Arm Charmer

Three summers ago I took up tennis again. Not in a tennis-teamy way but more like a who-wants-to-hit kind of way? So that was fun and then summer ended and I found myself with a low-grade throbbing in my right arm. Not enough to see a doctor over but enough that I was popping ibuprofen like tic tacs. I figured the pain was from taking up tennis. Then it went away. Fabulous. Then later in the fall it came back even though I had stopped playing tennis long ago. Must be from, er, writing? Driving a manual stick shift car? More ibuprofen and this time a doctor. I had x-rays taken by a friendly technician who had twenty-eight brothers and sisters. I know this because he had a map of the Ivory Coast on the wall of the x-ray room with a dot on the town where he was from. Then a lovely deaf man looked at the x-rays and explained to me that he saw nothing unusual and that everything looked fine. Fine.

The pain went away. Then it came back. Shoveling, maybe? Divorce? Summer returned and I started playing tennis again tentatively, and it went away. When it came back again next winter the pain had grown more acute and seemed to hop scotch up and down my arm, sometimes down by the wrist and sometimes within the mid upper-arm, but always on the right side. The pain was increasingly distracting. It was waking me out of a sound sleep. So I went to see my acupuncturist, Howard.

Howard told me that my right arm is connected to my lower intestine-- the one that processes stuff-- and that perhaps I wasn’t processing like I should. “My food?” I asked. “Your life,” he responded. Oh. Having left denial in the dust right around the end of my marriage, I felt pretty good about my recent newfound ability to process. I’d been forced to process some crazy stuff in the last two years, brutally hard and sometimes wicked fast, but I felt I’d been on it. Howard also reminded me that arms are for holding and that I might be holding onto to stuff that I need to let go of. Ah. I said, “Okay, that’s another story.”

“Yeah,” I told Howard, “there’s probably a thing or two more that I could let go of.” “Well then work on that,” he said, and then proceeded to stick little needles in my right arm and lower left shin. “And the next time your arm starts to hurt, stop what you’re doing and listen to it,” Howard said. “It’s trying to tell you something.” I nodded, “Got it. Listen to my arm. Will do.”

My arm stopped hurting right after my divorce was finalized. Shocker. But now it’s hurting again. So I’ve been listening. In the car, at the ATM, I’ve been doing my best to listen. I’ll be in the middle of helping my son with his homework and the pain will grow distractingly intense. I’ll have to say to my son, “Hold on, sweetie, my arm is trying to tell me something.” Then I’ll take a deep breath and look down. “Yes, arm, what is it? What are you trying to tell me? You have my full attention.” My son continues with his homework, which is a testament to his acceptance of his mother’s inherent kookiness I suppose, while I stare at my arm.

But I’m not getting any answers. I feel like a clueless farmdivorcee trying to intuit what Lassie is trying to tell me as she barks manically at the back door. “What’s that, Lassie? The barn? Is it on fire?! Or did you say boy. Is there a boy trapped in the well?! Barn or boy, Lassie? You’ll have to be more specific because they’re three miles in the opposite direction from each other. Is the boy in the barn?! Is the well on fire?! Oh, crimminy.”

So I’m trying. I feel like a pregnant lady talking to her belly, except that there’s no baby growing in my arm. Unless. Maybe that’s what Lassie has been trying to tell me all along. “Bark! Bark! You were abducted by aliens and your arm is pregnant with a hybrid alien baby which—bark—will be born from your elbow in about—bark, bark—6 to 8 weeks!!” Ah, thanks, Lassie, but I don’t think that’s it. So I cycle through all the things I thought I’d let go of but that perhaps secretly have held on to. Like a grocery list of shattered dreams. Or just an average life lived, risks and all. Maybe it’s that I have to let go of ever hoping to understand what my arm is trying to tell me and learn to live with the pain, accept it and move on. Did you ever think of that, Lassie? Didja? Still, it’s good to listen.