It’s interesting to me how important labels are. It seems obvious, but being able to frame something in words is critical to being able to identify it. This process has always been slow for me. Ironically it has taken me a long time to accept that it takes me a long time to recognize my own emotions and then, in turn, be able to process, accept and vocalize them.
I think a part of it is the cool girl troupe. I want to be a “cool girl,” but I totally am not at all. I don’t want to be that emotional girl, which I absolutely am. I am the one that gets upset, that gets jealous, that takes up space and cries in public. I want to be cool with everything. I want nothing to bother me. I thought this meant freedom. It meant not being stressed out. I think in reality I was trying to negate experiencing negative feeling by not processing them. This takes a lot of denial and a lot of compartmentalizing.
I have finally accepted that I am not that cool girl. I used to almost never cry. Now I cry all the time. I cry when things go poorly and when things go well. I cry during movies and wedding and when I read stories about strangers being nice to each other or mean to each other. I still do not accept the pace of my emotional process, and I get frustrated when I am slow to respond. It is also usually very confusing to the people close to me. You know that emotionally loaded thing you were talking to me about 10 minutes ago when I said ok and went silent? And now we’re out in public or doing something totally different or talking about something totally different? Well, I’m going to interrupt everything to tell you that I actually have feelings about it. Why didn’t I tell you 10 minutes ago? Because I had a feeling and I just now have the words. Sometimes this is 10 minutes, sometimes it’s days, sometimes it’s weeks, other times it’s never.
I used to just “let it go,” or bury it is maybe more accurate. Because before I could do an abrupt transition I couldn’t do a transition at all. I would wait for the person I was with or the person that had hurt my feelings to ask me what was wrong and if the question never came I couldn’t imagine even trying to make myself heard in an uninvited space. Now my mantra has become, do your own emotional labor. This is hard. I’m still learning. I will probably have to continue learning how to do this until I die.
This is not what I want to talk about, but it was important for me to understand this in order to understand why what happened to me happened the way it did. Injury onset depression is a term I only heard of recently, maybe several months ago. I wish I had known about it sooner. I think having this term would have helped me understand and accept what was happening.
I have always had girlfriends, and spent more time with women than men. I tend to gravitate towards charismatic girls who are good at persuading people to do things and bad at following through with plans. The first time I went rock climbing, it was because one such friend bailed on another mutual friend. She had invited him to her climbing gym, his first time, and convinced him to buy all the expensive gear and a membership and then was never available to go climbing with him again. So he asked me to go. I was scared and nervous and out of shape. I was bad at it, but I quickly fell in love.
When I do something, I usually go all the way. I think staying busy, almost always in overdrive, is how I choose to live in part because I love life and I want to have as many experiences as possible. It also comes from that whole compartmentalizing/ignoring my feelings thing I mentioned earlier. It’s much easier to do that when you always have something else to focus on.
What started as a once a week hobby became an almost daily habit. I went for a couple hours after work during the week and would go on camping/climbing trips during the weekend. It was social, active, and it was easy to see how I was improving. I liked it for almost all the same reasons I like to dance. It also became a major defining part of my life, like dance.
Two years after I had started climbing and a few days before Christmas, I was climbing after work like I usually did. I had graduated from college in May of this year and had been looking for my first post-college job. I had just started that job a few weeks before my accident. I had to wait three months before being eligible for insurance through the company and had bare-bones insurance at the time to tide me over. I was totally broke.
I had been climbing for a couple hours and was on my last climb of the day. I was tired and I was not paying attention. The route was an overhang and the last hold was a “sloper,” basically the most useless rock climbing hold (this is a fact and I am not just saying it out of spite). I put all my weight into reaching that top hold and when I found nothing to grab onto I popped off, flipped over, and fell about 15 feet. I landed with my left arm covering my face. As soon as I heard the popping sound and didn’t feel any pain I knew that my life was about to get a lot worse. I knew I was in shock. I remember two girls that were new to climbing standing over me looking horrified. People were telling me to hold my arm straight, then no how she has it is fine. An off-duty EMT came to help me and set a splint for me right there on the mat. I had never seen my boyfriend look worried before and he was way more freaked out than I was.
He couldn’t help me get my things from the women’s locker room, but as soon as I opened the door two concerned ladies that hadn’t see what happened helped me, and one of these strangers still felt it appropriate to delay me with the tale of her own injury, despite the obvious urgency of the situation. This need was something I would come to understand much later.
I couldn’t afford an ambulance so my boyfriend drove me to the hospital. The shock wore off on the way and he told me I had to control my breathing or I was going to hyperventilate. When we finally got to what would end up being a hospital my insurance didn’t cover, the nurse looking at me and said, What is your pain level? Is it a 10? I’m just going to put your pain at a 10. I sat hunched over, rocking myself and cradling my arm in a wheelchair. After some very painful X-Rays and waiting for the end of a prolonged discussion between two nurses and a doctor about how someone had messed up signing for the pain medicine they were trying to give me I got shot up with what was by far the best drugs I have ever taken in my life.
The doctor told me that I didn’t have an elbow anymore, the space where the joint used to be was filled with crushed fragments and that I needed to have surgery right away. However, the insurance wouldn’t cover it so I needed to go to a different hospital. So I was wheeled out, given oxycontin and went home.
The next morning I went to a hospital I could, in theory, afford and started the intake process over again. I was doped up and not writhing in agony so I ended up waiting in the ER for several hours. I was put in a bed to wait being admitted for surgery with a call light that didn’t work. My friends came to visit me. I needed water or something so they went to tell the nurse, who responded that if I needed something I had to use the call light. The water never came. I went to use the bathroom and to drink from the sink and got so disoriented from the heavy medication that I almost fell down and couldn’t find my way back to my bed.
I was eventually scheduled for surgery and was nervous that I wouldn’t wake up. But two steel plates and 15 screws later I did. I have very vague memories of coming out of anesthesia belligerently, and asking for, or more accurately yelling, to be taken to my boyfriend and a poor exasperated nurse reminding me that, “SAM ISN’T HERE” so forcefully that I felt ashamed even in my totally confused condition.
I couldn’t move my hand and the surgeon couldn’t come to see me. Two interns or whatever they call not yet doctors came to see me and told me that that wasn’t normal, that I might have nerve damage but they were useless and needed to check with the surgeon. Immediately after they left and totally in-line with the embarrassing horror comedy that is my life some casual acquaintances came with balloons and I was crying hysterically with the news that I might be paralyzed [Continue reading part two].
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