surgery Archives - imaginary magnitude

December 28, 2024December 28, 2024

The End of 2024

It’s been an eventful year, insofar as there seemed to be a lot going on and yet seems to have passed by quite quickly.

I’m happy to have completed revisions to my next novel, The Stars Align for Disco Santa, and passed it on to my agent (who I hope reads it soon, but he’s a busy man). Fingers crossed that in 2025 it does the rounds of publishers and finds a suitable home. Otherwise, as writing goes, it’s been liberating. As well as the novel, I’ve been seriously working on an essay about my uncle’s guitar and the sordid personal story surrounding that. As I might’ve mentioned previously, it’s the sort of personal essay that requires much more contemplation (not to mention exploring my own blind spots) than even a novel. There’s nowhere to hide with something like this, not when you’re writing about yourself. I’ve had essays published before — one of them made 2017 Best Canadian Essays — but it wasn’t nearly as vulnerable as this piece; there’s so much woodshedding (to use a guitar term) involved, and yet I’m happy with how it’s coming, even if it hurts to reach into the places it needs to go.

I also began in earnest on a fourth novel, which is coming along well. It takes place just a little bit in the future and seems to be drawing out a lot of my more philosophical thoughts about society and the erosion of democracy. The main character is a psychotherapist who finds herself immersed in an unspooling drama while attending a professional conference. It has a title, though I’m too superstitious to reveal that before it’s been vetted by my agent.

I had hand surgery in October, which was an emotional experience for me (speaking of unspooling), combined with the pressures of my work. The good news is that I’ve given myself a couple of weeks away from the office to let things coalesce. The trick, as I’ve touched on over at my professional blog, is not to overwork myself. In short, there’s no winner if I’m dead at the finish line.

For the new year, I see myself being a little more public-facing as a writer. I’ve been toying with the idea of facilitating a seminar for authors, focused on how to read for an audience. This is a long-brewing idea that I’ve kicking around for a few years now, inspired (if that’s the right word) by the fact that so few authors seem to know what to do when they’re reading their work for an audience, which ends up doing themselves and their work a disservice. If I can swing it I’d like to aim for the spring. It’s a way for me to give back to the community (I plan to make it pay-what-you-can just to cover costs, with whatever proceeds remaining going to a local charity).

Of course, politically and socially, there appears a storm approaching, and I don’t know what to do about that except to direct my powers as an artist toward addressing it in whatever way I can that might (if I can make a wish) allow people to understand how we got here, or at least put the spotlight on those who have done a better job of describing this better than I can.

I wish you, dear reader, the best for the new year. You have more power than you think you have, and I hope you find a way to channel it in such a way as to cut through the divisiveness of our time. I think community is important, and ultimately this concept is more powerful the more local and intimate its location.

November 30, 2024November 30, 2024

Hands On

Hand update: I’ve got a pretty gnarly scar, but there’s progress. Two weeks ago they removed the stitches from my palm, and I would not wish that pain and discomfort on anyone (note: they can’t anaesthetize your hand for this).

Psychologically I’ve been up and down. I’ve had to work through a feeling of being violated, of having to re-familiarize myself with what my hand can do (via physio) while fighting the fear that I’m going to pull or tear something in the process of rehabbing it back to where it should be.

While this has all been going on the political world south of the border has erupted into a swirl of chaos and condemnation. It’s a type of deja vu, considering we went through four years of this already. In the end, one of the people running for the presidency represented change and the other chose stability; the problem of course is that stability is hard to defend (let alone promote) when the candidate in question is trying to be a celebrity-endorsed centrist while there are so many voices in the mainstream media complaining about a left-wing cabal sacrificing the sanctity of American values. Frankly, it’s only a matter of time before the same debate amps up on this side of the border (it’s basically already here), what with a thoroughly mediocre Prime Minister playing out his third term similar to a sitting duck Biden, with little regard for the public malaise around his party. Cooler heads prevail when there are reasons to stay the course and our current PM struggles to even sell his wins let alone address his weaknesses.

When I wrote my third novel, The Stars Align for Disco Santa, it was during the worst year of Trump (2020), and was certainly influenced by many of the things that have now come to fruition: authoritarian politicians abetted by corporatist tech companies running roughshod over and unveiling the frailty of democracy, exposing how much of the West is protected by evidently feeble gentlemen’s agreements and empty platitudes of decency. In other words, if Harris had won, my book–soon to be doing the rounds of publishers via my agent–would’ve still been relevant, but reflective of a dark time in society now past. Now? It seems more pertinent than ever, which is terribly sad (an understatement), but here I am.

You write the book you have to write. By the time it hits the market you have no say on how trends will have changed in the interim, how the landscape and zeitgeist will have shifted. When my first book was picked up by Wolsak & Wynn, I had to wait nearly three years before it was published; in that time the media landscape seemed inundated with time travel narratives, so that when The Society of Experience finally came out the conceit felt certainly less unique than during the years I’d spent writing and polishing the manuscript. In short, you really have no choice but to deal with it, and I can only hope that, by the time Disco Santa does the rounds, publishers will see it as rising to the occasion.

