Injury

In response to a passage from Romany and Tom, by Ben Watt

I've always attributed my frequent bouts of lower back pain to an injury I sustained when I was 20 years old. Whenever I suffer these painful back spasms I curse the moment they first occurred. Now, however, many years after that event , I'm inclined to regard these hurtful onslaughts as more the result of emotional imbalances. In fact, I often think of them as expressions of my 'hysterical back.' During major events, like moving house, for instance, they serve as warning signals to calm down, to recognise and deal rationally with the problems that triggers them. I kid you not, the pain I feel is real. The restricted mobility is not a fantasy. The craving for instant pain relief is urgent. When I realise that I'm 'screwed up' with nervous tension, I can, with the application of mindfulness or yoga techniques, gradually relax and rid myself of my self-induced suffering. Sometimes it is, as they say, 'all in the mind.'

Considering all the rough and tumble of my life, especially in my childhood, it is amazing to think I’ve never broken a bone in my body. That’s not entirely true. I did crush a finger in an accident on a trawler, but I don’t count that as a proper break. There was no plaster or sling or need for crutches. The finger was just gaffer-taped to the one next to it and it was okay when we got back to port three weeks later. It didn’t fall off and, thirty years later, it’s just a little stiff and slightly crooked.

So no broken bones apart from that. There have been plenty of bruises, muscle injuries, cuts and stitches, some inflicted by friends, some playing sports and a sizable dent in my left shin bone courtesy of a Metropolitan Police steel toecapped boot.

My most enduring injuries are a result of my Crohn’s disease. I have some spectacular scars across my stomach from all the operations I’ve had. Some are neater than others. One still looks like a Cornish pasty poking above my waistband. My scars are an interesting and mildly embarrassing sight when I go swimming, but they are only superficial.

The problematic injuries are inside me. There are the scars inside my bowel that prevent me eating much proper food and cause me incredible pain if things go wrong. Then there are the mental scars, the result of so much pain and illness, the wrecking of all my plans and hopes and expectations. Although some days I drift into despair, I don’t let that despair define me. It’s not something that is at the heart of who I am. If it was, I wouldn’t still be here.

I don’t have some blind faith or hope that everything will be okay. Life hasn’t taught me that. I have come to see my injuries as something that has happened to me and something I can deal with. My future, however restricted it might be by illness and disability, will be what I make of it.

Quite a physical word, injury. We mostly think of injury as something afflicted to the body, yet there is another kind of injury, a kind of hurt that comes from our soul. Can depression be classified as injury of the mind? Perhaps not. During my dark days, it is not my mind that hurts, or my soul, or my feelings. That darkness... It has always been hard to express, hard to pinpoint. I know the darkness came from many unresolved issues I accumulated during childhood. But as I grow older, I find it easier to accept my moods, I accept the past without trying to change it, and I think about it less. Someone might even say that I live in the moment, which is ironic because I don't believe in all that mindfulness stuff. Stating the obvious: if you concentrate on what you are doing at any given moment, without letting your mind wander to past or future, or even present worries, then you will feel content. Genius. But I have moved away from the original prompt again.... Injury I have suffered very little physical injuries so far, perhaps that's why I can't write about it.... I remember breaking my arm when I was 7. My left, so that I had to learn to write with my right hand. The nuns were very pleased with this turn of events (the left hand being the devil's hand and all that), and spent many hours guiding me through perfect Os and Ms. I remember Ls being a great struggle....

I am writing. I am writing. I like the way Ben Watt writes of ‘perceived injustice’. So much of emotional injury is perceived. Real injury such as a broken leg or an experience of sexual abuse as a child leaves scars. But plenty of ‘perceived injustice’ is also carried forward. Within a family. Mum loves him more than me. Mum thinks I am a waste of space. Dad thinks I’m not good enough. My four siblings and I battled for our parents’ attention as any other litter of cubs do – mewling and scrapping, fighting for space next to our mother’s breast. We were cubs. We remained cubs until she began dying. Dying ostentatiously. Visibly. Before our very eyes. Dramatically, suddenly, glamorously, ceremonially, painfully, easily. Easily? There’s another ‘perception’. She made it look easy. She didn’t wish for us to witness her agony or sadness. Occasionally, rarely, perhaps on the way to chemo in Oxford, in the traffic on the Cowley road in March, say, with the daffodils spilling unfairly over the suburban verges, and buds forming rudely, protuberously, at the end of old branches. Ash, sycamore, Lime. Town trees. Sometimes then, tears would stream silently down her face and she would say: “I don’t mind for me. But sometimes I do mind not seeing the grandchildren grow up.” She has eight grandchildren.

“Will he go to art school? Will he play football for England? I will never see them realize their dreams.”

Then it seemed like a true injustice, not a perceived one, had been inflicted upon her. Her suffering turned our perceived injustices of our childhood into thin air. Her love for us was clear and strong and equal, as it always had been, of course. And without speaking, without even whispering to one another, we stepped into the space around her deathbed as a ring of five. All squabbles dispelled. For the six weeks of that summer prior to her death in August we were as one. No discussion, no plan. We fell into place. Taking turns to sit with her, making her laugh, finding poetry. We took her to Cornwall one last time, for one last week, and took home a box of sand from Daymer Bay. She died ten days later. In her last ten days she would play with the sand, letting it slip through her fingers.