Pandemic blog 2: arm metaphor

Years ago I broke my arm, broke it really badly. Head of the radius broke right off and was floating around inside the skin. And the next 48 hours involved things like EMTs taking me to the hospital, setting up surgery, getting surgery, being on a lot of painkillers, etc. At no moment did I think about what was going to happen over the next six months. Everything was “what has to happen right now to get me from this thing to the very next thing.”

But then of course I was past the surgery and past the crisis and had to come face to face with the fact that I had months and months of tedious and kind of painful physical therapy ahead of me in order to turn my screwed-back-together arm into a machine that, while different in certain permament ways, approximated the function it used to have. Readers, it sucked. Probably it’s a good thing I wasn’t thinking about it too much while still waiting, opiated, for them to screw the titanium plate into my bone.