Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  “Well,” came the analysis, “it looks like you’ve broken it. You’ll need to get it X-rayed, though.”

  I was carried to the side of the dojo, and Lana brought me her cell phone to call Gabriel. I lay on the mat, waiting for him to come get me, and muttered Rudyard Kipling’s “If” under my breath, trying to force some of the pain out of my brain by willing my mind to remember familiar lines. Whereas at first the pain had driven out all words, now I was trying to use words to drive out the pain. “If you can keep your head . . .”

  The guys took turns wandering over to check on me, and one of them would periodically poke my foot with the screwdriver to make sure it wasn’t going numb. I tried to hide my increasing annoyance. “I feel it!”

  “Good!” came the upbeat reply. “When you don’t feel it, let us know.”

  When Gabriel arrived, he and Lana carried me outside and helped me into the DeLorean while Greg maneuvered the dojo doors and one of the other guys brought along my shoes and gym bag.

  “Let us know how you’re doing!” Lana instructed as she closed the car door for me. The guys gave me encouraging thumbs-up gestures as we left.

  While Gabriel and I sat interminably in that modern version of purgatory, the hospital waiting room, I remember thinking that I never wanted to go through as much pain as I was experiencing ever again. I tried not to even consider what women in childbirth must suffer, but made a mental note to call my mother.

  Several hours later, I was wheeled off for X-rays, then wheeled back to the room where Gabriel waited for me. At around 11 p.m., Gabriel commented that, if he’d known it would take this long, he would have brought my corset. I glared at him. I was still mad that he’d taken the time to grab his iPod on his way out of the apartment, as I’d lain in the dojo with a broken foot. Still, I had to privately admit to myself that I’d had the same thought about the corset.

  When a doctor did finally come into the room, the first thing she wanted to do was give me drugs. “No,” I told her. “Thank you.”

  She stared at me incredulous, her pen poised over her prescription pad. “I’ll just write it out—”

  I shook my head, adamant.

  “No, thank you,” I repeated.

  I was in pain, but I didn’t want drugs. I just wanted to get fixed and go home. I could handle pain. I didn’t like it, but I could handle it.

  In the nineteenth century, a large occupation of many individuals who called themselves doctors had been the selling of various “remedies.” These were of widely differing efficacy and often stupor-inducing. Sensible people used them with caution, and the most adamant followers of temperance principles avoided them altogether. The specific drugs had changed somewhat since that time. The relationship of pusher to patient, it seemed, had not.

  The rest of that very long night would be comprised of a series of interminable waits, separated from each other only by flitting appearances of individuals offering me drugs, arguing when I told them I didn’t want any, then disappearing, never to be seen again. Mostly, we were left alone to share our own increasingly disagreeable company.

  Eventually, an intern came in. My foot was broken in two places, he explained, showing me the splinter of the third metatarsal on the X-rays. I had to squint to see the tiny chip off the cuboid bone—and might not have seen it at all were it not for my diligent studies in anatomy classes, which allowed me to follow what he was saying.

  He asked me what drugs I was taking. I told him I wasn’t on any. He stared at me in disbelief, then quickly said he would get me a prescription. I insisted that I didn’t need one and finally managed to convince him. I didn’t want to go through an extended, awful experience knowing the whole time that it would only get worse in a few hours when the pharmaceuticals wore off. I much preferred to simply get the worst of things done as soon as possible.

  The intern said he was going to set the broken bones. I held Gabriel’s hand, and squeezed hard.

  “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew / To serve your turn long after they are gone, / And so hold on when there is nothing in you / Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!”

  More lines from “If.”

  Painful experiences always slow down time, but at length it was over. I took a deep breath and swallowed, proud of myself for not giving in to the drug-pushers. My mind was clear, and there would be no dread of waiting for false comfort to wear off. I could know the worst pain was over.

