WHILE getting out hastily from the car recently, I bumped my tailbone a little too hard against the wheelchair. I immediately knew what the result would be. True enough, I discovered a stain of fresh blood in the diaper later. That careless manoeuvre reopened an old pressure sore that had cost a few thousand ringgit in treatment and took nearly one year to heal.
A wound on a bony prominence like that mends very slowly. Pressure is exerted on it regardless of whether I am sitting up or lying down. The little sensation I have makes it uncomfortable day or night. The pain keeps me awake and this is one of the reasons I have not been sleeping well lately. It is only relieved when I lay on my side but I cannot sleep like that the entire night.
The carelessness that caused the wound was nothing new to me. As a kid, I was hyperactive and clumsy at the same time. These two traits were not complementary of each other. As my left leg knee was inherently weaker, I had tumbled more times than I could remember while playing games or just scampering around. I would be running at one moment and my leg would suddenly collapse under me in the next instance.
If I were so unlucky as to fall on rough surfaces, bits of skin and flesh would be scraped off resulting in me walking with a limp for the following few days. On those days, I would avoid bumping into my mother as much as possible. When she found out, which she always did, she would catch hold of me and forcefully clean away the debris and slough despite my protests and dress the wound with iodine.
Both my legs and arms have scars from those falls. There is a conspicuous keloid on my right knee. That is the one I remember most. Each time I fell, I would land on my knee and injure that particular spot. I fell into a drain and it got scraped. I fell off the bicycle and it got scraped. I got into an accident while on the motorcycle and it got scraped. Being young and restless then, I never thought of the consequences of my clumsiness and carelessness. I was on the go again even before the wounds healed properly.
The pain from all those wounds could not prepare me enough for what was to come. Of all the scars on my body, the one that affected me most is on my neck. The impact from my head hitting the bottom of the swimming pool caused a bone the size of a finger nail to break off from the fifth vertebra and cut into my spinal cord. The surgeon had to make a 9 centimetre-incision to remove the fragment. The wide incision was also to facilitate work in fusing together two fractured vertebrae for strength and stability. It was then closed with 13 stitches.
When the numbing effects of the anaesthesia wore off, the excruciating pain was unlike anything I had ever felt before. I could not talk. Each time I swallowed anything, be it saliva or liquid food, it felt like a sword was being forcefully shoved down my throat. That was the suffering I had to endure for the first few days following the surgery. By the time I was moved from the intensive care unit back to the regular ward, my voice came back and I could eat solid food already.
As I slowly recovered and picked up my life, I realised the deepest wounds were not physical. The emotional and psychological trauma cut deeper than the damage from a fall, a scrape or even a surgery. If anyone could see into my heart and soul, there would be the scars of disappointments, failures, heartbreaks, betrayals and a thousand other hurtful memories.
Nothing revealed the true characters of the people around me better than when I was down-and-out, paralysed and in need of help for everything. There were those who stood by me and there were those who abandoned me. And there were those who took advantage of me. What made it more painful was that these were people closest to me and ones whom I trusted. I agonised over this for a long time not knowing what to do with them and how to overcome that feeling of hopelessness and helplessness.
As with everything that happened to me in life, I took that as a lesson. I have also learnt that being wounded on the inside was far more painful and that incision on my neck. While I knew the wound would heal in a month or two, the pain in the heart felt like it could go on indefinitely. In the end, I chose to leave those people out of my life so that I could move forward.
Having survived those distressing and uncertain times, I can say with certainty that pain is temporary whether in the heart or on the skin. Like the physical wounds, given time and care, the pain will dissipate and the wound will heal. I am not going to dwell on those invisible scars anymore for they are of the past now and have no bearing on my present and future. As for that wound on my tailbone, it too shall heal in time. I just need to persevere and tolerate the discomfort for a while more.