Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy

The Pathology of Loss & Longing

63 the pathology of loss & longing I. Appendix The appendix is a strange remnant. An afterthought, a survivor, a vestige. Or is it? New medical thinking suggests that perhaps the appendix has useful function after all: researchers at Duke University propose that the appendix serves as a haven for useful bacteria, when illness flushes those bacteria out of the rest of the intestinal tract. Other researchers argue that the appendix plays a role in hormone manufacture for fetuses, and in the immune system for adults. Either way, decades of appendectomies have shown that living without an appendix is entirely possible. The vermiform appendix is indeed worm-shaped; lives in the lower right abdomen; attaches to the large intestine; and is given to inflammation and infection. If that infection progresses, the appendix can rupture, leading to peritoneal inflammation, and then to shock, which, if untreated, can be fatal. * * * 64 [A word on shock. It is common to say I went into shock or he was in shock about a wide array of social and physical situations. Medically speaking, shock occurs in the body when there is inadequate circulation of oxygenated blood to the tissues of the body. This may occur with low blood volume, due to dehydration or excessive bleeding. It may occur with cardiac issues, when the heart is not up to its task of pumping oxygenated blood around the body. Or it may occur because of problems with the body’s blood vessels—massive dilation resulting from severe infection, head injury, or life-threatening allergic reaction. But shock is always a problem of the body’s pump, pipes, or fluid; it is not an emotional state, nor is it inevitable with every trauma.] Fluid weeping into the body cavity: what happens to the system when something is lost? * * * One in fifteen people in the U.S. will suffer appendicitis at some point in their lives, most commonly between the ages of ten and thirty. Usually, their appendix will be immediately surgically removed in a procedure known as an emergency appendectomy. And therein lies the question. Just what happens to us when we don’t have an appendix? Seemingly, nothing. We live without it. Does our body perceive its absence, do we experience any limit in ability, in immune capacity, in function? To the latter three, as far as anyone knows, the answer is no. We continue to function. Continue about our lives. Does our body perceive its absence? 65 * * * What does absence mean to the body—how does it keep count? Every day cells die and we pare them away. Osteoclast cells scrub our bones clean and then rebuild. We know that if a limb is removed , the body or the brain may experience phantom sensations, invisible pain. Concerning the phenomenon of “forgetting,” in some cases of phantom limb following amputation, subjects appear to be unaware that a limb is missing and, for example, try to walk on a missing leg. The infant raises a shortened arm, and its mouth opens. What do we do with the nagging pain of absence? Where do we put it, how do we sit with it when it threatens to trample us underfoot . A sobbing restlessness under the skin. * * * And (if this world is nothing more than a means of being in another) how to remain present here after their loss. Dwell in them? Or in the space they left behind. Name pieces of our body for them: the notch in our clavicle, the hollow where they take away our appendix. Spaces where something is missing. I will call my ruptured vertebrae George. (Even when it seems there are no words that could possibly express the suffering associated with loss) these words still beckon: blood, synthesis, grotesquery, despair, supine, beloved. Anatomy or melancholy. * * * What then do we do with language (believing that holes can be filled with language is dangerous) if not use it to fill what is empty (only space itself occupies empty spaces). To define what is empty. 66 Perhaps this is the danger: we seek to believe in language because it gives us the illusion of control. * * * Or perhaps it is the opposite. Perhaps to take refuge in language, to seek the rupture in language, is to keep this grief fresh. To remind ourselves that everything fractures—words, skin, the surface of the world. To keep ourselves on edge and away from apathy. Slicingly alive. 67 II. Joints Move your finger slowly along the clavicle. There is no pulse here...