November 12, 2024

Back, Kinda

So, as you may have noticed from last week’s post, I’m able to write again, and much sooner than I’d anticipated. My assumption was that I was going to be in a splint after my hand surgery, perhaps for upwards of months (thus my interest in voice dictation software). However, literally the day after surgery, I got a call from the hospital attempting to book me for physio two days later. Because I was in a cast I didn’t know what “physio” was to be done (see photo below).

(My hand in a cast, two days after surgery, on my first day back to the office)

When I arrived, the physiotherapist looked at my cast and then took a pair of scissors and said “So, let’s take a look at your hand…” which caught me by surprise. This is where I should probably go into the surgery itself, three days before. I was asked to show up for 8am that morning. It was cool and dark out (hello, late October) and I was dressed appropriately for the occasion, which basically was track pants, a loose pullover, a hoodie and wearing glasses. Normally I wear contact lenses but I knew this probably wouldn’t be a good idea given that I was going to be put under for the procedure. They’re an older pair of glasses and I don’t wear them out very often…and sure enough, just steps from the hospital, as I removed the hood from my hoodie, my glasses slipped down my nose and fell onto the sidewalk, breaking into two hinged monocles. And it might as well have been my spirit that broke. My prescription is strong, which suddenly rendered the world a smeared blur of strange shapes moving around me as I picked the pieces of my glasses up and entered the hospital in a state of despair. I held one half of them against my face, feeling terribly awkward…and terribly vulnerable being in this strange environment, on the verge of having major surgery.

Once the staff directed me to a pre-op area where I was required to change into a gown, to my frustration I realized–despite the nurses kindly providing me with tape–that the frame had broken at an awkward place on the bridge, which made re-attaching them nearly impossible without their collapsing soon after. I’m not too proud to say that I nearly had a fucking breakdown as I futilely tried to restore some semblance of my vision. And all of the pent-up anxiety I’d been holding around the surgery for months, around the potential outcome, around what my life was going to look like while in recovery came to the surface. I should say that the pre-op nurse who noticed my freak-out was very helpful and empathetic (she shared that her prescription was much worse than mine; she’d had laser surgery).

I can do pain. I’ve done pain. But the intimidation of the procedure–the not-knowing–was overwhelming as they wheeled me into surgery. When I woke up and saw the cast, and realized my arm was completely limp as a result of the anaesthetic, it was a lot to work with.

So, just days later, when the physiotherapist began cutting it off, revealing my stitched up palm and thumb, the blood that soaked the bandage she was removing, I was overcome with emotion. “Are you going to be sick?” she asked in a practised way as I stared at the absolutely gory Frankenstein result. I shook my head, instead looking at the box of facial tissue on the counter, holding back tears of a strange mix of shock and grief. Showing great care she proceeded to go through the exercises I was supposed to do, which involved stretching my fingers inward (which would also put stress on the ligaments and muscles, my palm held together with sutures), and told me that I had to do these every two hours. She encouraged me to use the hand regularly (or as regularly as I could manage), including things such as shampooing my hair, brushing my teeth, etc.

So, typing that last post was basically part of my physio. My hand is getting better and the stitches will be coming out in the next week, however I still struggle to look at my palm, the loose skin, and yes, I struggle to stretch and bend my hand for fear that I’m going to rupture something. It’s a body horror thing, basically.

(Me, holding up my Frankenstein hand in a mirror)

That said, I’ve got a new pair of glasses now.

October 5, 2024October 5, 2024

Yay Surgery

I have a genetic condition, called Dupuytren’s Contracture, or perhaps more cool, Viking Disease. Below, you see two photos. The first is my left hand, unaffected. The second is my right hand, very much affected.

A hallmark of the disease is a thickening of the tissue in the palm of one’s hand (though it also can affect the pads of your feet, which I also have, yet it’s not serious). Normally, as it gets more pronounced (it’s chronic), the thickening of the tissue ends up pulling the fourth and fifth fingers inward, making it eventually difficult to operate equipment (or shake hands!). What makes mine a little more odd is that it’s affecting my thumb, pulling it inward. In the above photo of my right hand, that’s literally as far as I can expand my hand, whereas my left can go much further (not exactly pictured).

And so, at the end of this month I have surgery booked. I trust the surgeon, who specializes in this type of procedure, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that I’m going to be without effective use of my hand for upwards of three months. I have no clue when I’ll be able to comfortably type using my right hand, which means that — you guessed it — when it comes to writing it’s going to be difficult. I might try voice-to-type software (which comes with most laptops and phones), but I’ll be honest: I’m not looking forward to any of it. I don’t like surgery, period, and I sure as hell don’t like invasive cut-open-your-hand-with-a-small-risk-of-nerve-damage surgery. However, my options are…bleak. The worse this gets, the higher the likelihood the skin around my thumb will contract given there’s less room for it to move, which means permanent contraction.

This all said, I’ve been lucky. The last time I had invasive surgery was the removal of all four of my wisdom teeth when I was at the tender age of eighteen. I’ve never broken any bones (but boy have I been close) and I haven’t had to have anything stitched in this time.

Anyhoo, I hope to keep posting here, but perhaps without the regularity…or perhaps more regularity if I find it keeps me sane. Wish me luck!