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Several months ago, I injured myself at work. This is nothing new, I get injured all the time, it’s the nature of my job. But this was one of the more serious injuries (I’ve only had maybe 2 or 3 that required medical treatment). I probably should have seen a doctor. I was walking next to a truss cart, helping to steer it while someone else pushed it. It had a bad wheel. It was a large metal flat cart, approximately 4 feet wide and 8 feet long. It carried between a quarter and a half ton of steel truss. As I walked along side of it, leaning all my weight into it to make it turn ‘round a corner, the bad wheel turned sharply and ran the front wheel of the cart into the back of my ankle. The wheel didn’t just hit my ankle, it ran up my ankle for a few inches until gravity overruled the inertia and it bounced back to the ground. I routinely wear steel-toe boots for exactly the purpose of something hard and heavy coming in contact with my feet, but the steel toe is woefully inadequate when the adversary attacks the heel.
I stood motionless for a solid minute, head down, eyes clenched, clutching of one of the bars of truss and focusing all my concentration and willpower just to keep from screaming. Eventually, the stars stopped dancing in front of my eyes and I released my death grip on the truss and looked around for a place to sit. I limped across the hallway to the nearest chair and whimpered ever so quietly as I pulled my boot off to assess the damage. Nothing was bleeding and I could move my toes, so I figured this would be much like my usual injuries – sore today, more sore tomorrow, eventually I’d heal. My ex-bf (who was having one of his let’s-be-friends days) ran to locate some kind of container for ice and came back with a large trash bag, which he proceeded to fill up from the industrial ice machine conveniently nearby. I sat there until the foot numbed up enough for me to put my boot back on and I went back to work.
In hindsight, this was a stupid idea.
I limped through the rest of my day, smiling and insisting it was just a bruise and I’d be fine in a couple of days. I should have had the doctor look at it and I should have filed workers’ comp paperwork that day.
Now, several months later, my limp is all gone and I can wear my boots again without any pain, but it’s still tender to the touch, as I found out when my sweetie, in a delightfully playful mood, grabbed my bare ankles and pulled me off the couch to get me closer to where he sat on the floor. He gave me a safe word a long time ago, but I’ve never needed one before. As he can now attest, my screams of real pain are quite different from my in-scene pain noises. I’m still bummed out about that encounter because I absolutely love it when he’s playful and roughhouses with me and I hate anything that discourages him from doing that. I still can’t sleep on my right side because the pressure of my right ankle against the bed hurts too much. As long as nothing is touching my ankle, I can forget that it’s hurt.
Clearly, this was one of my more major injuries and I would have benefited from medical treatment. Looking back, I can see how this pain was worse than my other non-serious injuries. But, at the time, I was too busy trying to get back to work, to be just another “tough stagehand” and not lose my paycheck for that day. Had this happened to anyone else, I would have immediately pressed them to make an official statement, just in case it did turn serious and medical treatment was necessary. I, of course, don’t listen to my own advice because I’m out to prove something. I’d like to blame this on the overwhelming pressure I feel as a female in a male-dominated industry. But this stupidity goes way beyond my glass ceiling at work.
When I was in 6th grade, I was a dirty laundry basket for Halloween. I went trick-or-treating with several neighborhood kids. I grew up in a valley, right on the very edge up against the foothills. Our neighborhood was not flat. Many houses were “tri-level” and the front door was on the “middle” story, so we had to walk up a flight of stairs that was too high to be porch steps but too wide and not quite high enough to be landing steps. At one house in particular, I was first down the steps, but I had to take them slowly because I couldn’t see my own feet very well with the laundry basket around my middle. My next-door neighbor, Michael, was in a hurry and pushed past me, knocking me down several of the steps. I landed badly on my right foot (the same foot, incidentally, as the more recent injury above). It hurt, but no one took any notice. I was required to pick up the pace and limp along for the rest of the night because I wasn’t allowed to leave the group by myself and no one believed me that I had hurt myself.
I told my parents when I got home, but since I could move my foot, it was decided the injury wasn’t serious and I was sent to bed with some ice. I limped around on that ankle for over a week. My parents and my teachers all unilaterally decided I was “faking” to get out of doing P.E. Then, one day, Michael’s father (who certifies people in First Aid) noticed I was still limping. He asked if he could look at my ankle and I let him. He felt it, I screamed, he immediately told my parents to take me to the hospital. They didn’t believe him, but they took me to an emergency clinic (not a hospital). I was X-rayed and then fitted for a cast. My fracture was starting to heal wrong for all the walking around on it that I had done. My parents apologized as we drove to pick up my crutches.
