Elective Amputation

I have some injuries that I sustained in a road traffic collision over four years ago. The injuries meant I required surgeries to pin and later unpin my ankle, and for skin graft procedures to my shin (it is, in fact, my leg that appears on the present Wikipedia entry for skin grafting - viewer caution, slightly gory). 

I spent eight months on crutches, and have not been able to walk comfortably since. The graft disrupts the lymphatic system so whenever the leg is not at hip height or higher, it slowly fills with fluid. Combined with joint pain in the ankle, I'm left with injuries which mean I can neither sit for long periods (without elevation) nor stand for long.

On many days the swelling is such and the pain within the joint so much that I can't focus well, and spend much of the day with intrusive thoughts, often imagining new and more gruesome injuries being sustained. Sometimes I fantasize about having the limb amputated below the knee. 

Since these fantasies are often sparked by pain, I got to wondering. What if...

Would some of my problems be alleviated if I were to ask, beg if necessary, my GP to refer me to a specialist who could remove an otherwise "healthy" limb? Would a specialist even consider this? Is quality of life a trump card over remaining physically intact? 

I can walk bipedally, and unaided for short distances too (I use a crutch to go more than around 100 yards since then the pain gets too intense and I need it to push on, and to balance, especially when the ankle gives out a little). However, despite this level of mobility which is apparently considered acceptable by some doctors, I can't imagine having to live for potentially 40-60 years more with the kind of pain I have now. 

I know I should count my blessings to be alive and have all four limbs reasonably complete and attached, but I can't help but feel it's simply not enough to live. I need to enjoy living.

Complaints and Herd-Mentality

During the half-time show for Super Bowl 46, headlined by Madonna, British-born supporting performer MIA "flipped the bird" to camera during her brief moment front and centre. It was true "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" television, and I would expect that ninety nine in every hundred viewers who watched the half-time show didn't even spot it. Of those who did, an overwhelming majority will not have taken offence, discussing it only in context of "what do you think the FCC will do? Will they be punished?".

Already it is featured on YouTube (see below), appears on blogs (guilty!), and has been repeated on air on American TV news shows (albeit with the offending digit blurred out. These will be the first times most people become aware that it even happened, let alone have seen it. However, there is bound to be an outcry and a vast number of complaints, campaigns by family and religious groups, and conservatives with an axe to grind over those pesky troublesome liberal artist types.

I expect any likely storm about this will be less reminiscent of the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" (<--photo link), which was a little more obvious in the performance, featured the star performers, and feeds into the American puritanical obsession with sex and the body.
    Instead I expect it to be reminiscent of a very British scandal in 2008: The Russell Brand "Sachsgate" prank-call debacle on BBC Radio 2. In this instance few people complained at first. Then, the following weekend, conservative right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail published reports that exaggerated the portion, encouraging its readers to complain. They did, and in record numbers. Most had not even heard the radio show (see Sachsgate link, above).
    Likewise I expect that MIA's poorly judged but entirely predictable bad-girl behaviour will prompt few complaints from those who watched the show, but rather from those who become energised by comment and innuendo after the event. This, I feel, is a most sad state of affairs.
    If this is the biggest worry in your life that you feel the need to complain about it, then you are very lucky and privileged.

Madonna's Superbowl Half-Time Show

No doubt there's thousands of blogs saying how awesome Madonna's Super Bowl 46 half-time show was, and almost as many who hated it. There is sure to be analysis of her clothes, her moves, and the supporting acts. Here is one extra voice to the chorus. And here is a link to the full performance on YouTube. 

Madonna is, in an age of intense scrutiny of any female media personality's physical appearance, looking quite young and attractive; aided in no small measure by keeping those much-photographed and much-maligned arms covered up, reducing the distraction (after all, with so much comment on them, people now look at them as much as her).

At a basic level the show was an enjoyable spectacle, plenty of flash and dazzle, pyrotechnics, and massed ranks of dancers, choristers, and marching drummers. The outfits were big, bright, brash, and memorable. The set-list reeled out some of her biggest and most popular hits of the past thirty years. Despite this, Madonna's show, and Madonna herself, failed to impress. The solo sections were mimed, badly, and the duet sections were flat, lacking personality and, Cee-Lo Green apart, seemed to be tacked in for the sake of promotional purposes with no particular statement to add to the performance.

The highlight of the show? The end. Not in the cruel sense of it being over, but for the anthemic "Like a Prayer", and the big aerial shots of individual lights depicting the world map, and the phrase "World Peace"; two visually spectacular moments.

However it's worth asking this... In what way did the song or performance of it reinforce a message calling for world peace? The song has been supposed by some to talk of a young woman's sexualised fantasies of a relationship with the saints or God, and the video an attack on institutional religion, to a call for racial equality. This last point comes closest to a world peace message, but again it's somewhat confused. Would it not have been better to have had something more specific to the message by means of amended lyrics, and using the big-screen displays to highlight contemporary injustices?

And so for the lacklustre performance, lack of narrative through-line which might have compensated for the blandness, and for missing its own efforts at a message, I'm afraid this performance has to go down as being poor and forgettable - a mere footnote in Madonna's career.

All copyrights to images in this article remain with the NFL. I took them (badly) from the live TV performance by camera phone, but I claim no ownership of them. 

Journalism

Journalism: A profession that informs us of the world around us, shapes opinions, and provides a narrative on life. For better or worse, the work done by the professional writers of the press corps is essential to the modern democratic world.

Not all the writing produced by the collective minds of our media's men and women is world-changing, of course; millions of column inches are dedicated to skateboarding dogs, freakishly large hailstones and kidney stones, local disputes, stolen gnomes, and what a writer or their paymaster thinks is wrong with the world. No matter the metric tonnage of ink and paper spent on such matters, as many are employed in lifting people from ignorance, shining a light on injustices, and empowering readers with the information that holds the potential to make their lives better.

Simultaneously mundane, banal, anal, self-important, yet sublime, educational, interesting, and important, the more I think of the value of this profession, the more I would like to join it.