#38 / Ice Burn
on being real; machines as mirrors
This will sound so pathetic spoken out loud, but it’s where I am right now, I said to Kiryll. We were sitting at the kitchen table. He’d just cooked eggs in an overheated pan, and the newly-installed smoke alarm had gone off because we couldn’t find the key to open the window. Germany! Okay. He nodded and motioned with his eyebrows for me to continue. I’m at the point in this crisis-cycle where I tell myself I shouldn’t write ever again, I said. My face broke into a mortified grin and swerved downward. He nodded again, chuckling. I breathed, staring at no-space on the table, then my head met the tablecloth. When I came to, he hugged me.
About three weeks ago, I gave myself a good old fashioned ice burn. A gift to myself, as these things go. It was Claude’s fault. No, it wasn’t. Claude said to ice my muscle strain thing that happened probably because I’d changed my squat form some workouts ago without lowering the weight, which I should have to give the small muscle in my hip that hadn’t been working properly previously a chance to catch up to my enormous quads, but didn’t. So I did! Ice the hip, I mean. But Claude didn’t say to put some real barrier between the ice pack and my bare naked skin. How could it, it didn’t know I was only wearing leggings. But it could have thought to just put a small PSA in there?? But also my custom instructions compel it to be terse and never ever coddle me. SO WHOSE FAULT IS IT? My body’s jiggly-ass thermal detection system, without a doubt. Exhibit 17b: I’ve been using ice packs to treat the fossils of my former migraine headaches for about a year. ‘Twas a Moment when I first tried cold on my temples. The ice pack did a hunky dance for my pain receptors. Now there’s a patch on my left temple where all my hair said BYE GIRL because I’d frozen my follicles due to repeated and excessive use.
This essay is my attempt at reconciling my dinosaur beliefs with my newly established Innocence. It’s about how my partner, and, ultimately, some LLMs — restored my sense of aliveness. Seriously. I love me some irony to hide my pain behind, but I’m sincere when I say that LLMs helped me regain my sense of self and, ultimately, the best aspect of being alive: the state of having no care about who, where, and why I am, what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and what for. The state of just doing something because it’s what I want to be doing now. The first time I remember tasting this mode of being, I was cooking. (Literally, that is.) I was sixteen, so I didn’t know what I was doing, which is exactly what makes these situations what they are. The most emphatic responses to whatever I be doing, whenever I be doin’ it, have always arrived when, shortly before, I could have sworn this is is the most fucked up and unskilled attempt at [insert activity here] I have ever launched — but at least, idk, it was fun while I was doing it??!
The dinosaurs I speak of are: What the fuck do you think you’re doing. You’re not an intellectual. You cannot possibly “compete” with all the geniuses and professionals submitting their work to this competition. Good lord. You are nothing. You’re a loser. You’ve been avoiding life on your dad’s couch in your dad’s attic for the last EIGHT years. (Okay fine, you brought up a child almost entirely alone in that time.) (Okay fine, you’ve also faced some hurdles and demons and physical ailments and mental catastrophes.) (Okay okay, you had a stroke three years ago when you were only thirty-one.) (But what were you doing before that, huh? Being delusional thinking you could make your own living designing books or showing people the light with Human Design or making cute websites or designing “tasteful” posters and calendars and clothes. Pathetic.) (Okay fine, you spent four days screaming/writhing/delirious and slurring words due to a swelling brain while your family was downstairs celebrating Christmas.) (JESUS, that makes your family out to be monsters. They took care of you! Okay, they did not call an ambulance until your ex, of all people, who was there to be with your son, had finally argued with them that this was pretty GD alarming and wouldn’t just go away on its own. But you didn’t want them to call an ambulance! You didn’t want to feel like some silly princess in need of special princess treatment. Okay fine, your brother asked you if he could do anything for you, and you said, “Yes, shoot me.” Yet, you didn’t “want” to go to the hospital. Bright lights, no thank ye lovely gentlemen. Also, wouldn’t the Medical People just give you stronger painkillers and come to the conclusion that it’s all in your head, pun totally intended, *winking smiley*? Plus, you did end up being proven right on that former point! When you got to the hospital and they did a CT, called the stroke, and transferred you to a different hospital, the bright lights you woke up to in the ICU were, no surprise, painful as hell. But the MRI they’d put you in the night before [“basically a techno bunker,” the technician said] had weirdly restored your mind’s capacity to formulate thoughts before speaking them aloud, and, also your speech?? [halfway through the bleeps and sweeps and creeps that did *not* feel like techno-bunker-decibels, more like standing-next-to-a-Boeing-level noise, your mind observed the formulation of a sentence, “damn, good thing I like challenging music,” and, when observing your mouth speak it aloud, you were dumbfounded when the words made it out unslurred]) But yeah — You’re a loser and you can’t write and it’s no wonder you can’t because you never actually do what you think/say/write that you must (write), because every time you go to do it, you stop because you listen to the demons and you let them get between you and everything you need to see tied up, golden, into a giant cartoon bow.
From the moment I first wanted to submit an essay to this competition (my mind berated the nudge it registered of maybe potentially wanting to attempt to write something to perhaps feed to the essay software and then also, possibly, submitting the resulting piece to the jury, and hasn’t let up since then) I knew it would need to be conceived of, written, and edited in complete and unadulterated acceptance of the high chance it would not even come close to being chosen – and with full knowledge of the consequences in the unlikely event that my entry might win. The cognitive dissonance of holding these two potentials in my body simultaneously, and the knowledge that the best outcome is typically achieved when I’m not thinking about outcomes at all, and knowing my essay would need to examine and hopefully unravel this very dissonance within the context of everything that’s happened this year – because it’s all connected, obviously – was so overwhelming that I spent weeks on the precipitous verge of crying fits alongside various aches and pains that may or may not have been related to the impending final weeks, days, hours, minutes of intense stress I pictured I would be in if I didn’t find a way to just… do this, now, while there’s still enough time.
