Posted by: Bob Stott
My life is a towering mass of boxes, slightly skewed to the right, some appear almost toppling like the Tower of Pisa, but it holds its own. In the family room of the house I am gradually vacating day by day, I add a new box filled to the brim with knick-knacks, term papers from college I still consider pawning off on eBay, and the miscellaneous trinkets and scraps of paper I refuse to part with because "they will be needed someday." I have no misconceptions about my lot. I am my father's son – pack-rat extraordinaire.
True to my nature, the boxes of trinkets, papers, and notes to self number already in the tens, and cleaning out my room of these menial odds and ends is by far the hardest task of moving, which is probably why, on average, it takes me months to do so. However, the eccentricities of a pack-rat often open opportunities to delve into the past, even for a few moments, to look back at another version of yourself when this seemingly useless trinket meant something very important.
Yesterday, packed in between copies of some poetry that got published in a literary journal in San Francisco, an old movie ticket to Star Wars, and a single leather glove a homeless guy in Philly gave me in exchange for the two pairs of cotton ones I offered him, I found an X-ray film of my left arm. Just out of college, I received a nasty hairline fracture to my left forearm. Very clean and no visible distortions as far as the doctors could see, I simply received a Velcro strap-on arm stabilizer and was told to follow-up in two months. As usually is my luck, my insurance ran out about a month after the initial break, so instead of checking back, I simply allowed myself to forget about it and drink extra milk everyday (for the calcium, of course, because that obviously expedites bone growth tenfold).
Unwilling to return to my parent's house yet not quite invested in graduate school yet, I was sleeping on a rotary of couches and futons – a segment of my life I simply refer to as my 'Crashing' phase – and paying bills and school loans by working at a veterinary hospital. About four months after the fracture, and three months after my student insurance dried up, I started to have these painful flashes in my left forearm, which I attributed to lifting the heavier dogs or sleeping on it in my sleep.
The pain came and went, but unwilling – and financially unable because, despite what they say, working in the kennel of a veterinary hospital is not a lucrative career – to go back to a doctor, I simply asked one of the veterinary technicians if they could X-ray my arm to make sure I wasn't growing another arm bone out of the break. Aside from some calcification, I was all clear. Since then, the X-ray have gone with me from residence to residence, usually taped on the upper part of a window so I can look at the fracture anytime I want and reminisce about my time living "off the grid." Over-dramatic yes, but it remains something to tell the kids later in life, how their dad was such a bohemian scrapper, if only for a year.
In a time of the push towards EMR and EHR software technology, I wonder where people who made my transitional lifestyle a permanent one would end up. Will the digital resistance hold out just for them? Sometimes, I think that's more the reason that I hang onto the X-ray – so when my medical record is finally digitalized and computer accessible, I can pull out this X-ray film, a relic from another time, that completes the timeline of my medical encounters.
