The 6 Billion Dollar Man

Some years ago a colleague accused me of being a perfectionist. I laughed. "Me?", I said, "I'm the least likely perfectionist on the planet", and thereby more or less automatically confirmed the allegation. And I guess that there is some truth to it. I recognize that I tend to set high standards at the office. I don't like work that is poorly presented or poorly finished. I don't like badly written text. Things should be ship-shape and Bristol fashion, as far as reasonably possible.

Elsewhere, I don't like things that don't work properly. If something is designed to do a job, then it should do that job properly. If it has features, then those features should work. I tend to get irritated with a thing even if features ancillary to its main purpose don't work properly. If something doesn't work, then throw it away and get one that does work. I hate messing around repairing things that are clearly never going to work again properly. Bodging a repair to get something partially working I find irritating, though sometimes necessary. On the other hand, if it's possible to repair that thing and restore it to fully working condition, that's fine. Satisfying, even.

This attitude extends even to my view of my own body. During my second year at University I had a knee operation. There was a suspicion that I had torn a cartilage. I must admit that I hated the idea that after the operation my knee would not be fully functional, that at the young age of 19 my skiing days would be over before they had even begun. In the event they couldn't find anything wrong with my knee. 

These were pre-endoscope days when a knee operation involved a three inch cut and 6 weeks in a plaster cast. When my leg came out of the cast it looked like it had spent 6 months in Ethiopia, my muscle tone had completely vanished. Bearing in mind that I was/am a cyclist and had/have well developed thigh muscles, this was a huge shock. I became determined to restore my muscle tone as fast as possible. I have to say that I became rather obsessed. The moment that I was allowed back on my bike I was off into the Pennines, hill climbing. With the help of the fantastic University physiotherapist I restored my muscle tone. But it came at the expense of my studies - I failed my 2nd year and had to re-sit my exams at the end of the summer holidays. Still, the next time that I saw the surgeon he remarked that he could see no difference between my left and right legs and that that was a remarkable achievement. 

I guess that I have more or less zero tolerance of imperfection when it comes to these kinds of things (but I'm not a perfectionist, right?). I like to think that all things can achieve a reasonable state of order or can be returned to that state with the right kind of effort and determination. I always reckoned that Steve Austin, The 6 Million Dollar Man, got a fair deal after his X-plane crashed. Sure, he lost two legs, an arm and an eye. But they were replaced with Bionic components that made him faster, stronger and just plain better than before. I think if I ever lost a leg or an eye or became disabled in some way I would find it extremely difficult to accept the resultant limits. I would hate the idea that I'd become... less.

And yet, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that that is actually exactly what has happened to me. I have lost a piece of my soul. My heart is broken. I am mentally scarred, a scar that is never, ever going to go away. There are things I will never do again, things that I can never do again even if I wanted to. I am broken and although I'm still functional, I will remain broken and irreparable forever. 

This is very very difficult to accept. I look at my life and wonder what has become of it. Ten years ago everything looked perfect, was perfect. I had a great family, money, prospects, ideas, energy. The future was an exciting, undiscovered country waiting to be explored from an established, solid base. Ten years later I feel battered and crushed. Amongst other things, my family has lost a child. We have been through hell and we don't know if we have come out the other side yet. In fact, we've lost the ability to distinguish between Hell and Life. Life, it seems, is Hell. And I'm afraid that I'm going to spend the rest of my life living in it.

When I look at myself I see some of the damage and scars that I carry and I know that there are some things that cannot be fixed, some kinds of order that cannot be restored, some things lost that can never be replaced. Not even if I was the 6 Billion Dollar Man.