  Next, they immobilized my foot in a huge cast of splinted plaster. It went all the way up my calf and ended partway up my knee, which even then struck me as a bit excessive for two little broken bones buried deep within my foot. The cast came up so high, I couldn’t bend my knee properly. I was given crutches and told to wait some more.

  Eventually, a doctor came along. “You’re the fracture?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I nodded.

  He shook my hand and Gabriel’s hand, apologized for the wait, and asked what drugs I was taking home with me.

  “None.” It was well past one in the morning, my foot hurt, I was literally tired in body, and figuratively tired of all these attempts to push drugs on me. “I don’t want any.”

  Again my insistence was met with disbelief, and, like the others, he tried to convince me. I held true and won out. Finally, at 1:30 a.m., six hours after Gabriel had brought me to the emergency room, we were given leave to go. Before quitting the hospital on that very long night of waiting, I was told that my break was an unusual one that would have to be seen by a specialist, and they made an appointment for me for Thursday (four days in the future) at the hospital’s joint clinic.

  Had it not been for Gabriel’s encouragement, that night would have been my first uncorseted sleep in months. As I staggered into our cramped little apartment, moving very unsteadily on my crutches, my only thought was for bed. The corset had been the last thing on my mind.

  “I’ll help you on with your corset,” Gabriel told me, his voice tired, just as I was collapsing onto our futon.

  I looked up at him, sideways. I made a disgruntled sort of moaning sound, but then managed to get out one word: “bed.”

  He yawned. “It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Rrrarhaoh,” I grumbled incoherently. I was too tired to argue, either with him about wearing the corset or with myself about not wearing it. I might have just slid into an unconscious stalemate if my cat Pretty Kitty had not chosen that moment to pounce at my cast. That roused me.

  With my foot broken, the sight of Gabriel lacing me in was an absurd spectacle, even to myself in the mirror. (It would be repeated many times over the ensuing weeks, so I was given ample opportunity to observe how ridiculous the procedure was.) I couldn’t put weight on the broken foot (the larger of the two breaks was directly in the arch of my foot), but I couldn’t post all my weight on my unbroken foot, either. Standing on one foot alone puts a slight twist in the spine, which the corset cinches in place, enforcing a temporary scoliosis that lasts until the corset is removed and the spine is flexed again. The condition is completely reversible, but quite uncomfortable, and I was in enough pain already. Corsets are supposed to be laced on with the wearer’s spine erect: my newest challenge was to work out a way I could keep my back straight without the ability to place both feet flat on the floor.

  Sitting was no good for lacing in; even if we’d had a suitable chair for it (which we didn’t—we would have needed a stool, and all our chairs had backs), human anatomy shifts when we sit, and it would have been difficult to get everything just right. Lying down was out of the question, simply because lying on my side would have presented the same aforementioned crooked-spine problem, and lying on my back or stomach would have meant lying on the laces or busk.

  Ultimately, the solution Gabriel and I worked out was for me to stand between two chairs, holding their backs. I would support myself as much as possible on the chair backs (trying not to tip them over) and attempt to keep my back straight while Gabriel tied the corset.
I’ll admit that I have been in more absurd positions in my life, but I can’t recall any that were so often repeated.

  With the huge cast encasing my right leg up to the knee and the corset preventing me from bending at the spine, I felt thoroughly trussed. I was supposed to keep the broken foot elevated (any time I didn’t, the blood pooling in the immobile extremity would cause excruciating pain), so most of my time during convalescence was spent lying flat on my back with the foot propped up on as many pillows as I could muster. Once I was in this position, the only way out of it was by semi-rolling, semi-flopping to the edge of my futon (we didn’t have a proper bed), then cautiously posting out my crutches and levering myself to a standing position. (I couldn’t shift leverage with my torso, since the corset kept me from bending at the waist.) Once I was standing, I could hop about a bit on my crutches until the blood pooling in my foot became too painful, then the only way down again was a sort of semi-controlled fall onto the futon, followed by side-to-side rocking and flopping to get my foot back on top of the pillows.

