Friday, January 23, 2015

Brittle

I cannot stop thinking about starfish.  Starfish, sea stars, brittle stars.  Many species have the ability to regrow lost limbs.  Some can even regenerate all new limbs and the central disk of their bodies - all from a single lost arm.

Humans cannot do this.  When injury or illness causes us to lose a body part, it's simply gone.  It can be replaced with a prosthetic, and certainly prosthetics have come a very long way.  But they'll never really be you.

Starfish and brittle stars can chose to shed their limbs.  Special connective tissues soften when the star is threatened, allowing it to lose its limb but keep its life.

If you had to make this choice, could you do it?

I like to think that I could.  I like to think that if I were ever bitten by a zombie, I'd waste no time in taking a hatchet to my own limb.  But I don't know.

Right now my mother is lying in a hospital bed facing a surgery that will amputate her right leg twelve centimeters below the knee.  It is, in her case, a true choice of life or death.  Diabetic complications have disfigured her ankle to the point where it will no longer bear her weight.  The limb is infected.  If it isn't removed, it will result in sepsis and death.

It took thirty-six hours to convince her to agree to the operation.  Thirty-six hours during which she asked, Why bother?  What kind of life can I have with one leg?  Thirty-six hours during which I stared at her in a kind of angry helplessness, and replied, You can have A LIFE.  In which you are not dead.  In which there is a chance, always a chance, of things getting better.

With the persuasion of one insistent doctor for whom I feel immense gratitude, my mother has finally agreed to the surgery.  She has finally allowed herself to feel a sliver of hope that after this operation, she will regain her health, and with the use of a prosthetic, may be more active than she had been able to be in over a year.

I'm incredibly relieved.  I'm deeply shaken.  I'm entirely terrified.

It's not me facing an operation or life without my leg.  But for a while I thought I was facing life without my mother.  My mother, who irritates me and makes me crazy, who succumbs to her depression more than she battles it, who gets into screaming matches with me over stupid, pointless things and then makes me feel terrible over when she starts crying.  My mother who taught me to swim, to makes art out of pine cones and glitter, to love horror movies, and to be a hopeless romantic.

I don't want to live without my mother.  I also don't want to live without my own leg.  I don't know now, if the choice were mine, what I would decide.  I am not a brittle star, just brittle.  And that scares the shit out of me.

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