Whose Foot Is It?
When friends have had medical issues or surgeries, I've been struck by how often they distance themselves from what's happening or happened by the words they use.
Like the friend facing heart surgery who never once said "my heart" but always said "the heart." As if it didn't really belong to her, was somewhere not very close, perhaps the only heart around, or she actually lived in an alternate universe where hearts had an independent identity.
Likewise, more than one friend dealing with knee surgery of various kinds has talked with me about "the knee" as opposed to saying "my knee."
It makes sense, I guess. Pain, illness, operations are frightening, so making them safer and more palatable is a reasonable defense mechanism. I understood the urge, but resisted it, I thought, until a recent consult with an orthopedic surgeon about a toe I'd damaged one night while stumbling around a hotel room that had no nightlights.
I asked, "What do you recommend for the foot?" It didn't seem to register with him as unusual while he explained a possible outpatient surgery, but it irked me. I was clearly infected, because as Laurie Anderson sings, "Language, it's a virus."
Be that as it may, this is not the micro, it's my micro.
The son of immigrants, Lev Raphael grew up in New York but came into his own as an author when he moved to Michigan. He and his spouse share their home with two loving, intelligent Westies. https://writewithoutborders.com | https://levraphael.substack.com/