  Time and time again, I considered taking the corset off. At least then part of me would have been flexible, and I wouldn’t have the edges of the stays chafing and pinching the sides of my breasts against the crutches when I tried to move about. I didn’t really want to take it off, though. I’d worked hard over the preceding months to winnow down my waist—it seemed a shame to waste it. If I couldn’t continue practicing how to walk in kitten heels, at least I could try to keep from backsliding with the waist training.

  On Thursday, my appointment with the specialist was scheduled for a time when Gabriel would be in class, so I was completely on my own in finding a way to the clinic. It was half a mile from my apartment—not at all a challenge when I was healthy, but now a rather intimidating stretch, most of all because of the intense pain caused by the pooling of blood in my foot any time it was below my heart for more than two minutes. I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and set off.

  Maneuvering on crutches while wearing a corset was a different experience than what I remembered of crutch-walking with past injuries. Since my torso was rigid, I couldn’t swing for leverage as effectively; to make up for this, I put more stress on my arms and shoulders. Then there was the pinching problem. The underbust corset I was wearing came quite close to my armpits on the sides of my body. Because it was an off-the-rack corset (not custom-fitted to my body), and because I was still relatively new to the whole corseting experience, there was a bit of bulge at the top where the fat and muscle tissue lateral to my breasts squeezed out. The crutches the hospital had provided were several inches too short for me, and their pads came right up to this bulge. As I tottered about, that sensitive tissue on my sides was pinched over and over again, every time I put my weight down. I took my weight on the heels of my hands as much as I could, but my wrists were not accustomed to bearing so much weight, and they added their cries of complaint to all the other pains I was experiencing.

  In the 1897 Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalogue, crutches ranged from 75 cents a pair to $8 a pair, depending on what type of wood they were made from.

  I made it a few blocks, foot throbbing, wrists screaming, and tender flesh being chafed raw, then swung into a news-stand café for a brief moment of seated respite. I snatched a few minutes of no pressure under my arms and no weight on my wrists, then set off again. My left leg screamed at all the extra work it was doing; the hamstrings in my right thigh quivered and trembled, exhausted from holding up the monstrous weight of the oversize cast. I got a few more blocks, sat on the doorstep of a closed business, got up, and traveled a few blocks farther. In this way, slowly, ploddingly, I eventually made it to the clinic.

  The line was long and tedious, and my one bright spark of amusement in the whole experience came from examining the back brace of the man in line in front of me: I wondered what he’d think if he knew how closely it resembled a corset.

  At great length, I was shown to a treatment room and the archaic cast was removed by an assistant. It would have been nice to wiggle my toes at this point, after they’d been forcibly immobilized for so long. Unfortunately, my foot was still broken. It was, in fact, covered in contusions of a color that would put any reasonable person off their lunch. Mobility was not really an option yet. Instead, I just looked at it, and waited.

  Eventually I heard the doctor in the room next door to where I had been placed. “Well,” he was telling the unseen patient in that room, “this isn’t really my specialty. I’m a shoulder specialist. You’re going to have to go to—” he named another hospital in a different section of the city, “—and see their specialist there.” Worry was clearly audible in the patient’s voice as she tried to ask a question, but the faceless doctor cut her off.

  Less than two minutes after he’d introduced himself to the patient in the other room, the “specialist” had cast her aside and was now in my room. He introduced himself and glanced at a clipboard. “This isn’t really my specialty . . .” The set speech was repeated and he was out the door even while my lips were still forming a protestation. I did manage to ask his swiftly retreating back how I’d get an appointment at the other hospital, as he was telling me to do; he said offhandedly that the receptionist would do it for me, then he was gone, leaving the door open behind himself.

  I looked at the brownish-yellow mottling of pools of dead blood underneath the skin of my unsupported, broken foot—now naked of its cast—then to the empty door, then back at my foot again. How am I going to get home like this? If I were to bump it on anything, it would break even worse.

