This damn elbow

On pain | Why did it get so hard to slow down and rest?

Hello and welcome to the Hungry Woodworker, a humanistic exploration of woodworking, purpose, and trying to make a living from the skills of my two hands. I’m Taliesin and one thing I do when not working is write; some of those notes get edited into essays, which I share every other Thursday. Thank you for being here.

A brief update: I am resting this week (reasons in more details below) and am glad to have the Women’s World Cup to keep me company. I’ve never been much of a sports person, but have been riveted by the players’ skills and abilities.

In the last two weeks I have managed to take zero photos. However, it simply won’t do to put this newsletter out as a wall of text, so I just took a picture of a little wooden piece I made out of scraps. That thing sat on my bench for months, because I need a lot of lead time before actually hanging something on the wall.

My essay is below—I hope your next week is full of all the lead time you need to do something fun.

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Pain and perspective

I’ve been thinking and writing about potential—the wide open doors of possibility that are the hallmarks of an idea in embryo and what it could become—but that essay has been derailed by something more primal and altogether more distracting: pain.

Writing about pain can be, well, as painful as the experience of it itself. How to describe it without seeming whiny or weak? How to write about it without dwelling even more deeply within it, possibly causing more hurt simply because you’re focusing on it? How to put it into it’s proper context, not over-blowing it, not minimizing it?

How to describe it without swearing?

I remember an older family member telling me—I was a teenager at the time—that people who swear are not smart. She said such people lack the intelligence and creativity to come up with better descriptions of their experiences.

I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m as dumb as they come, for swearing has been the verbal paint I’ve used to color my world for a long time. It is certainly a way I’ve managed experiences of physical and emotional pain. But this pain I’m in? My curse words are no match.

It is acute at times, sending shock waves through my right arm when I try to grip a drill or heavy piece of wood or pick up a bag. The rest of the time my arm exists with a dull ache, a quiet reminder that it no longer functions the way I expect it to.

If only a well-timed four-letter word would make it all better.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has a nifty tool online, the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), that lets you search for data about the numbers of people hurt by a variety of objects. If you want a chilling reminder of just how precarious life is, spend an afternoon querying the NEISS.

For instance, in the past 10 years, no less than 6,300 women around my age have gone to the hospital annually due to an injury from a power tool. The number peaked at 10,658 in 2020, adding to what was already a horrible year.

Those numbers seemed high to me, but they don’t come close to the injuries women around my age have sustained from housewares and personal use items in the last decade—16,242 at the lowest (personal use items in 2020) all the way up to 27,728 at the highest (housewares in 2015).

Pain is all around us, lurking. Sometimes in innocuous places (clothing, cookware—let your mind rest with that for a bit) sometimes in the more obvious places, where you’re expecting it and trying to be careful but fail (finely sharpened chisels, fast-moving saw blades, pretty much the corner of every table, bed, or door as far as my partner Josiah is concerned).

And then there’s pain that’s not from some acute trauma. It’s just from mundane repetition.

The NEISS tool doesn’t have data on that. On the numbers of people who wake up one morning with a slight ache, maybe with fuzzy awareness of something they did yesterday to cause it, but dismiss it or ignore it because it’s not that bad. And continue to do so—wake up with the pain, ignore it throughout the day, go to bed with the pain, ignore it because it’ll probably get better, right? But it doesn’t. That pain will not be dismissed, ignored. That pain will grow until consideration is given, until it drives a wedge into other activities, blaring like a klaxon, taking all the focus.

I saw a doctor earlier this week, finally, and she thinks this is just tendinitis—inflammation in the tendons around my elbow joint (tennis elbow). Even the joint pain in my right hand is likely due to overuse, nothing more serious.

There is not much for my arm but to rest, though she did give me an arm brace to wear just below my elbow, and got me scheduled to see an occupational therapist.

Once we’ve addressed the more pressing issue of my arm, the OT and I are going to have a heart-to-heart about how to maintain myself. Because the work isn’t getting less physically demanding. And my body clearly isn’t up for jumping back after minor breakdowns anymore.

During my rest period, I am reading Terrence Holt’s Internal Medicine, a collection of stories about being a doctor. Nothing I’m going through currently comes close to what his patients experienced.

In fact, despite my current pain and its duration, I am also better off than those thousands of people recorded in the NEISS who had to go to the ER for the myriad traumas inflicted by everyday objects.

And it’s exactly that perspective that I need to not become a mopey, ruminating mess, concerned solely with pain and the frustration of having to rest. (That’s some middle-age madness there: When did it become so hard to take a break and simply enjoy it?)

Reading Holt’s book brings a mixture of relief, gratitude, humility, and empathy. It’s not a formal prescription for healing, but it feels close enough to count.

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