The Two Kinds of Decay

Bones

In 1997 I stubbed my toe on the leg of a cast-iron chair and bandaged my purple foot and tore the insole out of a sneaker so I could fit my foot into it.

After watching me limp for a few days, my boss at the magazine made me go to a clinic, where they took an X-ray and announced I had three fractures.

In 2000, the first night I was back in New York after graduate school, I went to a roller-skating party at Chelsea Piers. I was curving left on my skates, at the narrow part of the oval rink, and lost my balance and fell backward. I caught myself on the heel of my right hand, and my arm hyperextended and my radius hit my humerus very hard and broke.

I’d felt the bone break, but just to be sure, I skated to a pay phone and called my friend’s father in St. Louis. He was an army doctor. He asked me how my arm and hand felt when I moved it up, down, around, how my fingers felt. Then he said I should go to an ER and have an X-ray taken.

I thanked him and thought to myself, Well, so I’ll have a broken arm for a while. I wasn’t going to another ER ward ever again. Not if I were conscious.

Five days later, while trying to chop carrots with an arm I knew was broken, I called my friend Vivian and said I wouldn’t be able to cook dinner after all. I had invited her over to prove my arm wasn’t just functional — it was good enough to julienne carrots. I hailed a gypsy cab and told the driver to take me to the nearest hospital. I should have taken the subway to a good hospital on the Upper East Side, but I didn’t know any better, so I wound up at Woodhull Medical Center.

In the Emergency waiting room were two men in orange jumpsuits, handcuffs, and leg irons, covered in blood, eyes swollen shut, and two or three police escorts for each of them.

A nurse asked me if I would please come into a ward to translate for a Polish patient, and I told her I didn’t speak Polish, and she stared at me until I noticed I was the only white person in the waiting room. The only pale white people treated at Woodhull were Polish immigrants from Greenpoint.

A doctor took an X-ray and gave me a sling and told me to come back in a week. I didn’t. The radial head fracture didn’t heal properly, but I don’t mind.

I’ve always had health insurance — if I relapsed without insurance, my parents would be homeless within a year — but other than that visit to Woodhull, I didn’t see a doctor for two years after I got out of lockdown.

In 2004 I fell on my kneecap while chasing my friend’s dogs in an ice storm in rural New Jersey. I drove myself to an orthopedist, skidding all the way, knowing I’d need surgery to fish out the bone chips. God, it would be horrible. I’d be admitted to the bone ward and everything would go back to the way it was when I was helpless.

But all the calcium supplements I’d taken, all the miles I’d run, had made my bones strong again, and I hadn’t broken my kneecap.

Even now, when I crack a bone on something hard, I still think I’ve fractured it, and in a flash I can see my wasted body in a bed with side rails, but I haven’t broken any bones since the night I broke my arm at Chelsea Piers.