This incident stands out in my memory because it is one of the few “major” injuries I’ve ever had, although I am forever getting banged up with minor injuries. But the reaction to any hurt I’ve ever had was always the same: “buck up kiddo, walk it off, you’ll be fine”, and “oh, stop being such a baby, it doesn’t hurt that much”. This was my own mother’s advice for my devastating menstrual cramps that forced me to stay home 2 days every month from the time I was 14. This advice came from a woman who had endometriosis so extreme that she had a full hysterectomy at age 29, so she of all people should have known what I was going through (I now suspect that I, too, have endometriosis and the only thing that has worked has been to render myself unconscious until the cramps pass, which is how I’ve lived every month for the past 17 years).
I’ve ranted many times about being treated “like a girl” and feeling as though my progress was hampered in my youth. But in the case of injuries and sicknesses, that is one area where I was never treated “like a girl”. I was always a tomboy and the “son” my dad never had. We played sports together, went fishing and hunting together, he taught me to drive when I was only 10 years old. So, in many ways, I really was treated like the boy I wanted to be. I got many conflicting messages – Dad showing me the proper care and respect of fire arms, Mom shouting at me to just please put on a dress, don’t I want to look pretty?
I’m not really sure if this attitude about injuries was leveled at me because I was the tomboy and the son my dad never had, or if this was my parent’s general attitude. For all their treatment of me like a “girl”, I was also very strongly encouraged to participate in sports, go to college, major in business or some white-collar degree, and put off marriage and children until after I had a lucrative career of my own started. I can’t remember if they gave my sister the same “buck up” attitude about injuries. Certainly, my memories are tinged with being grounded every time she puckered up and produced crocodile tears, but those are the memories of a frustrated older sister with a bratty younger sister (and as the only NT in a family of SJs), so who knows what really happened.
I was also very stubborn and I never liked being “a girl”, regardless of what my parents felt on any individual “girl” activity. I was bitterly disappointed when I started developing breasts and my earliest memories of childhood include insisting that I was just the same as the boys for all intents and purposes for games and grades and socializing. I was the girl that the other girls came to for body-guard duty when the boys picked on them (and I was proactive about that, often beating up the boys offensively instead of waiting around defensively). I held the school tree-climbing record and I was third in the school for the long-distance running record (behind a girl whose father was training her for a track scholarship and a boy who was just fast). I also held records in arm wrestling and tetherball (although my sister was even better than I was at that sport). I was the one chosen to remove bugs and reptiles from the indoors, even when there were boys present. I was the one who could consistently out-gross everyone (until my sister learned to belch on command – she still holds every local record for that particular skill). I was the one to whom all the neighborhood kids came for math tutoring, even though they were boys and all a full year above me in school (and no, this was before they started liking girls and I was actually that much better at math than they were – it was their teachers who sent them to me for help, they did not come voluntarily).
So it’s really very difficult for me to trace this one down. Is my refusal to appear “weak” and allow myself the necessary healing measures because of my own stubbornness and my own desire to be “one of the boys”, or is it because my parents never believed that I was ever hurt and insisted I just “suck it up” and “stop whining”? Is this a gender-role thing, a parental-baggage-thing, or is this a me-thing?
Here’s why these stories are important. My ankle is not the reason for this post. I just discovered that my trend for not tending to my injuries isn’t just physical. Apparently, I insist my emotional injuries be treated to the same “walk it off, kiddo” philosophy as my physical injuries.
And I just discovered that I’m broken.
I was hurt some time ago. I was hurt badly. As usual, I brushed it aside. I allowed myself to cry and then I picked myself up and got on with my life, as I always do. I’ve been hurt before and I know the pain always subsides, I learn something from the experience, and I heal.
But I didn’t heal right this time. I still hurt and things aren’t growing straight. This was one of my major emotional injuries and I treated it like a bruise. I expected the soreness of the first day, and that the soreness would get worse the second day, and then it would gradually lessen, as pain does. So I stopped limping around, and to all appearances, I seem healed. But my injury just got accidentally poked. And I screamed. It still hurts and it shouldn’t hurt anymore if it had healed.
