Femur

This is a picture of a broken femur, kind of like the one my friend suffered on Sunday when she was Hit By A Truck. No, I am not kidding. I just found out about it from my friend C, who was my first new friend when I moved here twelve years ago and who also happens to be this woman's daughter. We saw each other at the cafe at lunch, and she had her very sensitive and impressionable three-year-old with her so didn't want to go into a lot of details, but I am supposed to call her tonight to find out exactly what the hell happened. All I know now is that she's in the hospital with a broken femur and a shattered pelvis, and that she's going to be there for at least a few more weeks.

I managed to get through my first 31 years of life without ever having a tooth filled* or a bone broken, and until then I somehow assumed that because teeth and bones are hard, like fingernails, damage to teeth and bones couldn't be much more painful than having your nails cut. Then I broke two bones in rapid succession – my heel on the Fourth of July, by landing on it on the gravel bed of a shallow pool of water at the bottom of a waterfall I had been climbing, and my right wrist a couple of months later, by stepping off the side of a road to avoid being hit by a car, only to fall backwards into a deep ditch that had been obscured by leaves. I learned that bones have a lot of nerves in them, and that they take a long, long time to heal, and that even after that they still ache sometimes in the places where they were broken.

Being with my bones as they healed was a huge revelation for me. Healing in general always fascinates me – watching the skin knit itself back together around a cut, tracing the neat seam of an old scar, rubbing the new fuzz on the head of a friend who lost her thick waist-length hair in chemotherapy last summer. Even when the body doesn't heal (because sometimes it doesn't), I'm still in awe of everything it can do, and does do, every day we're alive. Breathing – a miracle! The heart – another! The liver, the eyes, even boring parts like the shoulderblade and the colon – there isn't a single part of my body I don't love. And really, I can't say I even find any of them boring – what's boring about shoulderblades? They're great!

Last night I was watching this weight loss show on tv in which they were talking to all these people who've lost a large amount of weight. This woman was shown a lifesize cardboard cutout of herself at the beginning of the contest – almost a hundred pounds heavier than she is now. The horror on her face as she looked at her former self was painful to see. Then the host asked, "What do you want to say to the old you?"

My response to that question was instantaneous, surreal and super emotional. Somehow in my mind the fat picture of the woman on tv merged with an image of myself during my own worst years, when everything was breaking in my life – my marriage, my bones, my confidence, my sanity – and all I wanted to do was embrace that woman and cry with gratitude. "This fat woman is the person who brought you Here," I wanted to tell her now-thinner self. "She gave you the life you have now and you don't ever need to be ashamed of her."

I'm sure everyone on that show has been challenged and grown by doing what they had to do to lose so much weight. But I really hope everyone who sees it will clue in that the fat person in the "before" picture is a hero, too. She made all the rest of it possible.

Getting back to my friend in the hospital, I'm trying to imagine what it must be like to be totally immobilized by such serious injuries. It might be a long time before she's fully mobile again, and even then, her life will never be the same as it was before this happened. And yet, C told me she's already started physical therapy. The body starts healing itself the moment it's injured – you don't have to tell it to do anything, it just does it. A whole, healthy body is a great blessing I want never to take for granted.

All this is good to remember at times when I feel disappointed with or disapproving of my own body, which still happens to me every once in awhile, especially when trying on clothes. I do think I'm becoming less vain and more compassionate as I get older, though. Yet another thing to be thankful for.

* I've been lucky in the tooth department; I've still never had any cavities, fillings, big chips or other major damage (knocks wood). And I still have my wisdom teeth – in a little plastic box in my underwear drawer!