Arm

It occurred to me as I was washing it: "Wait a sec... it's been exactly one month since I washed this arm myself." No lie, no exaggeration: between Saturday morning, May 16^th of the year 2009, anno Domini or Common Era (take your pick, you reactionary/revolutionary/"what is he talking about?", you) and June 16^th of the same possibly misbegotten year, the only time my right arm had been cleaned (presumably) was on the same day it was operated on and a screw set into a crescent-shaped bone in my wrist to keep it from flopping around in exactly the sort of unfortunate and tissue-destroying way that æons of evolution have programmed most-or-all vertebrate wrist bones not to.

And there was much rejoicing.

The occasion of the celebratory bathing was the fitting of a plastic, easily removed splint this afternoon at OrthoCarolina; this is a piece of thermoplastic, don't you know, that's softened in hot water and molded to my forearm, and fitted with velcro straps so I can easily undo it. I was specifically told not to leave it in the car on a sunny day (the heat would allow the thing to deform), and I asked if it was rated to withstand bears or sharks (it isn't; I shall have to ward off large predators with my good left arm, I'm afraid, though I suspect such an act will render me even less threatening than I am now--mostly 'armless, if you will). The previous splint, fitted last week by Dr. Perlik, was technically removable--held in place by an Ace bandage--but I really didn't trust myself to be able to rewrap myself so I left it in place. But this thing--zip, zip, zip and it's off, and 'alleluia! I can clean it and rub cocoa butter into it (I was told to do this by the doctor), and wonder at how much dead skin keeps coming off, like the whole arm is going to deglove¹ at some point (at which, to paraphrase Sheriff Brody, I think we're going to need a bigger splint).

The arm itself is still more useless than not. I put the splint back on so I could type this with more than one hand, and I can hold a few things and sign my name (sadly, my signature looks much the same) and write a little (my handwriting, meanwhile, looks childish and uncertain). I still can't wipe my ass properly, which is something I thought about writing an entire blog entry about but it may be enough to simply say it here: wiping your ass with your off-hand turns out to be a laborious and unrewarding task, one which I distinctly don't remember Mr. Meriadoc Brandybuck grappling with during his stay in the Houses Of Healing in Gondor after his arm was paralyzed while he assisted Éowyn in slaying the Witch-King of Angmar.² Dressing myself is still a challenge, and sometimes requires cheats like buttoning my left shirtsleeve before I put my arm into it or buttoning a loose pair of jeans before working them over my fat ass.

You never know what you have until it's gone, somebody once said (repeatedly, eventually making it a contemptible cliché, albeit true nonetheless). Who knew I'd taken my right arm for granted these long years since we'd been introduced? Once, it was so close it might have been attached to me! Now? Oh, alas, alack, poor miserable right arm! Whither hast thou gone, o withered limb? When shalt thou return?

When I was young, I remember being exposed to some terrible old ghost/revenge story about a woman with a golden arm who was killed by a paramour who desired the limb; in the nature of such tales, she of course returned from beyond the grave, demanding the arm be returned to her three times before the man was dealt his overdue justice.³ The impracticality of a gilded prosthesis⁴ or the obvious challenges in fencing a hot arm aside, I've come to sympathize with the monomaniacal ghost--it's hard enough (and cold at night!) wiping your ass with a metal arm. She needed that arm.

Anyway. I'm off to rub some cocoa butter into this thing and re-watch a few eps of Outlaw Star (I own the series, this past weekend something put me in the mood to watch the whole thing again). Welcome back, arm, at least partway, and let's never squabble again....

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¹This definition is so much nicer than the one used to introduce me to the term: at a CLE (Continuing Legal Education) one-hour seminar on forensic science featuring photographs of natural degloving occurring out in the woods somewhere--the term is also used to describe the point in decomposition when the skin begins to naturally separate from the body.

That particular session was well-attended and more attentively than most; one suspects that had less to do with the number of North Carolina Public Defenders handling murder cases and more to do with a shared fantasy of being the next Grisham.

I feel bad writing that, because you know I fancy myself a writer and all, and not a future Grisham, who I think is an utterly terrible writer. Not to mention I have no interest in ever writing a legal potboiler myself. (That is an understatement: I'm actually hostile to the idea and would rather not write at all than pen a "legal thriller." A horror novel with degloving corpses, on the other hand....) But there it is--most people want to write and few ever bother to get around to actually doing it, and probably a hundred-plus attorneys looked at those slides of purplish skin sloughing off stiff, cold limbs and contemplated some heroic investigator considering a corpse for clues.

²Considering Professor Tolkien's usual thoroughness in conveying the mundane details of Hobbits' lives, it's possible that the "omission" was intentional and Hobbits don't, in fact, shit, or if they do they don't wipe (which might explain Saruman The White's peculiar rage against the species--perhaps a Hobbit once borrowed one of his robes). I will leave the question for the more dedicated Tolkien scholars in the audience to resolve for once-and-all.

³A quick bit of internet research suggests the version I heard was based on something Mark Twain probably wrote as satire: the story, written in a ludicrously heavy "Negro" dialect, is ostensibly used as an example of how to tell a good story, but the hamminess of the whole thing suggests Twain was having a Spinal Tap moment at the expense of his readers. (The genius of Spinal Tap being that the members are actually fantastically talented musicians and the joke not being that Tap songs are bad in a technical sense--the songs have hooks and are well-played--but that they're so tasteless on every level, including aesthetically.)

⁴That said, Tycho Brahe famously had a golden prosthetic proboscis for special occasions, having lost his real nose, if I recall correctly, in a youthful fencing mishap.

The conventional story of Brahe's demise is that he hosted a lengthy dinner party and refused to leave to micturate, leading to some sort of catastrophic renal or bladder failure. Others have suggested more mundane causes of death, like kidney stones becoming infected or somesuch, although Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder attempted to make an unconvincing case for Kepler's complicity in murdering Brahe, an account which is ironically less-interesting than the traditional tale that Tycho held his water 'til a gasket blew in the pipes. (The Gilders' case seems to rest largely on the claim that nobody liked Kepler; I came away from their book less convinced of Kepler's guilt than I was convinced that the poor guy sounded like a lot of the people I played D&D with in college--none of whom, so far as I know, have ever murdered a noseless astronomer to steal his notes, I might unnecessarily add.)

Anyway, I prefer the traditional account that Brahe died from a resolute refusal to drain the lizard while he told one more bawdy anecdote and sent for another ill-advised bottle from the cellar, just because it's a story that ought to be true. Because it's just another example of how Tycho Brahe was made out of awesome. (Dude had a gold nose--how many examples do you need?)