Dirty Secret (17 page)

Back at the office I showed Eric the form limiting my keyboard use, but he continued to pile on the duties anyway. And my pain continued to worsen. Every click of the mouse sent a sharp shooting pain from my fingers to my elbow; every keystroke seared the nerves and muscles in my wrists.

When I was back in Dr. Olsen's office three weeks after my first appointment, she was surprised to see me, especially when I told her the pain had gotten worse. At home, I could no longer carry my laundry to the laundry room, chop vegetables, or even hold the phone up to my ear for more than five minutes when my mom or my dad and Sandy called. My hands were almost always aching or burning, or worst of all: numb. Each day I found something else that aggravated the pain, which meant each day I had to ask David to do yet another task for me—and I hated asking anyone, even David, for help.

I learned of a hand injury doctor who was supposedly the best in the Bay Area, and I went to see him, hoping he could help me. Dr. Chatterjee said my case of repetitive strain injury was severe and most likely permanent. I promptly pushed the word “permanent” from my thoughts. He changed my work restriction from six hours on the keyboard a day to four and prescribed hand therapy three times a week.

My hand therapist, Gloria, asked me to rate my pain levels on a scale of one to ten as she took an inventory of my symptoms. We were sitting across from each other over a small white table. She had me lift hand weights and pull on yellow rubber resistance tubes to determine my muscle strength and muscle loss. The room was bright, with lots of windows and seven other tables like the one at which I sat, each occupied by a hand therapist and a patient. Most of the patients were small-boned women like me, but there were a few men with broad shoulders and muscular chests who looked wildly out of place.

Gloria had blue eyes and gray-streaked black hair that she pushed behind her ear with the back of her hand. I got the feeling she was keeping a secret, and months later she would tell me she was dating a man who was not quite divorced. “So,” she said, setting down her clipboard, “can you think of anything you might be doing to contribute to your nerve pain? Are there any other activities you could cut out?”

I caught myself gritting my teeth and yawned wide to stretch my jaw, though it did nothing to release my frustration. I had just told her that I wasn't doing laundry, carrying groceries, cooking at all, or using a keyboard at home, and that I'd stopped writing with a pen entirely (the pinching necessary to hold it cramped my fingers); I'd also begun getting my eyebrows waxed so I wouldn't have to pluck them (again the pinching and the cramping); and I'd purchased a headset for talking on the
phone. When David and I went to our regular sushi place across the street from our apartment, I ate with my fingers rather than chopsticks. Like my colleague, I'd stopped using a blow dryer and was trying to accept my hair's natural waves (and frizz). I'd even swapped our ceramic coffee mugs for lighter plastic ones. “What else could I possibly stop doing?” I asked.

Gloria studied my face. “You're wearing earrings. I bet you put them in this morning. Why not get some small hoops and leave them in? That way you won't have to do the squeezing motion every day.” She made a lobster-claw gesture with her fingers to demonstrate, and at the sight of it my wrists began to tingle and burn.

I stopped wearing earrings altogether.

The layoffs continued at my company, but still not me. The only thing that kept me from walking out was that holy grail of a bonus I was supposed to get after the redesign.

The third time I saw him, with my symptoms continuing to worsen, Dr. Chatterjee added another physical therapy to my growing repertoire: trigger point release. I began seeing Kathy, a gentle giant of a woman who worked on the knots strewn throughout my upper back, swapped chicken mole recipes with me, and ended our sessions with a soothing stroke down my spine and a reminder to broaden my shoulders and carry myself in a way that left me “open to life's experiences.”

Because I was so afraid of doing something that would exacerbate my symptoms, I relentlessly monitored myself for pain. At any slight twinge—and I had many twinges—I'd scan my hands, wrists, and arms for nerve, tendon, or muscle pain. At least fifty times a day I asked myself what my pain level was from one to ten. It became a constant refrain, my mantra.

