Released!

The joy of two working hands

I am typing this with two hands. Yeehah!! This means, in case you’re new to my letters or had forgotten, that I have been freed from the cast that had been protecting my broken wrist for nearly ten weeks. Woohoo!!

So, despite all news to the contrary, there are things to celebrate in our own lives. This is maybe driven home more clearly with every new low for our country. You just have to celebrate your life when you can. Look for joy and happiness wherever you can find them. They’re there.

I had been worrying that my healing would have been sub-par or that something might be wrong with the plate and screws in my wrist and it would have to be redone. I went to that six-week follow-up with both dread and elation. Either something very very good or something very very bad would happen. I was counting on very good but trying to be prepared for very bad. I shook so much for the X-ray that I had to hold my left hand still with my right.

And then my surgeon tells me that my X-rays are “BEAUTIFUL!” She does some mobility testing of that hand and is shocked at how ahead of schedule my recovery is! Me, old lady with osteoporosis, doing better than expected. Unbelievable. I showed her where the cast had been cutting into my knuckles and torturing my thumb. She gave a devilish look and said, “Throw it away! Throw it into the trash.” Which I did, then and there.

I felt happier than I had in a long time.

So it’s not perfect. The wrist is still somewhat painful. I still have the unsettling, unpleasant sensation of an IV needle sticking in my wrist. My surgeon says she might need to take the plate out in six months. Not the best thing ever but I can do that. My hand is weak, stiff, and awkward. But look! I’m typing with two hands. I have played the piano with both hands. I have done some painting. I am fixing dinner. I can cut vegetables. I can grind the pepper. I can do many things that were not possible before. Joy of joys! Two hands. The simple joy of having two working hands, not necessarily perfect, but functional is sublime. How often do we think of celebrating that?

I’m taking baths. I can wear regular mittens when I go out. I can wear my own coat on a very cold day, instead of my son’s. I can wear all of my own sweaters and sweatshirts every day! How often do we take joy from these very small things? Yet they can add up to quite a lot of joy. They remind us, if we let them, of how good most of us have it.

And isn’t that just Life, all of the time? No matter what, there are many small things that add up to quite a lot of joy. Not perfection, not a lack of awareness about the state of the world, not every moment happy-go-lucky, but joy nevertheless.

There is joy to be had.

“[. . .] the success of Egyptian surgery in setting broken bones is very fully demonstrated in the large number of well-joined fractures found in the ancient skeletons.” - James Henry Breasted

“I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.” - Charles Blow

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” - Carl Jung

“Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.” - Virginia Woolf

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Thanks for listening,
Kay

P.S. MerryThoughts is the name of my first book, out of print at the moment. The word is a British one, referring both to a wishbone and to the ritual of breaking the wishbone with the intention of either having a wish granted or being the one who marries first, thus the “merry thoughts.”