I can walk and dance on my bad ankle; I can even wear my high-top boots. But it’s very tender to the touch, even after several months. There’s no discoloration, my toes work fine. From the outside, I look healed.
I can live and love with my injured emotional state; I can even apply some stress to my self-esteem. But I’m very tender, even after many, many months. There is no haunting in my eyes, my smile works fine. From the outside, I look healed.
But I’m broken. And there is no emergency clinic to x-ray me and put me in a cast that will repair the damage of walking around with a broken emotional state for this long. I’m doing my own x-rays, of course, looking deep inside myself to find the injury. But it’s much harder when there isn’t a machine that shows you exactly where the fracture is and a doctor who can slap some plaster on after positioning me in exactly the right position to heal. It’s also much harder when my mind has been making its own repairs when I wasn’t set right first. I have to undo some stuff, and do some digging around to figure out which stuff to undo and what should be left alone. But this is a new one for me. I don’t recall ever being hurt by someone to the point that it interferes negatively with my interactions with totally unrelated people at a future date. I’m not even sure how this particular injury became so major. But it did. And now I’m broken.
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no subject
Date: 4/5/08 04:36 am (UTC)From:If you ever want to talk about it, please let me know.
no subject
Date: 4/5/08 04:42 am (UTC)From:Re the ankle, though, you might want to get it looked at medically still. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I'm dating a woman who's 'minor' ankle injury reinjured from use, and is still causing major problems years later. re the emotional wound...sigh...those can take so long to heal, and heal in funny ways. I thought I was so tough with these things, 'til last year. I even expected the injury. Oh no: the conseque nce was way harsher than I expected.
no subject
Date: 4/5/08 05:04 am (UTC)From:I, also, thought I was all tough with emotional stuff. I was also expecting the injury I'm talking about in this post. I just wasn't expecting it to be this bad. Just as with the ankle, I can look back and see how it was clearly not the same kind of minor injury I usually get, but I insisted that I always bounce back from relationship injuries, I learn, I grow, I heal. This one was just outside my usual experience and I am still not sure why it hurt so much more than any other or why I didn't heal right afterwards.
I'm actually quite amazed it took me this long in dating to get hurt to this degree. So I shouldn't be too surprised that I didn't recognize the extent of the damage as early as I should have.
no subject
Date: 4/5/08 07:17 am (UTC)From:*hug* I'm not so much like you about physical stuff. But I definitely am about emotional stuff. If you want to talk about it sometime, I'm happy to listen. You've certainly listened to enough of my problems. *smile*
no subject
Date: 4/5/08 03:58 pm (UTC)From:And, just as a reflection back from a very outside observer.. you don't look as healed from the outside as you think you do.
I sincerely do wish you the best in your journey to healing - both physically and emotionally. If there's ever anything I can do to help, just let me know.
no subject
Date: 4/5/08 05:04 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 4/5/08 07:17 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 4/6/08 04:26 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 4/5/08 11:10 pm (UTC)From:Please have a doctor look at your foot. Lack of insurance is not a good enough excuse.
Bubba
no subject
Date: 4/5/08 11:36 pm (UTC)From:Y'know, I agree with that on principle. But when you have $300 in the bank account and rent is $475 and no one will give you a credit card, it's a little difficult to find a doctor that will treat just out of the kindess of his heart.
no subject
Date: 4/6/08 04:22 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 4/6/08 04:25 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 4/12/08 05:45 am (UTC)From:As to the emotional brokenness, that type of thing I'm very familiar with personally. It seems you have several people offering to give you an ear for your issues, so I doubt you need my ear, yet I offer it as well. Take care of yourself as best you are able and ask for help where you aren't.
no subject
Date: 4/12/08 02:51 pm (UTC)From:As for who I'm trying to prove myself to, it's a constant struggle in my business to keep up with the big boys. Every day is a renewed effort because I work for a new boss and with new co-workers every day. I have to match everyone else's effort just so I'll get a call for work tomorrow. That's how my business works and it goes that way for everyone, not just me and not just women. *I* know I can do the job. If I didn't know it, I couldn't sell myself to get each job. But I'm small and female and quiet, so I have to prove that I'm strong and competent and smart over and over again.
But I love my job and I wouldn't do anything else.