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cw: blood, self-harm

A bruise spreads over my left wrist. It’s red over the radial artery, patchy and purple toward the ulnar. I flex my wrist, and the patches’ blue undertones grow more pronounced. A yellow oval leads toward my elbow. Pink and brown discoloration wraps around the wrist, a small circle on the back of my hand. It only hurts if I apply pressure.

Last week, I was hooked up to an arterial line for six hours for a research study. I sat up in the hospital bed, ate a nice lunch, learned to use the bed-attached remote control to watch Lilo & Stitch. I had seen these remotes in my childhood, mostly when visiting my mother. It had been a long time since I’d used one myself.

The arterial line insertion took two attempts. First, I was injected with lidocaine to numb the feeling of a 20-gauge needle threading beneath the wrist’s soft skin. The stabbing feeling was translated into a dull throbbing, marked by jumps in pressure. The poke became an ache. When the first insertion was unsuccessful, I looked down at the site. Wet blood coated my wrist and seeped down through my palms, darker along the creases. There was a stream of it dampening the towel underneath my arm. I curled my reddened, numbed pinky to see if I still could.

“Was that a normal amount of blood?” I asked the attending postgrad, after the line was inserted, the blood was cleaned, and the doctor had stepped out.

“Oh, absolutely,” she replied. She and the nurse shared a quick laugh—the nurse had been a frontline worker during the worst phases of the pandemic. The blood on my arm was nothing to her. The two of them knew how much blood the body holds, and this wasn’t even a drop in the bucket, really. I laughed with them.

Earlier that morning, the nurse had strapped me to an EKG. Her hands slipped inside my gown, around my breasts, with a few acknowledging apologies from her as she navigated. I hadn’t realized that the EKG would be a part of the study—maybe I hadn’t listened close enough during the phone call, or during the intake visit. After a morning of accidental misgenderings and well-intentioned apologies, I felt a bit repulsive as the electrodes were stuck onto my chest. I was aware of every hair on my torso, every fleck of stubble along my jaw.

The last time I had been administered an EKG—or been in a hospital bed—was about five years ago, during my senior year of high school. I had been at work, doubling over with chest pains, until my manager told me to go to the hospital. I called my dad and he drove me. We joked on the ride that seventeen was a bit young to be having a heart attack. Once in the hospital room, the doctors had asked me to take my shirt off. They left my chest exposed, fitting me with electrodes while my dad sat in the room. I didn’t want to be seen.

Anyway, it wasn’t a heart attack. I left the hospital with a diagnosis of costochondritis: a benign inflammation of the cartilage connecting the ribs to the breastbone. It has a more-or-less random onset, and, in most cases (including mine), it fades away after a couple of weeks. There wasn’t any real treatment, just some advice to avoid heavy lifting or strenuous activities. I skipped school for a day or two, called out of work for the next week. The chest pains immobilized me for a little bit, and then I was fine.

The body is dramatic. A few drops of blood looks catastrophic, a mild cartilage inflammation feels like a POW! block (you know, from Mario Kart) buried inside the chest. I drank too much wine at a seder the other week and vomited three separate times. I think things are worse than they are, and the body confirms it.

But I’ve never been close to death. Once, when I was thirteen, I slashed my thigh open with the blade of a disposable razor. It was late at night, and I was sitting alone in my room. I watched, lulling between concern and fascination, as the small wound widened and widened, becoming a white-pink crevasse. The hole welled with blood, emptied down my thigh, repeat. I had been self-harming for a while at that point, but the blood had always stopped. Now, my entire thigh was red, the hair matted down, continuing to darken. I thought I had struck an artery (did I? who knows?), and I thought of waking up my dad. But eventually, the blood did stop (mostly—the next day in history class, a bloody tissue fell from my pantleg). I was fine. There’s still a pale, hairless streak on my thigh, bordered by dozens of other, smaller streaks. Most are on my left thigh; I'm right-handed. The scars on my torso, from unmemorable self-harm incidents, formed into keloids: raised pink ridges caused by the body overreacting and repairing a wound with excessive collagen.

Sometimes I worry my body is growing tired of me. I still get occasional chest pains, and my headaches have become more frequent. Sometimes I’ll notice the scars I’ve learned to ignore, from the shoulder down to the calf, and I wonder whether my body has forgiven me for them. I fall behind on hormone injections for a few days and begin noticing masculine body curvatures I had previously ignored: it’s like, my body is doing its best, but I’m starving it, and it’s withering. The bruise on my wrist feels like a small betrayal.

I watched Steve McQueen’s Hunger the other night and didn’t know what to make of it. It’s not my trauma to relate to. But I watched the slow degradation of Bobby Sands’ body throughout the film—first, from the thrashings of prison guards, then from the hunger strike—and I felt something between revulsion and comfort. In the film’s final moments, he is laying in bed, sixty-six days into the hunger strike, with his parents at his bedside. His mother leans over him, kisses his forehead, sits back down in her chair. Bobby, long-mute by this point, turns his head toward her, and his eyes well up. Before he passes away, he sheds a single tear.

The final tear is a resolution: in the moment before death, Bobby is reunited with his body, and they act with the same intent. They expend their last remaining efforts on a tiny act of communication, and then they fall asleep together. I assume not all deaths are like that. But I like to think that the relationship between self and body isn’t inherently antagonistic. That, at some point in this life, the body’s pains stop acting as a signpost to the mind, and the two become capable of acting as one. I don’t know how to apologize to my body in any meaningful way, but I feel her pains in the way I feel the memories of my mother’s pain, or my father’s, or my grandmother’s. I want her to hurt less.

The bruise on my wrist will heal in a couple of weeks. I’ll make a return visit for the study’s second session, and I’ll get a new bruise, in the same spot. I recently learned I’m a match for a patient in need of blood marrow, and I’ll learn more about that in the coming days. I think these are small pains my body will understand.