Just swell

The injury that dare not speak its name

by Chris Wright

Few things in this world are more depressingly wasteful than taking a sick day when you're sick. The way I see it, if you're going to be miserable, you might as well be miserable at work. And yet this morning I found myself calling to say I couldn't make it in to the office, and doing so with the utmost sincerity.

It wasn't so much that I couldn't be at work as that I couldn't get there. Indeed, the effort it took to make the call nearly killed me. But I didn't go into any more detail than that on the phone. I didn't really know how.

My condition first came to light when I awoke to find myself lying in a kiddie pool of perspiration. And there was something distinctly unpleasant -- even more than usual -- about my bleary, otherworldly trudge to the bathroom. But it wasn't until I hit the shower -- or until the shower hit me -- that I realized the extent of my affliction. Imagine Screamin' Jay Hawkins doing an ad for Ivory soap and you'll get a rough idea of my response to the jet of steaming water.

In a second I was out of the shower, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, my tooth-gritted grrrs competing with the radio's morning weather report ("Spells of searing pain will be followed by outbreaks of shock and confusion . . . "). I made an initial, wincing examination. . . . Sweet Jesus! Something had come on board -- a burrowing chipmunk, perhaps, or a colony of bees. Then I touched the livid knoll for the first and last time. Eearghhh!!

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If there is any advantage to being unwell, it's the sympathy. People are nicer to you; they bring you fruit and cards and flowers. Misery is increased tenfold, however, when your condition is something to be snickered at, when grave insult is heaped on unbearable injury.

See, the thing about the troublesome swelling, the thing that made me squirm with shame as well as agony, was its location. With a contusion like the one I had, you cannot complain -- cannot tease sympathy from friends and co-workers, cannot even mention the cause of your infirmity. All you can do is suffer in silence and pray that the damn thing goes away. And this was precisely what I intended to do.

I managed to modern-dance my way to the living room, dripping and whimpering along the way. I flicked on the TV and sat there adjusting my legs like an antenna, trying to find the No Pain Channel. Mark Twain once remarked that a terrible headache is more than compensated for by the first few seconds of its absence -- spoken like a man who's not anticipating the next twang of nauseating agony. I crooked and contorted, swiveled and arced, and always got the same result: Eearghhh!!

My wife, Nina, must have been a little surprised to find me, buck naked, legs splayed like some cheap bordello offering, grimly observing the antics of Al Roker. "Stomachache," I said, snapping my knees together. That I managed to stifle a scream as I did this is, I believe, a testament to my pluck. John McCain himself could not have put on a finer display of stoic silence in the face of howling pain.

"I'm not going to work," I managed to choke out. "Too sick."

Nina regarded this pop-eyed, sweat-beaded stranger for a few moments before retiring to the kitchen. Like anyone who'd heard the frightened-chimp noises coming from the shower earlier, she must have assumed that I was engaged in acts of auto-satisfaction, a touch of solo sadomasochism. And you know what? I didn't give a damn.

Suffering has a way of making you take careful stock of your priorities. Not owning a cell phone seems a relatively minor quibble. The fact that Tom Cruise makes $20 million per movie pales into insignificance. But in some ways you lose perspective. There's a part of you that would shrug at the prospect of a 747 thundering through the kitchen window -- as long as you didn't have to move.

Ah, but I did have to move. I had to travel to the end of the couch to get to the phone to call the boss to tell him I couldn't make it in today. I knew that every inch would reveal another facet of hurt -- the stab, the tweeze, the burn, the pinch, the thud. I could have asked Nina to pass me the phone, but that would have required mentioning the unmentionable, and that I wasn't prepared to do.

Why not? She is my wife, after all. Well, I wasn't sure I wanted her to see my, er, body in this state. I was afraid that she wouldn't be able to get the image out of her mind, that she might forever associate me with this Baconesque physiological aberration.

Also, she would have insisted that I go see a doctor.

I hate doctors, with their competent hands and run-along-now sympathy. I hate it when my body, my pain, is reduced to a fleck of a fleck. There's no way the troublesome swelling would make so much as a dent in Dr. Seen-It-All-Before's slick veneer. And what if it did? What if the doctor took one look at it and fell off his chair? What if he called in his colleagues? What if he put a steady hand on my shoulder and cried? What if he were a she? Jesus, what if she laughed?

If I didn't want Nina gazing out across the rising poppy fields of my intimate regions, I certainly didn't want a complete stranger tramping through them. The very thought of a scrubbed finger poking at the troublesome swelling made me shudder. And besides, how would I get there? Ambulance? Helicopter? No, there was only one thing for it -- wait it out and avail myself of nature's healing elixir: red wine.

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As the day wore on and the wine ran out, things got a little better. If I walked as if writing the letter Y with my feet, the pain wasn't so bad. Fortified with half a bottle of plonk, I even summoned the courage to call my boss and tell him what was wrong with me. And, to my surprise, this helped. Just talking about the troublesome swelling felt like a weight lifted -- suddenly, this dark, onerous affliction seemed run-of-the-mill. My boss laughed, of course, but so did I. When you've got a red VW bug idling between your legs, what else is there to do?

And now, sitting beneath a tree in my garden, watching a thunderstorm douse the geraniums, sipping Los Vascos 1998 from a coffee cup, I believe I can feel the thing subsiding. In fact, I'd go as far as to say you can cancel the errant 747. I might just make it through this. And maybe, just maybe, this sickest of sick days won't turn out to be a complete washout.

After all, I wrote this, and that's work, right?

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.

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