Autumn Onion

Back in February I chopped up some spring onion I bought for a dollar so I could make some homemade bolani in my terrible wok. Instead of throwing out the root base of the onion I tried to do something I saw on the internet, which was to put it in a glass of water on the windowsill so that it would grow some more spring onion for eating later.

I didn’t need to do this. I had two full size spring onions left in the crisper. Inflation wasn’t as bad back then. I just wanted to see if it was true, if you really could cut a plant off at the base and then witness it grow back into something. I don’t know how that works, but it does.

Plants do grow back. It doesn't look super healthy, but it has been sitting there ever since growing new fronds that creep longer each day. I broke my arm and my wrist shortly after I put it there and every time I’ve visited the kitchen since it’s been a little reminder that if I was a plant that fell off my plant-bike I would have been able to amputate the arm and it would probably half grown back by now.

For better or worse, when my wrist was still sore two weeks after I landed on it I advocated for an MRI and a referral not just to any upper limb orthopaedic surgeon, but one of the most advanced hand surgeons in the country. This has not been a cheap exercise, but this is the utility of my right hand on the line here. If I was to risk an ironic injury by listing the parts of my body in order that I want to preserve the functionality of the most it would go: brain, eyes, ears, right hand… That should be enough to keep me going to old age, consuming life, documenting it.

The most advanced hand surgeons in the country have their own fellows when you see them for appointments which is cool, because while you wait for the the appointment to start you get another hand and wrist expert to talk to as they take your history and load your 4D CT Scans up on the remarkably tiny LCD screen for such an expensive office location.

While we waited the fellow ran through the images taken by the 4D CT which showed the movement of the bones in my wrist as I moved my hand from side to side, up and down, and clenched my fist one week earlier. This was “very cool,” according to the fellow. (I agreed). This technology is apparently reasonably new and not commonly available. It also revealed how many tiny bones there are in a wrist, all presumably with ligaments and tendons and cartilage joining them to all the other little and larger bones.

The fellow ran through many animated gif-like loops of my wrist bones moving, deep in concentration. He told me he had read three different papers about the principles of mobility in the wrist, each with different conclusions. “There are theories, but no one actually knows how these joints work together,” he said.

That did not bring me much comfort.