My heel and my wife, the doctor

I cut my heel a few days ago. The underside of it. It didn't bleed that much, while I was examining it. But when I started walking around, the wound functioned like a puncture on the bottom of a barrel. Blood seeped through it persistently.

And it actually hurt. I mean, up to a certain level, I am ok with pain. Physical pain, that is. And that level is comfortably high. That is, I would consider myself to have a relatively high threshold for pain. I can work with pain. Talk it into submission. Slow-dance with it. Gently move it out of focus. As long as it is not overwhelming. Now, when I tore the ligaments in my right ancle, that pain was out of my control. Ditto when I broke my left one. Cuts and stabs, sprains, bruises and even the odd fracture, plus broken ribs have all been manageble, if persistent. Also the time I severed my pinky almost clean off, but I'm told that really was just because I numbed up so quickly that pain didn't get to be an issue.

Anyhoo.

I had a bandage on my heel, which I had planned on changing once my wife came home today. I wanted to hear what she thought of the wound, and what I should do with it. So she came home. We ate. Did the dishes. And then I took off the bandages. Lo and behold, it actually did not look that bad anymore. Quite a bit longer and deeper than I thought, but looked pretty good all the same. So the doctor, who had suddenly supplanted my wife, quickly, routinely and calmly told my I should wash the wound in warm soap water, pat it dry and wrap it into fresh bandages. Then she stood up and went to do something else.

I went to the bathroom, sat on the bathtub, turned on the water, found the right temperature, and stuck my feet under the faucet. It felt like a big jolt of electricity shooting through my foot. I uncontrollably yelped with pain, but shut my mouth as not to alarm my wife and daughter too much. I held my breath and heard feet running to the bathroom. I thought I'd hear something like "What happened? Are you ok?!" But it was my daughter. With a worried look on her face. I smiled and told her, as calmly as I could manage, that daddy was ok.

After I had dried my foot, I hobbled into the living room. My foot was distinctly uncooperative, hot and throbbing. I sat down next to my wife and started telling her what had happened, thinking she might have missed that pathetic cry of mine. But she hadn't missed it. And generally wasn't moved by any of this. At all. She asked me a few more clinical questions, and then, when it was apparent that no medical attention was needed, she gently lost interest again.

And then two things dawned on me:

- One, my wife was not being cold or uncaring, she just defaulted to her attitute towards how she deals with traumas, real traumas, day in and day out. She tri-oshed me, examined, evaluated, prescribed treatment and did a quick follow-up. Or something. All done calmly and effortlessly. But distantly. Somehow professionably. I have lived with this woman for more than a decade, and if this had happened in our first years of living together, she would have had very little of her current composure, calm and skills to effectively deal with something even as small as this cut. She would have jumped to my side, patting me on the shoulder, holding my hand, asking me irrelevant questions, and generally been of no concrete clinical use.

But she would have empathised with my little trauma. It would have registered.

- Which brings me to two: I really did not need her there as a doctor. Sure, I probably would have done something silly without her help, like making it hurt even more by pouring disinfectant into the wound. Or scrubbing it with a sterile cloth. Or something. But what I actually needed, was my wife. Someone as startled by this as I was. Somebody sharing that aspect of it.

The thing is, my wife is getting to a place where my favorite line from Blade Runner applies: "If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes". In her work, she has seen such horrors, with her eyes. Horrors which I only hope I will never see. And every day she is surrounded with truly traumatised people. Bleeding. Praying. Dying. This gives her a whole different perspective. I mean, she has kids dying in her arms. What possible right do I have to even whince at this miserably insignificant little bruise, let alone expect her to join me in that wallowing. To boot, she spends almost all her waking hours in that environment. And she does it so well. I am so proud of her. Have always been, and always will. For example, this is the most recent evaluation she got from a surgeon who was training her:

She is one of the outstanding residents in her training year. At all times, she was professional, knowledgeable, trainable, and pleasant. A woman of few words, she is concise and accurate in her evaluations and presentations whether oral or written. She is an exceptionally talented surgical resident and will do exceedingly well in surgery both because of her outstanding surgical skills, but also because of her extreme honesty and trustworthiness.

Isn't that great? Isn't that magnificent? I think so. Her dream is finally coming true. And she is so deserving.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I miss that insecure little medical student, who once upon a time was still marvelling at how big the world looked back then.

Dinner

It is so easy to slowly drift into mac&cheese land, and just stay there, when you only have a toddler for dinner. But last night I rebelled against that, and made real mexican meatballs, with oregano and cummin, sautéed in good beef stock with diced tomatoes. Granted, I did put fewer jalapeños in there than I otherwise would have, but that was the only adjustment. And she loved it! She ate almost five of them, plus a lot of tomatoes.

Now, where to next? Coq au vin, peut-être?

Roper v. Simmons

There is a concept that is commonly used in my profession when discussing questions of legal competence, i.e. whether a person is fit to stand trial for what she or he is accused of. This is the concept of lucida intervalla. In brief, it refers to a deranged person, which commits a punishable act while being temporarily lucid, or free of his or her madness.

Today felt like a lucida intervalla in these otherwise deranged times we are living. The Supreme Court finally managed to find the public slaying of juveniles in conflict with the Constitution. Granted, there is some merit to dissenting Justice Scalia's opinion, wherein he criticizes that the Court does this by finding that "the evolving standards of decency" have reversed the way in which the Eighth Amendment should be interpreted. However, his stinging denunciation, though directed at the Court, serves mainly to expose the shame of the legislature in the States where this abomination has been left on the books. A shame which extends to the people of these States, which have silently condoled this practice for decades. People, who quite probably can not fathom how a whole nation can look the other way while the state commits mass murder in their name. Nazi Germany anyone?

Nevertheless. Today, a small restoration of the reputation of this nation from perceived barbarism. I guess baby steps is the best we can hope for.

Decisions, choices

I was playing with my daughter tonight, just before I put her to bed. That isn't what we usually do. I try to heed that sensible advice, to keep everything calm just before I put her down. But I just couldn't help myself. So we jumped on the sofa, and ran around the sofa table, and rolled on the floor. I sang silly songs to her, and pretended to sneeze a lot, which is what really cracks her up these days.

It was when I was carrying her upstairs that she sighed. This completely care-free sigh of a child, riding the train of life along what seem like never-ending tracks. No stops in sight. No forks in the road. No decisions to be made. You wake up. You are dressed, fed, teeth are brushed, you're dressed some more. You are driven to the daycare, where you eat every now and then, play, sleep, look at a few books. Then you are picked up again, you play some more, you eat, you're bathed, put in pajamas, teeth are brushed again, more playing, and then you are carried off to bed.

And I started thinking. When did this really stop? I mean, when did I have to make my first real decision? The first hard one?

First, there was a period where I actually got to have choice. What clothes to wear, what to eat, whom to talk to, what movie to go to. Then that choice widened. When to go to sleep. To smoke or not to smoke. What to smoke. What subjects to pick in school. What to do in my love life. Once I had a love life. Somehow, these choices were not that hard. Sure, they seemed all-important, at least at the time. But there always seemed to be a Right Answer to every question. One possibility was always better than the rest.

I guess it wasn't until I turned twenty, that I actually had a life-defining decision to make. One that had only two choices, and neither one was better than the other.

One the one hand, I wanted to live my life playing the piano. I had been playing for more than a decade. It had become an important part of me. A beautiful voice of my own. Something that I was really proud of. At a time when there was not much about me that made me proud. Playing gave me this wonderous feeling of honest, innocent joy. Music would open up to me and allow me to delve into it, forgetting everything else in my life. And it felt so good. Freeing, novel, soothing. Powerful. Humbling. Good. I knew I could do this. I did not have long to go before finishing my education as a soloist at the music college. My teacher was happy with me. I had a good relationship with my instrument, my soul seemed to have a really good connection to my fingers. My technique was quite good. It was all good.

But not great.

And therein lay the problem. I was not great. I would never be able to concentrate on just performing. Playing what I felt like playing. For other people. That luxuray is reserved for only the truly great. Which I wasn't. I would have to take up teaching. Spend much of my time listening to other people maiming pieces of music, again and again and again. Music that I knew I could play way better than they ever could. I loathed the idea of it. Which is strange to think about now, when one of the most fun things to do for me is to teach at the university, or to tutor math or comp sci to high school kids. But then again, that is different. These are merely things of interest, not hardwired down into my feelings.

My other choice was to find something other to do. Something that wouldn't pain me, but I could still become interested in. They say that those who don't know what graduate school to go to, eventually go to law school. So I tried that. And, luckily enough, became somewhat interested in it. Eventually, I found myself a niche in which I am certain that I am more content than if I was teaching other people to play the piano. Every now and then I find myself in front of a piano again. And sometimes I try playing it. Understandably, each time I remember less than the year before. This once integral part of me has become a stranger. I have now lost this voice that I had. And all the things that I was able to say with it.

When I think back, it seems silly to me, that this turned out to be such a life-altering decision. That this was my first lose-lose decision of real consequence. Now that I am older, I have had to make other, even less pleasant decisions. And I also see my friends and family facing even harder choices. Like quitting college, because they can't justify to themselves running up more debt to pay for it. Or ending a marriage that they feel has taken a wrong turn, and thus facing the ire of a hurt child. Or staying tied to a place because that is where you can get work, even though your heart has moved over the border to a different country.

Maybe this is what choices do when you get older. First there becomes more of them. Then they get harder. Finally, you get to make decisions that hurt you. No matter what you choose.