Losing a hand always sounded to me like the perfect opportunity to learn to play trumpet. No matter which hand you lost, the other one could easily manipulate the three valves. The physical act of blasting lungs full of air through the thing also sounded like great therapy. Kind of like a more socially acceptable form of screaming. Earlier this week my friend found out that she may forever have limited use of her hand and arm and, worse, constant pain. Suddenly my many musings over the years became pertinent.

I’ve tended to think in terms of creative outlets first when I’ve thought about what I would do if I became disabled in some way. Blindness always seemed like a good time to become a guitar master. Deafness would be about photography and illustration. Losing limbs would mean picking other instruments, or focusing on singing. I looked up Curtis Mayfield a while back on a whim, wondering what had happened to him. It turns out that he had been hit by a falling stage light and paralyzed. He continued to write music by singing into a microphone.

The thing that I neglected to consider is the link between mind and body. Imagining myself happily trumpeting away ignored the massive psychological impact of having no arm. My body feeds my mental state, and even what I think about, in a whole variety of ways from adrenaline to raging hormones.

Certainly hormones and adrenaline have more immediate and obvious effects like the fight or flight reflex. Pumping bad food into my system makes me weaker and mentally dull. Not eating makes me cranky. Injury, though, has a unique effect in that it can be both physically painful and have psychological implications. When I broke my foot I became weak, incapable, shy, and fearful of the world.

Recently I met with a woman to discuss a documentary project about, well, her. She discovered that she had arthritis when she was in her early twenties. It slowly worked through her system until she had to have both hips and both knees replaced. Because it is abnormal to get this form of arthritis until people get older, her insurance company refused to pay for it.

All of her energy was spent learning how to walk again. She had to start all over again from scratch doing something she didn’t remember learning. Compress butt muscle. Twitch calf. Each muscle was a piece of the whole movement and each required individual attention and complete focus. She was psychologically drained and went into reclusion and depression.

After years of work, she has returned to the world and wants to push it as far as it can go. She still has a difficult time walking, but that isn’t enough. She wants to learn to dance.

In effect, her very real experience directly contradicted everything I had thought I might do. Instead of finding activities that fit within the new scope of her limits of movement, she is pushing singlemindedly towards the most difficult task she can find. I asked her if it was a quest for normalcy or the desire for a higher mountain to climb and she wasn’t sure. I’m sure it’s hard to know.