Held Together by Wire

Held Together by Wire

Krystal Renee

My eyes clenched shut in fear of the artificial suns above me as I continued to scream, “You have to help me,” over and over. “Please help me.” The room was filled with sterile, composed, but bustling people, like a busy sidewalk. Each person had a job, a role, and a responsibility. None of them looked directly at me. I kept screaming, “Please help me,” as if I were begging along that very sidewalk. I was there for them, after all. Finally, as I began to tire, a man in a white coat appeared above me. He was young, not worn by wrinkles or frown lines, but still weathered, well-seasoned. His face was upside down from my vantage point, as I lay strapped to a board that felt like it had been made of concrete. He stood over me, looking down on me. He said, “We are here to help you, but you must first calm down.” Doctors are meant to prescribe, not demand. And I’d never met one who negotiated in trade for relief. I replied in agony, “I don’t understand”.

My leg lay broken beneath me—how many pieces, I didn’t yet know. Each time they moved me from one board to another, the fragments rattled like pieces in a shaken box. I wanted to respond, “Make me,” or “Try me.” Not because I’m typically that ferocious, but because if he could calm me despite my pain, I’d welcome it. I’d thank him. The white coat left and returned within a few breaths. He held a syringe filled with sleep, I hoped, or with relief. End me or end this experience. His choice. But instead of granting that mercy, he appeared above me once more and told me I’d been given medicine for the pain. Another doctor would be in shortly for something he called “traction.” Then he left.

As he turned his back, we were finally aligned, he no longer looming above me. He was across from me, we were even in line of sight, except he stood on two working legs, while I lay crumpled. He kept walking. No jolt in his stride. No desperation in his voice like mine. His white coat disappeared, and the room continued to bustle. All the commotion was for me. All the hurry and chatter, for my sake. I had now been absorbed into the belly of the system meant to fix me. Broken people come in. Broken people cry out in anguish, leading to desperation. Sometimes, shiny new people come out, if they’re lucky.

While you sit along a sidewalk begging for relief, or rather the hallway of a hospital, you don’t sleep or rest, but you do learn quite a bit. The doctor in the white coat kept half his promise; whatever had been administered into my veins drained my cognitive function, and probably secured what he was ultimately after, my silence. The bustling inside hospital walls slows for no one, not a heart attack, not a girl with a broken leg, and not even for those who are unsuccessful at purposely trying to die. Hospitals are living ecosystems, and I was in the digestion phase. Another white coat approaches me in the hallway. My cardboard sign reading “help me” is now soggy and trampled beneath the feet of those walking through this system, but he still stops. I am still worth noticing even in my quiet. I am his favorite thing, after all, broken.

The new white coat I refer to as Mr. White Coat is dark skinned, thin, wears glasses, and is too arrogant even for an emergency. He doesn’t bother with any type of introduction; no one does in these walls, but rather, he begins to explain to me what happens next. He speaks in a way that has me thinking all his patients lie pinned to a concrete board, helpless, lifeless enough to not have the ability to punch him for the size of his ego. My husband rests his hand beside mine and listens intensely as we are told “traction” requires pins to go through my nonbroken bones to realign my femur, and that it’s not painful, Mr. White Coat has done this procedure several times today on “old ladies,” and they were fine.

Grief is a strange phenomenon that strikes you with inconvenience. I, a full-grown adult woman, continue to lie on this board, leg in pieces beneath me, and while Mr. White Coat speaks, I can only cry as if I am a child once more. I am lost, the absorption of me into the walls of this factory, and I am a small child attempting to find my way home. My tears, once shed in agony and anguish, have been traded in for confusion, and now I continue to murmur “I don’t understand” as if I cannot comprehend words or am not a college graduate. I am in pain, but not physically, in that moment, as Mr. White Coat walks through the overwhelming amount of steps that follow to patch me up, repair me in his best effort to make me shiny and new, I am overwhelmed with grief. I am at a loss. I will never be the same. I will never be the same girl I was just seconds before my bones collided into pieces, similarly to the structure of my now femur, she is gone. She has shed. I am someone entirely new now.

“Bones do not have nerves”, Mr. White Coat tells me that. I call bullshit. What shifts like icebergs splitting in my leg if not my bones broken into pieces? What feeds my desperation and bargaining? When in pain, I begin to haggle. What if I lie just the right way? What if I holler, but the walls of this system are vast and my screams cling only to empty spaces, what if it is all in my head and my shattered leg doesn't hurt at all? “Traction will solve all the pain,” he repeats, as if saying it enough will make it true. I shift my body but only on the non-broken side; my left side has all its pieces still intact, and I can shift my left hip and leg enough to provide some comfort to the right side. Alas, a nurse enters the room in her hand, some new cocktail and she shares with me that most pain from broken bones is from the muscle spasms, soft tissue constricting, and inflammation around the bone itself. Normally, the girl I was just hours before loved to learn, be educated, and learn new things through adventure, but this isn’t what I had in mind, but I welcome her story as the fluid is pushed into my body. Finally, I cannot feel the puzzle pieces inside my leg. Finally, I am accepting of the absorption into the factory. Finally, I think they can make me shiny and new.

