Morphine fan

My new faith in chemicals (and other miracles of modern medicine)

by Michelle Chihara

Every day, at least once a day since December 13, I have answered the following question: "What happened to your arm?"

Here's the answer: I shattered my humerus, the long bone in my upper arm. Quite badly. A compound fracture. I was practicing an acrobatic move in a martial-arts class. I did a trick right, and then I did it wrong, and then I heard the bone snap.

Throughout the recovery process, everyone I talked to agreed on one thing: it's important to look on the bright side. Our bodies' astonishing ability to heal is greatly reinforced by a little effort on the psychosomatic side. This explains a lot of things: the placebo effect, The Power of Positive Thinking, people who are still fans of the Chicago Cubs.

But positive thinking has its limits. And based on my own oh-so-scientific study of one, I'd like to suggest a couple of additions to the lexicon of self-healing -- not self-help, just helpful observations for that day when you, too, fracture a bone with such torque that in order to keep the fragments in place an orthopedic surgeon has to drill 13 screws into a steel plate on your skeleton.

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Phenomenon one: the Good Stuff Is Coming Effect. This is the benefit, in times of intense discomfort, of knowing that modern medicine is there for you. And I don't mean aspirin.

Right after I broke my arm, while I was being shifted onto a stretcher and experiencing what I was later informed was the sensation of bits of bone moving around under my biceps, I thought of something important: heavy drugs. I knew that out there, beyond the haze of pain, I would be on the receiving end of some serious meds. This idea stuck in my head like a bad pop song. Whatever was going down inside my arm was excruciating, and yet I remained pretty composed. I focused on my breathing. I squeezed a couple of friends' hands extremely hard. I prayed for an ambulance with functional shock absorbers. But mainly, I told myself, The good stuff is coming.

It worked. I was, in fact, so quiet that at one point the paramedic queried, "You're not going to pass out on me, are you?" The ambulance went over a bump, and I blanched, searching my friend's concerned eyes for an answer to the question, Do they give heroin as an analgesic?

The inherent promise of opiates was key. But the point is that the promise is real. I would remember the entire experience very differently had it not ended with a beautiful, kind ER nurse named Linda dripping Demerol into my IV. (She wins the understatement-of-the-day award for "This is gonna feel a little funny.") There is no mind-over-body substitute for Demerol.

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Phenomenon two: the Delayed Schadenfreude Effect.

Schadenfreude is German for "joy in the suffering of others." I'm not sick of telling my gruesome story or boasting about my new hardware, because I am not yet sick of hearing other stomach-turning sagas. Walk around with obvious evidence of injury (in my case, a high-tech brace that's somewhere between Robocop and a ski boot) and you bring the skeletal histories of your entire social circle out of the closet. Cocktail parties start to sound like radiology conferences. Stories of fractured feet, cracked wrists, pulverized upper arms wrapped in titanium mesh -- they all get aired. The juicier the details you give, the more you get back.

The war stories are great not because I take pleasure in my friends' suffering, but because my friends all look so normal. Even now, I still drop glasses of water and get stuck in my jacket in ways unseen since nursery school. These people drop nothing. They put their coats on with ease. They represent the promise of renewed coordination.

Of course, their thousand and one tales of sedatives and woe have also forced me to put things in perspective. A friend's girlfriend broke both bones in her lower leg when she was hit by a car while biking, and a month later she was still bedridden and stir-crazy. Me, I've been able to walk since I left the hospital. An oft-shattered rugby player told me that when she got one cast off her arm, she found that the hair follicles had gone wild -- as though the plaster cast had been acting as a greenhouse for jungle thickets of matted hair. My arm hair, post-cast, was normal. Amen.

Granted, I sometimes get bored with telling my own story, repeating "I was doing this cartwheel type of thing." But the repetition itself can be a way of working through it. However much I wish I could say I rose to the defense of a young girl and her puppy, however nice it would be to say "You should have seen the other guy," the snap was really excitement enough in itself, thanks. And the retelling is quotidian therapy. My friend E. (two broken forearms) asked me if the experience had been "at all traumatic." I thought back -- to the time before the Demerol, to receiving the news that I had to have a plate and screws surgically inserted, to being told post-op that I couldn't move my fingers because one of my nerves had "gone to sleep" -- and I answered, "Yup."

In my sheltered existence, this qualifies as trauma. But with a little bit of psychological quackery, I'm managing to reconfigure the ordeal into something between a learning experience and medical research. Some people call this positive thinking, turning lemons to lemonade. I'd like to rename it the Otherwise I'll Just Be Grumpy Psychological Reflex.

Sure, I learned a lot. I learned about what the ER is really like. I learned about myself and those who care about me in times of crisis, about surgical steel and the amazing resilience of the human body. And I made a new friend.

Morphine.

Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.