  I didn’t even want to contemplate what it would do to my recovery if I stumbled and inadvertently put any weight on the naked fractures. Even the danger of someone or something bumping into it represented a legitimate hazard (not to mention the pain involved). I couldn’t think of a way to get home safely, let alone to a different quadrant of the city and to the other hospital.

  At first, I couldn’t really believe they were sending me home that way. In his blitzkrieg-style encounter, the doctor had given every indication of washing his hands of my case, but I couldn’t quite believe it. I waited, staring at the open door, expecting someone to come and do something with my foot before sending me away.

  An hour and a half later, I finally decided I had been entirely forgotten. With great trepidation, and taking enormous care not to jostle my broken foot, I got off the examination table and hobbled out into the waiting room on my crutches.

  I spent the next several hours being assiduously ignored in the waiting room, then, in precisely the same condition, still without a cast, I found myself pushed out the door and into a cab. I desperately tried to hold my broken foot above the jerking floor as the taxi whipped over pockmarked streets. At my apartment building, I negotiated the heavy iron security door at the front, crutched my way through the lobby, pulled myself up the banisterless three steps to the elevator. The slow old elevator got me to the sixth floor; I crutched my way to my apartment, got inside, and collapsed on the futon.

  I lay there for a while, exhausted. I stared at the telephone, waiting for the promised call. I looked at my little antique watch. Its clockwork ticked like a small, impatient heart for a long, long time. The telephone remained silent.

  After a while I pulled myself over to the phone and tried to call them myself. With every motion, I was terrified I would jostle and reinjure my foot, or even worse, that my cat would put her weight against it in misplaced sympathy or affection. When I’d made my way across the tiny room, I dialed the number I’d procured on a scrap of paper from the clinic.

  Ring, ring . . . ring, ring.

  I got the automated answering service and left a message. I repeated this process several times between lengthy waits for responses that never came. I spent five hours calling, leaving messages, and waiting. Victorian doctors made house calls. Twenty-first-century technology, it seemed, was preventing even office visits.

  I was at my wits’ end and feeling incre
dibly vulnerable. When my cat approached again I scooped her up and cried into her fur. After a while, the phone rang and I answered it quickly, but it wasn’t the hospital: it was Gabriel, calling from his job in the university library.

  “How did it go?” he asked, his voice confident.

  “It was awful!” I sobbed out the details.

  He came quickly home, and my tears abated as he wrapped me in his arms. I nestled into the curve of his shoulder, which had always fit my cheek so perfectly, and my breathing started to steady. When I finally regained control of myself, I tried the hospital’s number again. This time, I got an actual person.

  I assumed that the clinic had called the hospital, as they’d promised they would, but my name clearly meant nothing to the bored man on the other end of the line. “I’m calling to make an appointment,” I explained, looking down helplessly at my throbbing foot. “I have to see a foot specialist.”

  The sound of flipping pages came through the phone. “Well,” the bored voice said slowly, “I could get you an appointment with one of our regular doctors next Tuesday. How’s that sound?”

  Next week?! My broken foot lay bare and vulnerable before me.

  “No!” My cat came over, and I cringed as she sniffed at my foot in curiosity. Gabriel shooed her away. “I have to come in today!”

  What would happen if I slept with my foot out like this?

  “I have to see a specialist—”

  “Who decided that?” the voice at the other end asked scornfully. “You?”

  I started crying again, though I didn’t want to. Gabriel took the phone from me, and it was one of the very few times I have heard actual anger in my husband’s voice.

  “Look,” he started, and my champion commenced an argument from which he clearly had no intention of backing down. Yet he was not satisfied when he finally hung up.

  “There’s no one there!” He threw up his hands. “Not until Monday!” He shook his head at the incompetence displayed. “Even the guy answering the phone said you shouldn’t have been sent home without a cast! He said you should go into the emergency room!” He glared at the phone in angry frustration.