Lucky me and RSD
To my surprise, any sense of self-pity at being stuck here for a week has been subsumed by a sense of gratefulness. There are people here who are really sick in totally different ways, or really old, or both. They have cancer or have undergone major surgery or, in the case of my roomate from the first half of the week, have RSD.
No, I’d never heard of it either, but catch this. She is a Queens cop who was helping out some young officers. She chased down this huge guy and pulled him out of a car. Doing this irreparably damaged the nerves in her hand and wrist.
She has lost use of her left hand. It is small and delicate, the fingers curled into the beginning or end of some unfinished gesture. There is a fine coat of black hair along the back where the nerves have overstimulated the hair growth.
She is a hoot with her thick Queens accent and tough talk, but she also has a sweetness and vulnerability to her. Unremitting pain and the loss of what makes you feel whole— hand, career, lover- can do that do you.
Every day they take her upstairs and hook her up to Ketamine, Special K on the street. A narcotics cop pumped full of Special K for 8 hours a day to try to fix a hand destroyed on a narcotics bust. That’s irony, right?
The last time I was here my roomate was a bodyguard to the stars. Big, wierdly beautiful butch lesbian who had just come out of major spinal cord surgery. Totally addicted to pain medication. Now, her I envied just a teeny bit, because even though she was seriously messed up and had at least a year of recovery, there was an end in sight for her. Something to point to and cut and fix. How fucked is it to envy someone in that situation?
Overall, though, I can still make it too the loo on my own and feed myself and I am not faced with a degenerative disease right at this moment, so it’s all good. And so is the morning light that creeps down the hallway each day. That’s good, too.
