A while back (7/10, to be exact), two Sacred Harp singers came by my house to pick up the printer’s plate for SH99 Gospel Trumpet in the edition we’ve been singing from for 34 years (a wonderful object that I was giving away to reduce my household belongings dramatically), and like the bright-eyed Mariner ensnaring the wedding guest trapped on his stone (who cannot choose but hear), I engaged them in an hour or so of animated chat, to relieve my loneliness, after which we sang three songs from that Sacred Harp.
In e-mail afterwards, thanking them for their friendship and forbearance, I asked them a strange question:
While you were with me, did you notice anything odd about one of my hands (my right hand, specifically)? Or about how I used my right arm?
One replied:
we both noticed several fingers were bent. I assumed this was from arthritis, so if there’s more of a story I don’t know it or I’ve forgotten.
I then told them a story that I was convinced I’d posted about, on Language Log or this blog, but apparently not, so now I’m now telling it to you too.
Bad history. What I wrote to them:
Ah, that’s the effect I was hoping for. My various forms of arthritis can’t be concealed, but it’s important to me that I minimize the extent of my disabilities, since the more seriously disabled you are, the more likely it is that people will dismiss you as an incompetent human being, not to be taken seriously, not to be listened to, to need to be spoken to slowly, with simple vocabulary; you become your disability, and it’s deeply humiliating. Also, the more obviously disabled you are, the more distressing you become to other people (even very nice, good people); you become symbolically a walking death’s head, a terrible warning of what might happen to others. I understand these dynamics because I used to be on the other side and, against my excellent intentions, behaved badly (and am still deeply ashamed, but there it is).
The fact is, my little finger is not just bent some, but permanently doubled over and immobile, and my fourth finger is pemanently bent, and subject to pretty much constant untreatable electric pain. You didn’t even notice that the muscle between my thumb and first finger is completely eroded, leaving only a hollow space. All this, and shooting pain down my arm, is the result of damage to my ulnar nerve on the right side. I wear tank tops in the summer heat, but never raise my right arm, because that would display my ravaged right armpit, which is a disfigured mass of scar tissue. I have learned to hold my body in such a way that ordinary people don’t see any of this and to draw their attention away to other things. A good line of patter helps. It’s important to behave as much as possible like an ordinary, though old and creaky, person.
The ulnar nerve damage and all that scar tissue are the legacies of my 2003 bout with necrotizing fasciitis, the famous flesh-eating bacteria My particular rogue organism was MRSA, methicillin-resistant staphlococcus aureus, the most common culprit. (If you go looking NF up, DON’T LOOK AT THE PICTURES, unless you have a truly strong stomach.) NF has a high mortality rate, and I came very close. A week of debriding surgeries every day, the surgeons working (a) to save my life and then (b) rather than doing that by amputating my right arm at the shoulder, before the NF could reach my heart (they were proud of their skills and had to beat down the infectious-disease guys, who all wanted to amputate), to save my arm as well. In this they were successful, but the surgeries damaged my ulnar nerve badly.
Post-operative treatment was extraordinarily painful and drawn out, ultimately taking many months. Then to learn to live with the chronic pain. And to conceal the evidence as much as possible.
I’m occasionally caught out. I can’t grasp pencils and ordinary pens, but I can use specially made thick pens (and specially made thick eating utensils), but sometimes I’m handed a normal thin pen and am unable to sign my name, eek.
Fortunately, I have two fingers on my right hand that are merely arthritic, not neurologically damaged, so I can type with them. Everything hurts some, but that’s life, and you get used to it. Meanwhile, I commit innumerable typos, not all of which I catch, so I have to apologize to my readers about my typing; that too is life. (I have proofread this quoted material 7 times, catching at least one error each time. There might be some left.)
Now that I’ve told you this, I ask you not to treat me just as a damaged person, not to fear me, and, especially, not to pity me. I’m getting by with a little help from my friends (and Paul McCartney).
And now I ask the same of you, the readers of this blog.
July 20, 2025 at 5:15 pm |
Well, I’m certainly glad about the outcome of your bout with MRSA, not only because it would have been pretty disturbing to have a professor die during the semester in my first semester of grad school, but also because all sorts of things I’ve learned from you in the ~22 years since.
July 20, 2025 at 5:42 pm |
😀😀😀 I too was pleased not to die during one of your first grad school classes, because then I wouldn’t have had enough time to get to know you. And thank you for the good thoughts.