Five
When I was sixteen I broke my right arm playing football. I was flipped in midair as I leaped to spoil a certain mark. Complications meant I needed plates inserted. Then there was significant nerve damage – I couldn’t feel the lower half of my right hand, the ring finger, and small finger. I had to wear a brace around my hand that forced my fingers to flex when the rest of the hand flexed. Once I started feeling again, the brace bit excruciatingly into my right hand, particularly my palm. Well, that’s the way it felt thanks to the damage. I started wearing a fingerless glove – the genesis…
Chronic Pain and Perspective
I live with pain every day. The worst of it is in my right leg and foot – a result of being struck by a car in 2011. My leg was broken, the ankle dislocated, the nerve damaged, and the injury developed Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). After about eighteen months of rehab, hydrotherapy, and pain seminars, the surgeon confessed he never expected me to recover as much as I did. He told me he expected the foot to be all shriveled and shiny from the nerve damage. In my last appointment with him several months later, he laughed when I asked if it’d ever recover fully. He said the…