loose change

a sneaky (tuesday) monday piece due to yesterday’s extenuating circumstances! it was a big weekend–dad’s sixtieth birthday party and some beautiful quality time with sammy. this past week i’ve been thinking a lot about fear, and a lot about community, about friendship and love. i’ve ALSO been really hung up on daylight savings, and muscles and nerves and tendons.

after a very sweet goodbye early monday morning, sam was able to come back up to stay the night. a little bonus time! under normal circumstances this wouldn’t have hindered my ability to get words out on a monday, but we’re still operating on injury time, and so there was a minor hill to climb.

today marks three weeks since the surgery. insane! three weeks feels like a long time, and i was maybe expecting to be further along in recovery by now, but this is a good benchmark. i want to say i’m at 15% mobility in my hand, but need to separate mobility from strength–i can’t lift much more than an empty cup. movement has become easier as the pain continues to evolve and lessen, and it’s remotely funny to me to watch people react to my major accomplishments. last friday i was able to touch my pointer finger to my thumb without any passive assistance, and was thrilled to show it off–when you tell people look what i can do! they usually expect something extraordinary, and what i provided was a scrunched up face, exerting all of my energy into curling my finger one half-inch. i’m happy to laugh at it. it’s my first foot in the door of playing guitar again!

but the psychological block is still there, thus the aforementioned hill to climb. i am not familiar with my wrist at all. the first time i saw the incision was last wednesday, when the stitches came out. the surgeon told me i should be touching it and touching the skin around it daily. i couldn’t bring myself to do it. i was telling sam last night about this elusive fear–i’m terribly afraid–and the depth of it. it’s a big chasm. i’ve got no idea what i’m afraid of. saying it out loud was helpful. prior, i’d said that i was afraid i would touch the incision scar and it would burst open and all of my intestines would fall out of my arm. but i was lying! i was just looking for something that sounded fearful to the same degree of fear i felt. that is too implausible to be afraid of, and i knew it when i said it. sorry, mom, for freaking you out.

i wrapped up my day at school yesterday at 3:15 and got in the truck and instead of driving home, i sat in the car for half an hour. i was deliberating many things–should i go sit at dom’s to write my monday piece, should i go to the beach, should i just go home and crawl into my cave? but mostly i was just avoiding the reality. if i go home right now, i will have no excuse not to take off the splint and reacquaint myself with my hand.

i did elect to just go home, and that’s when s called to let me know he was on his way back. it’s a sign! i told my mom. not ten minutes before he called, i was lamenting to her that i should’ve bitten the bullet and taken the gauze off while sam was here. and here he was!

we went to loon point for sunset and picked up delgado’s on the way home. i don’t remember daylight savings time being as drastic of a change as it’s felt this year. it was such a lovely evening and when we finished dinner it was really time to confront this beast i’ve built up in my head, which is actually just my injured arm, which i’ve sworn to love and care for in the name of body-mind/mind-body mentality!

it was a lot of nervous laughing, a little bit of crying, and insane amounts of love, trust, and care. i was washing the shampoo out of my hair when a stream of water ran down my arm and over the incision for the first time. it wasn’t hard to feel it, it was hard to allow it to happen. sam took my mind off of it by scrubbing soap into my armpits. he took my hand and he felt all around it, the outside of my wrist, the inside of it, my fingers, my palm. nobody but the surgeon has touched this part of my body in three weeks; i’ve not allowed it to be touched. so much of my hand is still numb from the nerve damage. the part that hurts on a regular basis is not the incision itself, but the nerves regrowing around it. the cut i’ve been so terrified of is effectively closed.

we got out of the shower and sat in front of the heater and he rubbed vitamin e oil into the scar for the first time. it was difficult! and scary! nothing bad happened. that’s the big takeaway. i’m still afraid to do all of this by myself, but Nothing Bad Happened. i know that if i didn’t have sam to help me through it, i would get through these milestones by myself. i feel lucky to navigate this with him by my side. he is so careful, so nonjudgmental, so patient during these extremely intimate moments of discomfort. i hope i can emanate this warmth.

everything else has been good, i think! my brain has operated like this since the accident. how is my hand?????? and then everything else. last week was really hard at school, and this week i am feeling more capable, in spite of still feeling hungover from daylight savings. my sleep schedule took a big hit after the accident and hadn’t fully recovered by the time we lost an hour on saturday, which has snowballed into probably six or seven hours lost for me now.

this weekend was so lovely–a celebration to which a hundred of my dad’s friends and family traveled to santa barbara to welcome him into 60. so many of these people have seen me grow up through my dad’s lens, and it brought so much warmth to reconnect with them and to see them show up for him. it made me reflect upon my own community of people and think that maybe the apple doesn’t fall far–i’ve been so fortunate to learn the value of friendship from both of my parents.

i spoke at my dad’s party very impromptu, and i’ve been told i pulled off something cohesive and great, even! it was very cool to address him in front of all of these folks we adore. i feel that i’ve inherited many of my speech tactics from him. while i was speaking my mind was on this one time in middle school–it was at a slideshow for our end of year trip and my dad was to give the speech about it, but his flight had been delayed, and somehow his speech was passed down to me, and i delivered it in front of a couple hundred people in the auditorium at the museum of natural history. it was my first time publicly speaking, and when i visualize it i can’t see the audience at all. all i really remember is the speech in front of me, in 14 pt. font, and that i was terrified but secretly thrilled.

i walked away from the microphone and gave my dad a big hug only to turn around and see john henry and claire, in many ways my siblings, who’d showed up just in time to hear me speak and embrace me in a gigantic hug afterward. their dad had spoken just before i went up, and he told a story i recognized as the same one he told at my parents’ rehearsal dinner thirty years ago. firsthand proof–my dad’s friendships translated into mine. my siblinghood with c and jh is generational. annie took this beautiful photo of me speaking while my dad looks on. it’s such a special image; i can tell from his stance that he is moved, and proud.

for my final notes–i am so thrilled to inform you that this piece has been (partially) written with two hands!!!!! so much sooner than i’d thought! i hope it’s indicative of a full recovery. there are small things that make me nervous. i told my PT tonight that my wrist still looked crooked in comparison to my right and instead of responding with oh that’s normal, she said kind of huh, and had no concrete reassurance. we’ll look at it on friday. but we are looking past that for now until it arises on friday!

thank you for reading, as always, and be kind to yourself, especially if you feel a little groggy this week like me. i want to write more but i simply don’t have it in me! which is okay. plenty of thoughts to sift through before next monday.

all my love! xxo r

tuesday night addendum:

i’m in bed now with g and stella, and had to add–i’ve also been thinking about tendons a lot this week. forcibly, because i can feel them moving through my muscles every time i move a finger. throughout all of these PT exercises i’ve been so fascinated by mirroring–jessica explained it to me last week and i’ve been leaning into it the past few days.

my mom’s birthday gift is that we sit down and watch a bunch of movies on her list, no distractions, and tonight we watched the zone of interest. devastating and brilliant. no notes. but it is a haunting film, and we needed something to balance, and i suggested the national’s tiny desk show. famously i cannot watch this show without dancing. and i’ve not danced in three whole weeks! and so we danced. and i was moving my arms around together and i was snapping my fingers on my right hand and mirroring it on my left and i think i’d like to incorporate dancing every day into my recovery.