My husband and I had been married only three months when I became injured, and as the weeks, then months, passed,
my hand injury began to affect our sex life—how could it not, when any new way I moved made my hands hurt? Besides, when you're in chronic pain, sex isn't exactly appealing. Not that I felt sexy in any way. I felt weak and helpless and infantilized. I couldn't even clip my own fingernails and toenails—David had to do it for me.

But the worst humiliation happened one night when David and I went out to dinner. It was an old-school, red-velvet-draped place in North Beach and David was including it in an article. We ordered creamed spinach, iceberg wedges with chunky blue cheese dressing, big steaks for each of us, and a nice bottle of red wine. My hands had been particularly achy that day; even holding the heavy steel fork to eat the salad was difficult. But I tried to ignore it. The steaks arrived perfectly done—red in the middle and yet slightly crisp on the outside. I reached for my knife with my left hand, but froze as a sharp pain shot through my wrist and up the inside of my arm.

“What is it?” David asked.

“Nothing,” I said and sliced into the meat. I was determined not to give in to the pain. But I felt like someone was poking a hot knife straight into my armpit from below. Each time I sawed off another piece the pain got worse. I'd eaten less than a quarter of the steak when I set my utensils down.

“Are you okay?” David asked, and I started crying. I hid my face behind a red cloth napkin. David reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. The weight of it hurt.

“Sorry,” I said, and glanced down at his hand. He knew what I meant because it had happened before. He moved his hand from my shoulder to his wineglass and took a sip, frowning almost imperceptibly as he set it down. In some ways this was harder for him than for me.

“I hate my evil arms,” I said.

“I don't. I love your arms.”

“You're joking. Why would you love my arms?”

“They're part of you,” he said. “And I love you.”

“I talk to them sometimes,” I said without thinking, and regretted it when I saw the mildly horrified expression on David's face.

“Maybe you shouldn't tell me things like that,” he said, but he was smiling. “Here,” David said, pulling my plate closer to him. He began to cut my steak into bite-size pieces and for a second I hated him for being able to do it; then in the next second I hated myself for putting him in the position of
having
to do it.

I was thirty-two years old. Much too young to be this feeble. I didn't eat another bite.

The next day I went to my boss's office and asked him to lay me off. I was willing to forgo the bonus. For the Europe trip and the move back to New York, we'd just have to be on a very, very tight budget.

Eric agreed to let me go instead of the person who was next on the list. I was among the last round of employees to receive a severance package before the whole company collapsed, soon after.

We wanted to leave for Europe, but everything had to be put on hold until my hands were better—if I left San Francisco before my doctor deemed that I'd reached my “maximum recovery level,” I'd lose all future medical coverage related to my injury.

In addition to my thrice-weekly hand therapy appointments with Gloria and twice-weekly trigger point release sessions with Kathy, I began getting full body massages once a week from a woman named Marilyn, who welcomed me to her apartment
with a big hug every time and smoothed the knots in my neck with warm stones. Our chatty appointments sometimes lasted for two hours though she was being paid for only one.

I saw a chiropractor. I tried acupuncture. I floated in a rehabilitative pool and was the youngest person in it by forty years; I ignored the women, in their flowery bathing caps as they stood off in a corner and whispered speculations about why someone so young might be there. I was tempted to tell them I'd been bitten by a shark, but then they might ask to see my scar and I didn't have one. I saw an “intuitive healer” who claimed that she could see my organs and discern which vitamins and minerals I was lacking—conveniently, her office was located inside a vitamin store and I left with close to two hundred dollars' worth of products. I tried a sensory deprivation tank. I went to a repetitive strain injury support group where I was told that I needed to switch from being a “do-er” to a “be-er.” At the end of the meeting, instead of clapping we all snapped our fingers.

I tried qigong, meditation, gemstone therapy, Reiki, Feldenkrais, biofeedback, a wheat-and-sugar-free diet.

