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Are You Blinded by What’s Broken
I have a lower tolerance for pain, so I’m grateful we live in such an age where I can open a cabinet, take a couple of pills, and resolve a headache in 30 minutes or less.
In 2017, I tore a small tendon in my left wrist. Being left-handed, I found the inability to use my arm crazy frustrating. For 6 weeks, I had to wear a brace that kept my arm locked in a specific position while the tendon healed.
Once immobilized, the pain of the damaged tendon was basically erased. However, the brace itself caused a lot of discomfort. I remember barely sleeping the first few nights as it felt like my skin was on fire.
Soon, the discomfort I felt was all I could think about. For perhaps two weeks, any idle time I had was occupied by thoughts of what had happened and how uncomfortable I was.
What added more to my discomfort was my inability to do my job. I had a job that required a lot of typing. If you’re a proficient typer, you know that one-handed typing is much more than twice as slow as two-handed typing. I resorted to a job-trade of sorts with my office manager who spent a lot of her time on the ten-key. I did her work (where I could) so she could sit at my desk and type as I dictated.
That was fun for about 15 minutes.
After a few weeks, I was at wit’s end. In frustration, I yelled at my boss one day which was uncharacteristic. Unfortunately, the expression of frustration didn’t end with him. I was impatient with almost everyone in my life. To be fair to myself, I wasn’t sleeping well which always shortens my fuse a little, but I tend to be a super patient person.
In short, I had allowed an injury to a small tendon to temporarily change who I was.
After about 3 weeks, an odd thing happened. I would sometimes take the brace off after I showered so I could dry my arm and clean the brace. I started noticing how much it hurt to take the brace off. Now, I still had the frustration of not being able to do my job, but the pain of not wearing the brace was greater than the discomfort of wearing it.
At the end of the six weeks, physical therapy was difficult, and I found relief by slipping my arm back into the brace I had hated so much. How was it that the object of my pain became…
