Saturday, March 23, 2024
In bed at 9 then I did the recliner circuit all night, letting Lilly out twice. Bad pain in both shoulders, right wrist and hand, hips, and lower back. I think I overdid the yellow elastic exercise band yesterday, which could account for the pain in my right shoulder. Plus, it's difficult to stand up from the recliners. I'm losing the will to maintain this journal, too distracted by pain, immobility, and lack of good sleep. I took 2 500 mg. tabs of Tylenol at about 7 a.m. In case I didn't know, my iPhone's Walking Steadiness Notification feature regularly warns me that I have a "very high risk" of falling within the next 12 months.
I'm grateful for all the stuff and to all the people I have written about in past entries, but the pain and related problems do a good job of keeping me not very conscious of all that gratitude at any given time. But I read a little essay in The Atlantic 'on communing with trees' that reminded me of my deep fondness for trees, individually and in their plenitude, reminding me of Mary Oliver's "each as common as a field daisy, and as singular."
I opened my laptop to the feature essay in The New Yorker which I had started yesterday, "The Children Who Lost Limbs in Gaza: More than a thousand children who were injured in the war are now amputees. What do their futures hold?" by Eliza Griswold, March 21, 2024. Were these injuries caused by American bombs, rockets, or missiles given to Israel in my name by Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, and Lloyd Austin? To further enrich the American world-leading arms industry? While the Republicans in the House invite Netanyahu to address the Congress despite Biden, as they did once before to spite Obama?
Gazal was wounded on November 10th, when, as her family fled Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, shrapnel pierced her left calf. To stop the bleeding, a doctor, who had no access to antiseptic or anesthesia, heated the blade of a kitchen knife and cauterized the wound. Within days, the gash ran with pus and began to smell. By mid-December, when Gazal’s family arrived at Nasser Medical Center—then Gaza’s largest functioning health-care facility—gangrene had set in, necessitating amputation at the hip. On December 17th, a projectile hit the children’s ward of Nasser. Gazal and her mother watched it enter their room, decapitating Gazal’s twelve-year-old roommate and causing the ceiling to collapse. (Multiple news reports have described the event as an Israeli attack. The I.D.F. claimed the incident could have been caused by a Hamas mortar or the remnant of an Israeli flare.) Gazal and her mother managed to crawl out of the rubble. The next day, their names were added to the list of evacuees who could cross the border into Egypt and then fly to Qatar for medical treatment. Gazal’s mother was nine months pregnant; she gave birth to a baby girl while awaiting the airlift to Doha.
unicef estimates that a thousand children in Gaza have become amputees since the conflict began in October. “This is the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history,” Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a London-based plastic-and-reconstructive surgeon who specializes in pediatric trauma, told me recently.
In Gaza, Abu-Sittah was performing as many as six amputations a day. “Sometimes you have no other medical option,” he explained. “The Israelis had surrounded the blood bank, so we couldn’t do transfusions. If a limb was bleeding profusely, we had to amputate.” The dearth of basic medical supplies, owing to blockades, also contributed to the number of amputations. Without the ability to irrigate a wound immediately in an operating room, infection and gangrene often set in. “Every war wound is considered dirty,” Karin Huster, a nurse who leads medical teams in Gaza for Doctors Without Borders, told me. “It means that many get a ticket to the operating room.”
and this from the NYTimes, "Gaza’s Shadow Death Toll: Bodies Buried Beneath the Rubble":
Gaza has become a 140-square-mile graveyard, each destroyed building another jagged tomb for those still buried within. . . .
Some were buried too hastily to be counted. Others lie decomposing in the open, in places too dangerous to be reached, or have simply disappeared amid the fighting, the chaos and ongoing Israeli detentions. The rest, in all likelihood, remain trapped under the rubble.
A year ago at this time I was reading and enjoying Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.
While waiting for the Diclofenac on my shoulder to dry enough to put my shirt back on, I watched Bill Maher on CNN and thought we ought to start watching him again.
Sarah and Christian arrive from Germany Wednesday evening. I hope I'm in decent enough shape for their visit, concerned a bit about sleeping on the BL in the TV room while they are here.
A Poem about Pain
BY DAVID BUDBILL
I can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing
from this life, just as my father did.
When the pain you're in
is so great you can’t think about or pay attention to anything
but your own pain, the rest of the world and all other life
don't matter.
I think about my friends with dementia, cancer, arthritis, and
how much more pain they are in than I am, but it does no good,
their pain is not mine, and therefore, no matter how magnanimous
I might want to be, their pain is not as important to me as my own.
EMILY DICKINSON
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.
It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
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