This sort of news coverage makes me nuts. Okay, Hillary Clinton fell and broke her… elbow. What’s wrong with that, you say? Well, the elbow is not a bone; it would be just as accurate to say that someone fell and broke his or her ass, which while an evocative phrase that I have used often, does not constitute precise medical reporting.
Come on, CNN — did anyone bother to ask? You’ve got a humerus, a radius and an ulna converging in there. Which bone was it? More than one? Are we talking sling only? Jelly cast? Ulnar nerve channel spared? How is Secretary Clinton’s shoulder? Has anyone checked? Inquiring minds want to know.
Maybe it is just me since I work with busted people all day long and trying to pry out of a client what diagnosis they received on damage to their own bodies that they are walking around in can sometimes be like asking a toddler to repeat a phone message. They have no clue and don’t realize that it matters, or else prefer to believe they are solid inside, like a potato, instead of filled with complicated and icky stuff. CNN itself ran the recent news story which described how depressingly few adults of normal intelligence know where their hearts, livers and other chitlins are located.
Also, I broke my own elbow once. I was nine and running around at dusk, to a children’s birthday party, carrying a nominal gift that kept me from catching myself competently when I tripped on a rusty wicket fence (I couldn’t see for sour owlshit even in those days). I did a one-point landing on a flagstone with my left elbow and chipped the end off my olecranon process. All I knew at the time, of course, was that my elbow hurt like hell and I had better hide it when I got home or the screaming would never stop (we all know about parents like this, I had one, nuff said), but eventually it became apparent that I couldn’t straighten my arm out and I went through the whole miserable trek to the dispensary (as the clinic serving military families was called in those days) and various other medical locations, over a period of weeks.
What nobody did was think through the collateral damage — when you fall like this, your shoulder joint, a loose shallow joint that allows you a big range of arm motion, gets jammed like no one’s business, and the damage lingers, not so much in joint tissues themselves, but the muscles that got strained and torqued when the jolt passed through. Nine years later I had a mean nerve impingement that made my whole left arm feel like it was going to fall off and pain in my left hooter so sharp that I ran it by a gynecologist. It took a fresh-from-school chiropractor to start sorting it out, when no lord-of-the-earth MD could offer me anything more specific than Valium, and after that one thing led to another and today I fix busted people because someone has to.
A little over two years ago my older massage buddy, Sister Age, dragged me to the pool when she was rehabbing her own fractured tibia and made me swim laps with her for 45 minutes, and that was when I finally tore loose the last adhesions from that old fracture. I had to ace-bandage the elbow for about a week, but it finally straightens out at an angle indistinguishable from the other one.
I suspect Secretary Clinton gets a massage and probably from someone good. I hope so. Someone who knows biomechanics, or their ass from their elbow.
I’m so glad I am not the only one frothing at the mouth about stuff like this in the news. That sort of coverage only feeds the attitude that it’s okay to be ignorant, that you don’t really need to know about your innards and how they work. I’d love to read your rant about clients who don’t even know what drugs they are taking and what they are for, which are items of information that the State of Missouri feels is important for massage therapists to know before they give a person a massage.
The State of Virginia cares less than a lot of my clients, who tend to be refreshingly suspicious of drugs for some reason. What makes my head spin is the people who have had a surgery and don’t know exactly what was done.
There seems to be a whole subsection of, I am sorry to say, the female half of the human race who view their life path as:
- Get out of school and get job
- Assume only the positions required by that job for the next 30 years of your life; typically, sitting
- Develop pain here and pain there; smile ruefully and say “I’m getting old”
- Flap ineffectually at the idea of going to an occasional exercise class
- Do not exert real effort, because they already hurt so anything like physical work might make them break
- Accept drugs and surgeries in increasing frequency; collude in viewing menopause as an illness requiring treatment
- Tentatively consider taking a vitamin supplement, as if it were something exotic, like firewalking
- Totter around in shoes that give no support and clothing that discourages movement, including bra’s that leave furrows in the flesh
- Accept all orders from doctors to go here and go there and get this test and that test and this other procedure without any question, in preparation for an old age of devoting all their leisure time to being a medical consumer, but
- Learn as little as possible about their bodies, because it’s scary.
Sometimes these are people who teach the young. By me, that’s scary.
Well, how could they know what was done during surgery? After all, they were unconscious at the time it happened, right? Besides, it involves those suspicious and “solid” insides. And the explanation and diagnosis probably involved big complicated words like arteriosclerosis.
This situation is not helped by the medical establishment’s penchant for redefining conditions and appending horrendously complicated names to them. Back a decade ago, an enlarged prostate was just that. Now a man suffers from “benign prostate hyperplasia” and I’m here to tell you that words like “hyperplasia” give most people a migraine.
Also, I could write on and on about this post and your response, but where I live and work, the men are just as bad as the women in terms of their life path only they frequently work themselves to a total frazzle at a factory and they don’t wear bras. . .
I misread chitlins as clitoris……
If someone has more than one of those, alert the media.
somehow this does not surprise me, Nursie!
HMH: Unconscious — well, maybe. When I had my one, three-hour, open abdominal surgery, I voted for a spinal block and while the pathologist was doing his thing, entertained the surgical team with my ex-husband’s Gounod parody “My Uncle Sleeps With A Kangaroo.” The anesthesiologist did finally give me “the hook.” But the surgeon later ran the entire video for me (she was filming her procedures at the time).
As for men and bras, some of them maybe ought to…
[...] Elsewhere I have made mention of the minor elbow fracture that might have been a nudge from my daimon, damn close to the one which Hillary Clinton managed to incur a few months ago. I really thought the last of the fallout from this four-decade-old injury had settled but some earnest warfare on the shrubbery with a pole pruner convinces me I had a few degrees of extension left to go. I barbered the bushes yesterday, before and after beating several suffering butts, and this morning the elbow was ringed round with creaks and squeaks and charley horses, most of them in the forearm compartment that bears the unlovely nickname of the “extensor wad.” [...]