Please Don’t Show Me Your Wound by David Shawn Klein

Dr. Matthew Mori was explaining why my voice suddenly sounded like a seventy-year-old blues singer, worn to a rasp by whiskey and heartbreak, but all I kept thinking was how amazing it was that I had a vagina in my throat. Apparently, we all do. If you want to check it out, ask a doctor to snake a four-foot wire with a camera at one end into your nostril and down your esophagus.

“This is really going to revolutionize gender studies,” I told him.

He didn’t laugh.

I was staring at a live-action video of my vocal cords: basically, two bands of flesh that form a bow, or depending on your thoughts about the vagina, a sort of heart.

“It’s like this,” Dr. Mori explained. “Once you hit middle age, pretty much everything on you dries out.”

I felt sure he’d been required to retake “Bedside Manner” in med school.

“Is there anything we can do about it?” I asked, with a catch in my voice that wasn’t my desiccated vocal cords.

He looked at me with pity and the blind faith of the young that getting old would never happen to him. “If you learn to speak more efficiently, you can save a lot of function. I’ll write you a prescription for voice therapy. And try to drink more water.”

“Water will keep me from getting old and turning to dust?” I asked.

He seemed to realize he’d gotten in over his head. But then, no one is better than I at culling the chaff of optimism from the wheat of futility and despair.

When you do accident law for a living, you’re confronted every day with how comfortable the rest of humanity seems to be with our misbegotten bodies and their infinite variety of pain and reek. But my clients are more than merely comfortable: they have an infatuation with their injuries that borders on flat-out romance. And they just have to share how badly off they are. No one ever just stubs their toe. Partly, it’s the innocent belief that a wound is unimpeachable proof of someone else’s bad faith. “I hurt,” they think, “therefore, someone’s got to have screwed up.” We’ve all been there. I mean, who wants to admit we live in a totally random universe, tethered to a faithless body?

When a client walks into my office, I always begin with the same greeting. “How can I help you today?” I ask, sincere in my desire to be of service.

“You can’t believe how bad my pain is,” Mrs. M. responds. “It’s sort of piercing but also dull. And sharp, like a knife. But not a really big knife. More like a bread knife or an apple parer. To be honest, I’m not sure what kind of cutlery it is.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I say, praying we can move on to the particulars of her case.

That, of course, can never happen.

“It begins in my left hip,” she continues. “But not exactly in my hip, more like just above my butt cheek. Like someone’s jamming a live electrical wire up my butt all the way to my shoulder blade. I can’t even brush my teeth. I can’t brush my own teeth,” she repeats to make sure I’ve absorbed the full significance of her Station of the Cross.

“But Ms. M., you’ve only fractured a toe.”

“And let me tell you what it’s like when I try to use the toilet.”

John W., pushing up from his chair, begins to raise his sweatshirt. “My injury has ruined my life,” he assures me. “It really has. I’m not just farting up your ass.”

I pause, trying hard to fight the visual of John W. farting up my ass. Meanwhile, he’s down to a wife-beater stretched over a belly that can only have been cultivated with the commitment that Zen masters bring to bonsai trees.

“Mr. W., I’m your lawyer; I’m already on your side,” I plead, my voice rising with panic and my hands folded in prayer. But when someone is hellbent on displaying their hernia scar, you can light yourself on fire and they wouldn’t notice.

The comfort most people have with sharing their medical problems is, I think, a sign of a greater acceptance than I can muster that at some point in our lives, things on us will break, gouge, and spew.

My good friend Rob called me one day, consumed with excitement over getting to watch his knee arthroscopy in real-time. Really? When I’m about to have blood drawn for a routine check-up, I’ll warn the lab technician that she might want to start an IV of Xanax and call in a team of paramedics.

My wife Eva watches with rapt fascination those scenes in spy thrillers when the hero surgically removes a bullet using nothing but tweezers, a Q-Tip, and his teeth. But if Eva cuts a finger on a can of tuna, I have to throw myself into bed and pull the cover over my head.

So, whatever it was that induced me to glance at my vocal cords, I let my thoughts stray to the vagina in my throat while Dr. Bedside Manner advised me to start scouting nursing homes and ponder the benefits of burial over cremation. I feel my resistance to anything medical is the coming face-to-sagging-face with being ordinary, after all, and not the hero of a Star Wars epic, who, through infinite sequels, proves to be above such mundane facts of life as arthritic knees, a memory like a sieve, and an impulse to pee seventeen times a night.

Even the rich and famous aren’t immune to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” as Shakespeare put it, probably after a visit to his doctor. Nor are the supernaturally gifted. Heroes, too, wither and die. Norma, my grandmother, survived a cattle car, the Spanish Flu, being orphaned, the deaths of both her sons, four marriages, and multiple heart surgeries. Yet even Norma, pumping out half-pound bicep curls in the gym at her nursing home, couldn’t outlast her reconstructed heart.

If no one can cajole aging into a free pass, why should I expect a break? Isn’t it better to stare death in the face and laugh? Or welcome it philosophically, like Socrates? And yet, the next time a doctor snakes a camera up one of my orifices and invites me to have a look, I’ll remind him of the teaching of Ecclesiastes, “He that increases knowledge, increases sorrow,” as I squeeze my eyes shut, tight as I can.