My whole life became appointments with Gloria, Kathy, and Marilyn and then my standard every-three-week session with Dr. Chatterjee. I walked to all of my appointments, no matter how far away they were, just to kill time. Killing time became one of my daily goals. There was no such thing as pleasure anymore; there was only constant pain. I couldn't even hold up a book without my hands and arms going numb, so I started getting books on CD from the library. I'd lie on our living room floor—on my back, with my feet on a chair to force the blood to my upper body and arms—and listen to the books until I fell asleep.

I asked Gloria one day: “If I fell into a coma for a year, would
that be enough time for my muscles and nerves and tendons to heal?” I'd been daydreaming about being comatose.

“You have a crush injury,” Gloria answered. She explained that this meant the muscles covering the nerves had become so tightly knotted that they created pressure on the nerves. “Would a year in a coma help?” she said, repeating my question, “I'm not sure. The damage is most likely permanent.”

“But you said ‘most likely' permanent. So it's not
definitely
permanent.”

“I'll tell you what you need to do,” she said and wrapped the arm we'd just dipped in warm wax in a plastic bag. After the other arm was waxed and wrapped, too, I'd lie down on a table and she'd massage my shoulders as we let the paraffin wax do its supposed wonders on my circulation. “What you need to do is start listening to your body.”

“I already do,” I said, and was glad she didn't ask me to elaborate.

We hate you,
my arms told me often.
Anything you love, we will take away.

By the time I passed the one-year anniversary of being injured, my arms had nicknames: “bastards,” “traitorous wretches,” and when I felt generous, they were “poor things.” I rubbed them, hoping to wake them up, I wrapped them in heating pads and lay on the floor, trying to breathe the new, correct way Kathy the trigger point release therapist had shown me: into my abdomen and not shallowly into the top of my chest. It turned out I'd been doing everything wrong, including breathing.

Sometimes, as I lay on the floor, I'd imagine chopping the bastards off; I'd picture them separated from my body, right at the top where the shoulder meets the rib cage, sliced precisely with the cool steel of a machete. Some days I thought that might
hurt less. Some days I felt a tingle of life at the tips of my fingers and I'd imagine blood circulating through them, filling them with oxygen, and I'd feel hopeful.

Because of my years in gymnastics, I'd always had strong, well-defined arm muscles. I'd always hated my legs, scrawny and so pale that you could see the blue veins running under my skin like rivers on a map, but I liked my biceps and triceps. One day while getting dressed, I glanced down at my arms and I thought I was being tricked: These were not my arms. Somehow I was looking at someone else's arms. These were the arms of someone who was fat and lazy. They had no muscle tone whatsoever. None. These arms were flabby and shapeless. Weak. Useless. These arms could never take care of me. These arms could never keep me safe.

“Chronic pain can create patterns in your brain that keep the pain cycle going even without stimuli,” Dr. Chatterjee told me one day. “And one thing that can stop that cycle is a low dose of an antidepressant. I'd like to prescribe one to you.”

His examination room was all-white, except for a colorful poster of the different kinds of infection you can get from not washing your hands.

“No thanks. I'm not depressed,” I lied. Depression was for weak people. Depression was for people like my mother.

“This is about stopping the pain patterns in your brain,” he said and explained it again.

“I'd rather not.” I considered myself opposed to antidepressants. My mother had been on them for decades and they'd done her no good. For all I knew, the pills had made her worse.

“That's your choice. But I want to be clear about the severity of your injury,” he said, his dark eyes serious. “This is permanent. You'll never be able to return to your previous job.” He tapped the end of his ballpoint pen on the white counter.

So I couldn't be a producer at a business magazine, I thought. Big deal. But then panic struck. What about writing? Did he mean I could never use a keyboard again?

“Let me think about the antidepressants,” I said and left the appointment in a daze. I hadn't ever told Dr. Chatterjee about being a writer, mostly because I feared he'd attribute my injury to writing and not my job, which would jeopardize my medical coverage. But there was also a part of me that didn't want to think about what was beginning to seem inevitable—physically, I could no longer write. I had a feeling that if I told my doctor the true impact of this injury, I'd start crying and never be able to stop. Just like my mother, all those years ago in the dermatologist's office.