Knitbone

Stasis and change, storms and sealions.

I have a painful shin. It could be a shin splint, a name given to a sore tendon or muscle but actually nothing to do with splinting. But it is more likely to be the bone that is stressed or actually fractured. I’m assuming that from the fact that it has been nearly 4 weeks with no improvement, although I have stopped running, cycling, unnecessary walking and am swimming but leglessly, with a buoy between my thighs. I have also been using a crutch for over a week which a) makes me feel stupid but b) takes weight off my shin bone.

Bones. So many people have the wrong idea about them. In Nine Pints, I wrote this:

The spleen is popular. Someone suggests the pancreas. Another offers, “The heart?” No one is sure, now that they have been asked. No one knows where blood is made.

The answer is: bones, mostly. Inside the bone, in the marrow, which most people probably think of as dog food, but which is the essence of us. “Gosh,” says a hematologist when I tell him no one ever guesses this. “I wonder what they think the bone marrow does.”

Perhaps they think bones are white and brittle, not vivid and vital.

I suppose if you are not a medic or you have not had an accident where a bone has emerged from your flesh, you will think of bones as skeletons: passive, white, inert. This is so wrong. Bones are constantly regenerating, healing, changing. When I went to the Wharfedale Minor Injuries Unit, finally, to get an X-ray, the nurse — a runner, thank goodness — said she was looking for “signs of bone remodelling” as well as a clear fracture. I don’t know what these signs would look like, and she didn’t see any on the image, but they would indicate that my bone is pissed off and trying to get better.

I joke about my injury. I say, it’s because I have old bones. This is true, and no matter how fit and active I am, the reduction of oestrogen and collagen in my body means my bones will be less dense and easier to fracture. Stress fractures are common in runners, footballers, military personnel who march forever, and menopausal women. Here is everything you want to know about the 206 bones on your body. This number is gospel, but I wonder: can you grow more? Can you lose some without amputation?

Bone density. Menopausal women are always been warned about decreasing bone density. Finally I thought to look it up.

What can I do to strengthen my bones? Usually I’d say, run.

For now, I add a dollop of collagen powder to my nightly mug of hot oat milk. I take calcium. I ensure that the tofu I buy is calcium-enriched.

And I make knitbone.

Symphytum officinale, better known as comfrey, used to be known as knitbone. It was applied as a poultice to fractures and thought to hurry up the healing. This is what Wild Foods UK has to say about it:

Comfrey contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids some of which can harm the liver so some foragers no longer consider this a safe plant to eat but we still eat comfrey fritters from time to time as have many people with no obvious ill effects. Quantity is the key, a little every now and again is not likely to cause any harm.
White flowered Comfrey does not contain echimidine, the pyrrolizine alkaloid that is causing concern at the moment so wait until the plant flowers and eat only from the white flowering variety. Comfrey has long been used to ‘knit bones’, used as a poultice it it is said to help broken bones heal although this may originate from the grated root being used like plaster of Paris as it can be moulded before setting very hard.
As with a lot of plants comfrey is said to treat many different conditions but none seem to have been scientifically proven although the phamaceutical industry take quite an interest in this plant.

And here is a clinical overview from NIH. What I need from comfrey is allantoin, which is meant to speed cellular production in bone. But I didn’t know any of this until my friend Ruth advised me to use knitbone. Ruth is a horticulturist, an amazing knitter and painter and basically superwoman, and she knows her plants. If you’re in West Yorkshire, go buy plants from her. So when she suggested making a poultice of comfrey roots, I listened. The next morning I went to my plot, on crutches, chopped off some roots and apologised to the worms who had been living in them.

That evening I scrubbed the roots, chopped them into smaller pieces and boiled them for half an hour.

My fellow witches — running women of a certain age who have a Whatsapp group — said, “that looks disgusting, what did it smell like?” It smelled of earth.

Next, I mashed the roots into an even more appetising sludge. My cat looked on with distaste.

Witch Ruth (I mean that as high praise) suggested securing the poultice with clingfilm or tin foil and applying it to gently warmed skin so the pores are open. Yes, ma’am.

I kept it on overnight, and waited for my bone to knit. I am still waiting for my bone to knit.

This isn’t the only remedy I have tried. Earlier this week I shared a lane at the pool with a magnificent older (than me) Irishwoman. She told me she had run her first marathon at 60 and done four more but now her knees were arthritic so it was swimming only. I told her about my suspected stress fracture and when she got out she said, “I hope your fracture heals overnight, I’m going to mass later and I’ll pray for you.”

