Man of Steel

The project that I’ve been working on at Unidentified California University for the past year originally hired me as a techie — to help with putting the research results onto the web, and in other digital forms for distribution, and also to fathom out a piece of software they’re using for qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. The clash of styles and backgrounds has been fascinating, but not a little frustrating. The people on the project are right at the top of their game, but it’s a very different game. I’m used to clarity, formality, a reasonably clear division of labour and responsiblity, but the process here is one of a slow bottom-up construction of theory from masses of data, which is messy and driven by continual discussion, rethinking, redirection, and gradual consensus.

As it happens, though, I’ve ended up in the thick of things, constructing case studies from mountains of rambling interviews. It’s somewhat like trying to solve a jigsaw without the box, and without any real expectation that the picture will amount to anything clear anyway. The process feeds my love of structured narrative, though. To find the real story in amongst something as messy as a life is a challenge. Sometimes it works, sometimes less so. Like all good stories, the narratives work better if there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. Sometimes the ends are tragic, which makes the story clearer to write, but harder to tell.

The focus of the project is strikingly, saddeningly relevant today, because it involves the causes of development of pressure sores for people with spinal injuries. Because the context of the study is a particular unit in a particular rehab hospital, the cases tend to be the most serious. Many of the cases I’ve written up involve people whose lives were disadvantaged and broken even before they were injured. The injury then left them no chance. It would be easy to infer from a cursory glance at their backgrounds that spinal injuries — or at least pressure sores resulting from spinal injuries — are a disease of poverty, poor education, broken homes, involvement in street-gangs. It would also be spectacularly wrong. A spinal injury places someone on a precarious cliff-top, from which every direction potentially heads downwards to some calamity. Maintaining the balance in their lives which keeps them from falling, basically becomes their lives. If they lose focus, they’re lost.

I’ve not yet read anything which hints at the underlying causes of the pressure sore/s that ultimately led to Christopher Reeve’s death, via systemic infection and then heart failure, but one thing is clear: if anyone seemingly had the best chance of escaping from underneath the pressure sore Sword of Damocles, it was Reeve. Though he must have been ravaged by the worst demons, he’d found purpose in his new life, had the best treatment available, and a strong support system around him. Even with all of these advantages, a pressure sore got him in the end. I daresay the results of the project I’m working on will reference Reeve somehow, if ony in a preface.

There was a little of Kal-El in Reeve, and a little bit of Clark Kent too. Whatever the weaknesses of the Superman films he made — and there were plenty — he wasn’t one of them. I remember seeing the first one for the first time when I was kid. It was shortly before Christmas, a cold winter day in the north of England. My mother took my brother and me. Between going into the cinema and coming out again, it had snowed enough to leave several inches of snow on the ground, so we emerged into a different world.

If you can bear to descend to one of the lower circles of hell for a moment, Digby has been there and it’s not pretty. Think about contributing something.