor and broke my humerus where it connected to the shoulder. Don’t do it. Ever. It is the worst pain in the world, and there is nothing that can be done except let the arm hang, inert, in a sling, and heal. For an active person this is a huge slice of HELL. Add to this the necessity to sit in a cramped reclining chair to sleep…crunched up like a bag of sausages.

The hospital stay was a nightmare, especially since I was in a bed next to a woman with pneumonia…the kind where you cough all night, making sleep impossible. A well-meaning young doctor informed me right off the bat that I would be deformed, whereupon I asked if that meant that I could play The Elephant Man on Broadway. His sense of humor was right up there with his bedside manner.

My two children who live on Whidbey Island, Cary and Tom, fearing for my sanity, got me home after four days, and with patience and a great deal of love and encouragement, brought me to the present, where I can now sleep in a bed and where optimism is once more possible thanks to determination and physical therapy. Whidbey Health’s home services deserve endless kudos. So I am grateful and I plan to live another day. And I promise you, next summer there will no encore. Enough is enough…for sure!

Next time: Our final day in Kathmandu. Obviously, the trip in November has been canceled, and who knows how long our whole country will be on lockdown. But I have been through the worst. I am ready for anything!

In an impulsive moment I composed a simple poem describing my thoughts after my fall. A sense of humor is absolutely essential, combined with the realism that such events are no longer viable.

FALLING. AGAIN

The garden spreads in front of me. I reach for the knife, the pesky arugula in view;
The rabbit hole grabs my foot and I am flying,
Flying, flying backward, the clouds a blur, the shed all weathered as I pass by,
The floor receiving me like a giant rock to be repelled;
In one instant my life has changed, enveloped in pain
Indescribable

The ambulance screams

I talk to my body, this body that has no problems:
My heart beats, my lungs draw air, my legs go to high altitude, no pills line my shelves.
The stomach, the liver, the bowels, the kidneys…they are agreeable,
Then is it my feet that are the problem? Or their connection to the ragged sidewalks, the woodland holes, the forest’s rugged tentacles.
How to lift the brain fog that leads to these disasters,
Such adventures. You say, find another way to be different.
Eschew the hematomas, they are out of style, the broken ribs, the compression fractures,
The arms cracked at the shoulder. They get you nowhere. They cause one thing, family distress at the gloomy prospect of old age.
It is a costly way to learn compassion, patience, and gratitude for lesser injuries than those that could lead to oblivion
Or the desire for oblivion.

Do not crunch over, do not shuffle, do not be dispirited or depressed or angry at a careless self.
Start again, do the heavy lifting of repair, believing a fuller, more aware life is waiting to be plucked. To be enjoyed.
To be shared.