Healing is violent. Healing requires dedication to become new, against your will, but alas, you must become new. The old ladies Dr. White Coat referred to as surviving traction, I imagine, were either unconscious or dead. I wished for either, but received only violence. When you break the strongest bone in your body, the healing is not met with cuddles, pillows, or even enough drugs to help you forget your name. No, when a femur is broken, it requires both manipulation and hardware to make it shiny and new. Suddenly, a few hours after the nurse silenced my leg, a team of people entered my room and they brought supplies for opening a circus. One of them carried rope, one carried a weight, and the other carried rods. Dr. White Coat, the one who has an ego taller than his body, carried nothing, typical. Is this what animals feel like when they’re being taken out to slaughter? No one talks, equipment moves, my broken leg gets doused with iodine, and then I remember nothing next but also every detail. I remember they took a screwdriver to my knee so that wires could be inserted through my leg to support the weight they’ll hang off my foot. I don’t hear my screams because I am no longer living in the moment, all while still suffering through it. Traction is modern-day torture. Traction is used to realign broken bones before surgical intervention. Traction is used to bring the broken pieces back together, but without the use of glue. I am told I blacked out. Why can I remember? Traction is not the shiny and new part, it’s as if I must be peeled apart in its entirety before fixing.

I came into this carnival of an ecosystem broken only to be plastered and duct-taped back together with wires and rods. Later, when my brain turned back on and I came to, my broken leg now lay on top of a pillow, and my knee with wires through it pulling the thigh up, my foot had a weight dangling off the end of it to keep the knee and thigh in suspension. I am told this will merge the bones in my femur back together, and only then will I be worthy of fixing. I am back to bargaining and negotiating by asking how long this process will take, my pain is still not relieved, and all while I am conforming to this new identity. This new girl, whose only concentration can be focused on healing, even if it’s violent, I want out and back into the world and spaces I occupied just hours before. I have no autonomy, I can’t leave because I will remain broken, and I couldn’t walk out of these walls if I tried, but if the violence didn’t defeat me, the grief might.

The weight at the end of my foot kept me together, or maybe it taunted me, as it swung back and forth while X-rays were taken, meds were pushed into my veins, and family filtered in and out. I watched it in anticipation of catastrophe. What if that weight slips? What if my leg rips from my body entirely? What if the weight fails and I’m left like this, suspended and unfinished, forever? My body hung like a puppet, but my bones weren’t ready to be played with yet.

The rods and wires forced my leg into something resembling straightness, but nothing could force my mind to comply. It lingered somewhere between desperation to be rebuilt and the quiet dread of knowing that rebuilt implies a return. There would be no return. The girl I was, the life I had, the body I knew, it was all forever changed. I wasn’t going back. I was being made into someone entirely new. Someone I had yet to meet.

Weeks passed, and to the outside world, I was shiny and new. Catastrophe had been compressed into four days inside the hospital factory: traction, hardware, transformation. Then I was sent home, patched and repaired, expected to step back into a life that no longer fit.

Was I a skilled haggler, a panhandler begging in the hospital corridors? Or was I resilient? Do you splint a butterfly’s wing, or do you drive titanium through it? Neither. You expect the butterfly to flatten and become one with the earth.

People ask, “What was the worst part?” One might assume it was the break itself, the surgery to install a titanium rod, or the discomfort of coming home. But the worst part is becoming a new person while still grieving the old one, all while the word resiliency mocks you. The worst part is that you have no choice but to become new. There are no sign-up sheets plastered on the walls we walk between in life that read, Hey! Want to break your leg in a traumatic way? Sign up here! There’s no opt-in. There’s only the option to push forward. Hurry up.

Resilience is thrown around like a compliment, but it feels like mockery. It keeps you too busy to grieve. Too distracted to notice what’s gone. If you stop moving, you’re forced to reckon with who you’ve become and what you've lost. Resilience is pretending nothing changed. Tenacity is knowing everything did, and showing up anyway. I choose to be tenacious.

A month has now passed, and I glide through water just as the girl did four weeks ago, before her femur and her life came apart. The water ices over the places that still ache, muffling the grief, silencing the noise. I remind myself: I’ve done this before. It’s just different now. I’ve come back from what others call tragedy, time and time again. And here I am, swimming and walking only three weeks post-surgery, moving through depths most don’t try until eight weeks. I still mourn the girl without the broken leg, without the scar that runs hip to knee, without the fracture of identity. But she’s fading. She’s quieting. Wings can be splinted. Puzzle pieces of bone can be made whole again. And grief, while never gone, can settle below the surface. I cannot return, but I am shiny and new.