muttered "nothing is revealed"

yesterday was the annual Dexter-Ann Arbor Run for whose half-marathon i was "training" (although, tbf, i was, really, just running my chilly heart into further nonexistence, as usual) last year when The Injury occurred. it's helpful to have these recurring days/events—because otherwise everything would be a fog in a time when records were assiduously not kept (for various reasons, some of which have been amended—for fun, security, and profit).

to celebrate, went in to see the sports medicine MD, after waiting a month for the appointment. while i thought i would be able to glean some actual practical advice about the idiotic mess—or, should i say, to prevent idiotic mess (part 2) from happening—but, instead, it was more of the same. apparently, i am an Fe/Ca-leaching machine, for reasons which pretty much cover all the possibilities. we'll just leave it at that.

upon going over my records and the x-ray, the sports med doctor believes that these fractures are still in the process of a healing that takes at least a year. moreover (and in the absence of any other tangible means whereby to advise this kind of thing), she wants me to "use my pain" as a guideline. at both of these, i double over. the whole problem stems, it seems clear, from my inability to feel pain—either at all, or, at least, in the appropriate parts of my body. i dream about losing my limbs; the nightmare spins itself into silent terror (because, of course, the tongue is the original casualty) as, first, i can't/don't notice what i've lost and, then and moreover, fail to care—and just keep going, without even a momentary pause or glance back.

other than "using my pain" and the other vitaminy/nutritional things i'm doing, there doesn't seem to be any remedy. it's becoming clearer that it was not how i was running—but that i was running, all the time. how do i explain that it was either my bones or my head, that terrible spring—and the summer that followed, and the fall that indicated that there would be no end—and i offered up the former to save the latter (with dubious success)?

seeing my x-ray lit up on the computer screen, i realised that although i had physically gone and spent the $2 for my very own copy last month (running over to the hospital between classes, sweeping into my Hiroshima/Nagasaki class several minutes late, holding the huge manila envelope with its red-lettered "X-Ray Film" printed across its length and beyond concealing; smiling wryly: there are no easy answers, really. and, later, when the envelope caught in my spokes, the accident was avoided solely because it would have been unexplainable), i had never gone over the film with a doctor. i'd cowered in a corner by Cobb Hall and heard a tinny rendition of the results over the phone; i'd pressed the x-ray up to the sunlit window in my bedroom.

this is the difference between data and knowledge: in that sunlight, i scoured the representation for what i thought, based on the diagnosis, would show up as thin filaments of knit-up fractures. as a result—lo and behold!—i thought i saw them, where the pelvic bones curve, where the connecting muscles rag their corners. what i didn't—couldn't—see (but for the conceptual trees) until today, as the mouse traced over them: two completely visible, even in their filmy translucence (of sheer newness? of decalcification?), circles growing out of and around what is usually (who knew? i don't see a lot of bone images, which is not to say that i am excused from missing this glaring fact) a straight, solid white bone. and in the middle of these rounded deposits (this the healing bone mass, fastened on either side, at a good and theoretically protective distance, to that which is (also theoretically) undamaged)), unmistakable fractures clear through the bone. the third site (higher up on the right side) was, admittedly, harder to make out. but the main ones are so crystally obvious as to render my blindness ridiculous.

if today marks a full-circle of sorts, there's this undeniable sense that it didn't have to take a year for such a runaround—didn't have to be this difficult. it's amazing to have mis-known the whole problem on so many levels. frightening, actually, to have the things we think we're looking for so cloud what actually exists.

focusing on the conceptual intricacies, the systematic failures of thought and interpretation, of course, is wonderfully effective in diverting what would otherwise emerge, unforgivably messy, in ways that don't show up, milky on black bendable plastic.