The Harvest of Hurt

I had a serious physical injury during the past week which put me in a hospital trauma ward for a couple days. I slipped while getting out the door of a big truck and fell about two meters to the street, getting a concussion, a head laceration and losing consciousness for a few hours.

The seemingly purely physical aspects of such injuries are fascinating and deep – the brain, the cerebrospinal fluid, the blood and all its constituents, the protective structures and functions, the repairs and the physical therapy. There is also an infinity of people and social institutions that comprises the health industry, from the first responders with the ambulance to the nurse's aide who pushes the wheel chair out the door at the time of hospital discharge. All are astonishments without end, especially to an older person who increasingly appreciates everything as he approaches the end.

But what mostly absorbed my attention and sense of the miraculous as I regained my consciousness and continuity, were the psychical/spiritual aspects of it all. My first introduction to this appreciation was as a teenager when I heard a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto give a lecture about how he first became interested in psychosomatic medicine. He cited various instances in which patients' physical ailments were frequently caused by and complicated by psychic realities.

And then it was seeing the physical effect of “suggestion” in hypnosis that first got me into the study and practice of hypnotism, and even into the study of the dreams and the subconscious.

So, I thought about and explored these psychical/spirituals a lot during my time in the hospital this last week.

The first thought was about all the people who came before me, for millions of years before my immediate parents, whose evolutionary experience of suffering led to my having a thick skull and sturdy bones that did not break. All the other protective and recovery systems involved were given to me by those people, and I felt this direct communion with them as if time didn't exist at all.

The second set of psychical thoughts were about how much memory is involved in various of our physical parts that we do not ordinarily appreciate. I once met a physician who believed that he could discover most of the psychical issues of a patient's life just by probing the musculature of the patient's back. I could grasp that quickly because “in back” can easily connect with “in the subconscious,” the back of the mind. 

The specific psychical connections in my case this past week were related to sharp pains I had in the musculature in my chest area and around the sockets of my arms at the front. Just the slightest touch to these very painful muscles brought a flood of thoughts about what is meant by “embracing,” having something “on your chest” or someone “in your bosom.” Our fronts, no less than our backs, contain an unknown wealth of psychical stuff within them.

Finally, a third set of thoughts came to me a day or two after I got out of the hospital were very definitely around humor. There were certain nurses whose humor and playfulness made all the difference, and there were a few whose deadly seriousness felt, well, deadly! I've met a few people – Elizabeth and Nicolas come immediately to mind – who were able to have humor in the middle of disaster and I well remember their effect on me and others around them. I've seen it in Shakespeare. And once, I remember my father telling me how some Eskimos/Inuits came to the gates of his radar station in Thule, Greenland, in the middle of a raging, howling storm. They said when they got inside that the storm had blown their tents and everything they had away. But the funny thing was, my father said, that they laughed and joked about it as if it was all just the greatest fun, whereas we would have considered it a disaster. 
 

There is a song that Old Tex Ritter used to sing that came to me as I was thinking last night of the blood I had lost and my trauma. He said that a friend of his, Everett Cheetham, wrote it in response to a cowboy being injured in a rodeo in Wickenburg, Arizona, but when he started singing it, “People started laffin',” No, it's right. Here is Tex Ritter singing it, below: