A Time to Dance(14)
I don’t know who I am
anymore.
PAIN UNCONTROLLED
Nurses come and go,
black strands of hair escaping bleached white caps,
flowing saris peeping from beneath starched coats.
“Pain under control?” they ask.
As a dancer, how carefully I mastered
the mechanics of my body—
learning to bear just enough pain
so I could wear it proudly, like a badge of honor.
I want to tell the nurses no scale can measure
the pain of my dreams
dancing
beyond reach.
PINS, NEEDLES, PHANTOMS,
and
PAIN
The nurse pulls the faded privacy curtain around my bed
to keep me partially hidden
from my roommate’s curious eyes. Why bother?
The curtain isn’t soundproof.
My surgeon, Dr. Murali, lists my injuries in a tired voice,
his limp hair matching the glint of his silver-rimmed spectacles.
Below-knee crush injury, concussion, two cracked ribs,
cuts on thighs and shoulders.
“Nothing more.”
Sounds more than enough to me.
My once-golden-brown skin
mottled with more blue-black bruises than a rotting mango.
My once-strong body
bandaged in so many places
I feel like a corpse someone started to mummify
and abandoned halfway.
“Will I have scars?”
“None a sari won’t hide.”
My sigh of relief is cut short
by a stab of pain from my cracked ribs.
Dr. Murali says, “You may have phantom pain.
You might feel the part of the leg you lost
is still there.
Many patients say it feels
like when a part of your body falls asleep
and later the numb part wakes up with a prickling sensation.
Like pins and needles.
Except it hurts worse.”
Pain from the ghost of a leg that’s gone,
adding to the excruciating ache
in my existing limbs?
Just what I need.
He continues, “Most patients get over it soon.
A year or two at most.”
Maybe when you’ve got
hair as gray and glasses as thick as he does
two years feels like a short time.
When my roommate and I are alone, she says,
“Sometimes they cure ghost pain
by cutting more off.”
Butcher what’s left of my leg?
No, thanks.
ALL I
STILL HAVE
Paati says, “You have your whole life
ahead of you.
You have