Take it from a guy who gets paid to (among other things) nitpick technical statements: People wildly abuse the term “exponentially.” No, your Camaro is not exponentially faster than his Camry, and nor does Bernie Sanders want to raise taxes exponentially. Exponential growth is when the independent variable is in the exponent – for instance, when something doubles every week.
On March 6th, 2020, there were about 100,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide. A week and a half later, there were 200,000. A week later, 400,000. A week later, 800,000 (data from worldometer). In March, COVID-19 infections grew exponentially.
The thing about exponentials is that they sneak up on you. The world can look completely different in a week. The Dow can drop 3,000 points in a day. What was okay one day can become unthinkable the next.
If you’re smart, you get ahead of the curve. You start reacting to the future before it becomes the present. I should have done that. Instead, on March 21, I went for a nice, leisurely bike ride. Which was fine and dandy until I stared down the longest, steepest rock slab I’d ever contemplated riding. A week before, I wouldn’t have worried about it. A week later, I wouldn’t even have considered it. But I stood there, in the middle of an exponential, with my buddy telling me I should probably pass and take the ride-around, and I peered over the lip. Screw it. Worst case scenario, I’ll scrape some knees and elbows.
I’m relatively new to mountain biking, but what I lack in skill, I make up for in audacity. Pulse high, I clipped in, breathed in, and dropped in. Slow and steady, they said, so slow and steady I went. I even came to a momentary standstill as I passed the point of no return at the halfway mark. The rock grew steeper and I picked up speed, still maintaining control but not far from losing it. More front brake, I told myself, but the visceral fear of tumbling over the bars seized me and I was shy on the brake lever. Careful about the pit at the bottom. I was moving faster than I would have liked, but finally the end came into view. I relaxed. And then…
Oof. Apparently, I bottomed out my suspension in the pit I was supposed to be watching out for. My body position was too high above the bike and my arms were locked when they should have been bent. When I hit it, my left hand came off the handlebars and I flew over them, clipped out, and went for a roll but only made it to my collarbone, which didn’t make it out in one piece.
As it turned out, I was in relatively empty hospitals for all that happened next. Everyone I interacted with was gracious and helpful, but the slew of safety precautions told me that even so, the last thing they needed was someone with a preventable injury risking transmission and taking up another bed. This time, fortunately, my being behind the curve didn’t cause any real harm, but I’ll appreciate it as a lesson in better considering the broader world in my personal risk tolerance.
Over the next few hours, I found out that (especially at this time) they’d only operate on a broken collarbone if it was “pretty bad,” whatever that meant. If it was only a little bad, you’d recover back to normal without surgery. If it was pretty bad, you’d get surgery and eventually recover back to normal. But if it was medium bad, then you wouldn’t get surgery, and your shoulder might never be the same.
I was reminded of my favorite Chinese idiom: 破罐破摔 (po4 guan4 po4 shuai1): If the pot’s cracked, you might as well shatter it. Well, that’s my translation. The literal translation is “to smash a cracked pot”, which better conveys its connotations of judgement. I first heard it from my Chinese roommate Max as he described his wallet: He’d already spent more than he should have today, so he was about to spend more, even though that was a po4 guan4 po4 shuai1 sort of thing to do. I’ve come to use this phrase liberally. If you crack your phone screen, why not throw caution to the wind and go caseless? Po4 guan4 po4 shuai1. My housemate: Dude, she broke your heart, why are you still hanging out with her? Me: Po4 guan4 po4 shuai1.
The last bone I broke was a little one and at the time, I denied that it was A) broken or B) my fault. It was my friend’s pinky finger (sorry, Hannah). But if I was going to break one of my own bones, then by Jove, I was going to shatter it.
In case you were wondering, my lively discussion as to what could have been written above the incision was inconclusive.
*On reading this, my friend Alex noted that these days, they put in MRI-safe titanium plates. I confess to taking some poetic license with my doctor’s words – The imagery of a bad day at the MRI was just too tempting not to allude to. I believe his actual words were that if I ever wanted to get an MRI, I needed to tell them that I had this plate in. When I asked him if that meant that I couldn’t get an MRI, his noncommittal answers weren’t exactly confidence-inspiring.
Words & Things 