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Our bodies are designed to handle being damaged. We go into a state of shock. It's really not a bad sensation at all. Most of us have experienced it in one form or another. It's a little like being high on alcohol or drugs. We hurt, but there is a distance between us and the pain. We know it is there, but we watch it, like an out of body experience. I can't speak for something really severe, like having an arm or a leg blown off, or being gutted or something similarly gruesome and permanent. I've never been around that kind of damage, much less experienced it. I only know what I see in the movies, and they show people whimpering and screaming a lot. I don't want to know about that kind of experience. I have never had an injury that penetrated my body. Wait. I have to take that back. I was shaving the side of a tree with an axe, so that someone else on my survey crew could get a view past it with the telescope on a surveyor's transit. We didn't want to cut the whole tree down just to see past a quarter inch of tree along a six inch length. I struck a blow and the axe glanced off and embedded itself in my shin. It wasn't deep enough that I had to pull it out, but I rolled up my pants leg to see the damage. There was a gash about three-quarters of an inch long and an eighth of an inch deep. A little blood crept out. There was no pain to speak of. I can't say that it felt good, but it certainly hurt less than stubbing my toe on a bed frame. I rolled my pant leg down and ignored it. I really don't have much meat on my shins. They are bony, so it was basically a skin cut. A friend of mine had a similar accident. He glanced an axe off of a tree and into his foot. He had put a lot of work into sharpening that axe, and it cut right through his leather boot, through his sock, and between his big toe and the one next to it, cutting at least an inch deeper, giving him an extra long big toe. The company was making a big deal out of "XXX many accident free days," so our bosses didn't want to report it. The doctor who sewed him up was paid from petty cash, and he spent the next month sitting around the motel during the day, recovering, and sharpening other people's axes. He was lonely, and we suspected the extra fine sharpness of the blades had an ulterior motive. It made work a lot easier, so we didn't complain. He doesn't remember it hurting. He wasn't even particularly upset that he cut his foot. What really irritated him was that he was wearing a brand new pair of boots, and that was the first day he had ever had them on. He also disliked being stuck at the motel while the rest of us went hiking among the trees. A worse case, on another job, with a different company, involved a carpenter foreman who was ripping lumber. There's a right way to do this and a wrong way. You are not supposed to push the lumber all of the way through the power saw with your hand. You are supposed to push the last bit through with another piece of wood. The saw has a habit of unexpectedly grabbing the wood and pulling it into itself. But he was a foreman and he knew what he was doing, and he was in a hurry, so he just pushed the board through the saw until it chewed through his hand, about halfway to his wrist. He didn't jump around and scream and yell. He was more embarrassed than anything. Our bodies go into shock in such situations and we keep functioning. The first time I ever hurt myself really badly I was a little kid. I was probably 5 years old, and I was standing in the doorway at the rear of our garage with my hand on the door frame. It was a big, heavy metal door. The wind blew it shut on my hand. The next thing I knew I was running through the house screaming, waving my hand around and throwing blood everywhere. The tip of my finger had nearly been severed. My mother grabbed me and drove me to the hospital, where a doctor sewed it back on. That finger still has a scar that wraps halfway around it, and it's about an eighth of an inch shorter than the same finger on my other hand. I don't remember it hurting, though. I was screaming because I was 5 years old and my finger was spewing blood all over. I was frightened more than hurt. Jumping forward twenty years or so, there was the time that I took a bad landing while skydiving. I pulled my rip cord too late, leaving me close to the ground when my parachute opened and I was flying under canopy. I was too low to get to the nice, soft plowed field I wanted to land in. I could see the plowed field on the other side of a dirt road, and I tried to make it over the road. At the last moment, I realized I wasn't going to make it, and I didn't want to land crosswise to the wind, so I turned to face the wind just in time to land on the road. Unfortunately, I hadn't looked at the wind sock for awhile, and I turned with the wind rather than into it, thereby increasing my speed rather than decreasing it. I fell faster, having less lift with a tailwind. It was a bad landing. I recall lying there in the road afraid to move. I thought that maybe I had broken my back. I knew that I was within a hundred yards of the club house, and I could tell that there was a crowd of people staring at me across that hundred yards, wondering if I was conscious. I knew they were staring at me because nobody was saying or shouting anything. What I didn't feel was pain. I wiggled my toes and my fingers and decided that I probably didn't have a broken back. I didn't want to move, because I was afraid that if I moved I would start to hurt, and I still wasn't convinced that I didn't have a broken back. But I also didn't want all of these people wondering if I was dead or paralyzed, so I finally rolled over onto my side and started to get up. That's when everyone cheered and ran to help me. It probably took about 2 seconds for all of that to happen. It felt like about ten minutes. Someone helped me gather up my stuff and carry it back to the rigging room. I really don't remember it, but apparently I packed my parachute. I drank a couple of bottles of beer and drove home, where I drank lots of bottles of beer. The next week I flew to Alaska, and I had to stand up for the entire five or six hour flight. That was when it hurt. Come to think of it, I just this minute realized something. Forgive me for this aside. When I got to Fairbanks, my job didn't
start for awhile. I found the local parachuting club and arranged
to make a jump. I went out of the plane by myself (nobody there
knew me - they weren't going to share the air with me). When
I pulled my rip cord, I looked up to make sure that my parachute
was OK. It wasn't. There was a big hole in it. It was ripped
along a seam, but it seemed to be working fine, although it was
a little difficult to steer. They thought I did it on purpose. They were amazed by my accuracy. Who am I to shatter someone else's illusions? I had to pay a rigger to repair my parachute. Eventually I had to sell it, because I needed the money. But it wasn't until I wrote this piece that I realized I probably had torn the parachute when I crashed in the road, and that's because I was in shock and I didn't notice that the seam was damaged when I packed the parachute. I've wondered for 30 years about how that parachute got ripped. Maybe I landed on my head instead of my butt when I hit that road. The point is, that if you have experience with pain from injuries like this, you know that you are going to go into shock, that it really won't be that unpleasant an experience at the time, that the unpleasantness will come later, as the shock wears off and you find yourself in some emergency room explaining that you really do need a prescription for some heavy-duty painkillers. You also know that once you leave the emergency room there will be a liquor store on the way home. Despite these facts; before you do something that looks like it might end with a body that is crunched or mashed or flattened or cut in some way; despite the fact that you know that what is really going to bother you is feeling stupid about making a mistake rather than the pain, which will come long after the fact, when you can deal with it. Despite all of that knowledge, when you stand on the edge of the precipice you still fear the pain. "This is going to hurt," you say. And then you go. ©Jon Norland 2008 Jon Norland has a bachelor's degree in Physics and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. He was also accidentally entered into a graduate program in English Literature just by showing up and taking classes one year. He was born into a military family, raised as an Air Force brat, and has never stopped traveling. He is currently in the process of moving out of his current house, which he has lived in for five years. He admits this is a lifetime record for living in the same house. He spent the decade of his thirties wandering around the old West, seeing it before it disappeared. He feels it is gone now. He has worked as a wilderness surveyor when he didn't need money badly, and as a construction engineer when he had to put together enough money to take a winter off to ski or go to school. Jon has spent most of his adult career writing software of one kind or another. He is currently disabled. The proximate cause was a paragliding accident, but feels he would have ended up disabled by now anyway as he was born with a bad back, which has made a lifetime career of finding new ways to disintegrate. According to Jon, The only
good thing that has come from being disabled is that he has discovered
a knack for writing poetry. Pain is an old acquaintance of his,
but never a friend. |
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