God, herbalism, drugs, rest. Something will have to work soon, right?

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Storms

Agnes, Babet, Ciaran

Debi, Elin, Fergus

Gerrit and Henk

Isha and Jocelyn.

A poem of storms. Unfinished.

And now have some Gerard Manley Hopkins, even if this poem is about a nun taking the veil.

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

Animal hero of the week

Another friend, Mary Roach, is another superwoman. She writes marvellous books, and before she wrote marvellous books full-time, she wrote for Salon. One of her best pieces, I think, was this one, about what happens to your body if you choose to jump off the Golden Gate bridge. It was classic Mary Roach: unafraid to be graphic, but never callous and always readable. Here is Mary talking to Herb Lopez (really!), a safety patrol sergeant on the bridge.

Lopez regales would-be suicides with details of has-been suicides he has helped recover. (While the U.S. Coast Guard retrieves bodies that land in open water, bridge personnel are responsible for jumpers who land on the ground or in the concrete-ringed moat that surrounds the bridge's South Tower.) I asked Lopez for a "for instance." He thought for a moment -- I cannot begin to imagine the horrors that flashed through his mind in that moment -- and then he said: "One time Lt. Locati was down on the moat bringing in a body and someone yells, 'Look out, Mike!' He looks down, and right there on the concrete in front of him is a complete human brain. Something sheared off the back of the guy's head."

We were on the South Tower at the time, so Lopez leaned over the railing and pointed out the spot where the brain had sat. A tourist stopped alongside us. "What are we looking at?" he said.

"Pelicans," said Lopez.

I know that no-one jumps off a bridge unless they are in such despair they can’t not do it. So they probably don’t think about the physical reality of it. There is that soaring down of course, but then you may hit concrete on the bridge structure, and that is pulverising. Bones do better with a direct entry into water.

Depending on what position they were in when they hit, very few bones may be broken. Bodies that enter the water feet first or lying flat tend to emerge with the skeleton largely intact. Of the 169 Golden Gate Bridge suicides in Snyder's paper, 17 had no fractures at all, and two had no injuries. If you manage to enter the water feet first and close to vertical, it's possible to survive a leap from the bridge. But it's not very likely: At the time of Snyder's paper, the death rate was 99.3 percent.

One of the 0.7 percent was Kevin Hines. That makes him one of 35 survivors of the 2000 (known) people who have jumped. He jumped off the bridge when he was 19, in 2000, suffering from bipolar disorder and serious psychosis. He says he regretted it as soon as his fingers left the railing. His jump, by the time it was ending, reached a velocity of 75 miles per hour. He entered the water with his spine crushed and his ankles broken. This is his description of the day.

Miraculously, I survived– and despite my severe injuries, I was able to reach the surface of the water. Upon my resurfacing, I bobbed up and down in the frigid waters surrounding me. Then, something brushed by my legs, I feared it was a shark come to devour me whole. I tried to punch it thinking it might bite me. However, this marine animal (whatever it was) just circled beneath me, bumping me up.

It was a sea lion.

Yes it may be hard for the average skeptic to believe, but don’t take my word for it… Call the old producers and staff of ABC’s “Primetime with John Quinones.” You see, I did not know that the creature was a sea lion, not a shark until I was featured on that show due to my work in suicide prevention and mental health.

Many viewers’ emails flooded into ABC and one of them was from a man named Morgan. He wrote:

Kevin, I am so glad you are alive as I was standing less than two feet away from you when you jumped…. And by the way it was not a shark (like you mentioned in the TV show) it was a sea lion and I have pictures.

Hines is now an activist trying to prevent suicide and improve mental health. The Golden Gate Bridge, as of three weeks ago, has a “suicide net” to catch jumpers. We have no idea where that heroic sea lion is.

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P.S.

I’ve had hard things to deal with this month as well as my bone issue, and The Detectorists have been essential at giving me some sanity and serenity. I have come late to it, but once I started, I couldn’t stop. It is so smart and lovely and warm and oddly gripping. I cannot recommend it highly enough, not least because its final episode had none of the usual disappointments of final episodes but was supreme. Especially because of this, which had me in tears and laughter at once.

Compare and contrast:

The Dectorists (from 10.48)

Witness (from the start)

The handshake! The shonky music! The lemonade! (Which is even better than Witness because of the lemonade backstory). So, so good. And it’s all on iPlayer, too.

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