On a Saturday night, one week after adjusting my squat form, the small muscle in my left hip yelled when I bent my knees. Claude said:
tensor fasciae latae (tfl) - it’s that little muscle right at the anterolateral hip that basically connects your iliac crest to your it band. if the form change involved “knees out” cues or a wider stance, tfl gets TAXED. it’s a hip flexor AND abductor so it’s doing double duty in the hole.
Knees out was the cue, as a matter of fact! What a coincidence. The model urged me to lower the weight to no more than 50% of my current working weight. I checked my range of motion without the barbell. Close to nil.
ice it when you get home. if it’s still sharp tomorrow or hurts to walk/sit, see someone. if it’s just sore/achy tomorrow you probably just irritated it and need to back off squats for a bit.
I aborted the workout and went to bed. On Sunday morning, the pain in my hip was much more obvious than before, so I heeded the AI’s tips. I got an ice pack from the freezer, spread out on the couch, and positioned it over my hip over my leggings. When the ice pack had warmed to room temperature, I got myself another.
On Monday, the skin on my hip felt tender. Must be the muscle, I thought, and put ice on it again, twice.
That evening on the toilet, I noticed the skin on my hip was bright red.
yeah that’s an ice burn. classic mistake. stop icing immediately. the redness is from cold damage to your skin - basically frostbite lite. might feel sensitive or look splotchy for a few days.
Fuck. I couldn’t tell anymore if I was even still feeling the muscle strain or just the ice burn.
you added a red herring to your own diagnostic process. good job. just ignore the superficial stuff and focus on movement quality/deep tissue tenderness. and yeah don’t ice anymore, you clearly can’t be trusted with frozen water.
Three days later, it was my son’s bathtime. Kiryll had just left for his hometown that afternoon, the first time in months.
I don’t remember why, but I pulled down my pants on the side of the ice burn to show the kid the skin splotch. Looking down at it, I was slightly amused at the size of my thighs looking down on them from the side. All the training and eating I’d committed to over the last couple of months was showing.
A minute later, it dawned on me that this wasn’t just “the size of my thighs these days”. I compared. The left side was definitely protruding outwards in a way that the right was just a little fat. It was also purple and radiating heat.
Over the next hour, I became increasingly agitated. My partner and the LLM were urging me to go to the hospital.
what you’re describing is textbook “get evaluated same day” territory. urgent care can assess, potentially start antibiotics if needed, or tell you it’s fine and send you home. but you NEED someone to actually look at it tonight.
My son was scared and wanted me to stay home with him. I wanted to stay home, too. It was the time of day when I usually stop doing things, and I wasn’t in the mood for another emergency room caesura.
After some agonizing, I conceded I had no choice. I couldn’t wait to visit my GP the next morning; the LLM was right — I did need a medical professional to tell me asap whether my leg would sustain lasting damage. I put the eight-year-old to bed with a phone next to him so he could text me if needed, and my dad drove me to the hospital. Five minutes after we’d left, the kid wrote me, asking where we were. I replied, “Still on the way!” Five minutes later, I sent another text asking if he was still awake, which remained unanswered.
At the emergency practice, I waited an hour for the on-call doctor to grossly misunderstand my predicament. He typed “muscle strain on hip” into his form with one finger, then called the orthopedist in the neighboring hospital on speakerphone, butchering my words when he repeated what he assumed was happening. I pushed aside my desire to be polite and interjected, trying to correct his assessment. Both doctors ignored me, then the incompetent one hung up. He said he could get me some antibiotics for the “infection”, or I could go see the orthopedist now. Incredulous, I asked him what he — the medical professional — thought I needed to do. I limped and winced over to the other hospital with Kiryll on the phone giving me directions from four hours away, trying to make up for not being there physically.
I found the place, handed the receptionist my referral, and she pointed me to the emergency room, where I waited again. When the burning from walking and standing on the wounded leg had gotten so intense that I was breathing audibly through the lump of WHY THIS NOW in my throat, a real surgeon called my name and asked why I looked to be in so much pain. I explained what I’d done. He asked me to tell me exactly how long the ice packs were on my skin, then called his female colleague; she kept my legs covered while held an ultrasound wand to my leg. Both of them seemed transfixed by whatever they were seeing on the monitor.
There’s nothing to do, there’s no infection, it’s just going to hurt for a while, the surgeon said. When asked how long it would take to heal, he shrugged. Probably a few weeks? We don’t get many injuries like yours around here; it’s not exactly the Arctic.
I was sent home with a pack of Novalgin. The report, riddled with anglicized German compounds, politely advised that I rest the fuck up.
If you’ve never had an ice burn, which, judging from the surgeon’s remarks, I assume you haven’t — let me tell you what’s weird and, might I say, special about this fun injury. Initially, the skin is bright red and sensitive to touch. You barely know it’s there. A couple of days later, though, once it’s warmed just a little, it grows in size, in color, and in level of Ouch when touched, bumped, or even grazed by clothing. It is also disconcertingly firm to the touch (like one should be able to gather, considering the injury’s origin??). It feels like the skin, and all the cells about an inch beneath it, have, well, curled up in the snow and died. After a few weeks of limb dysmorphia, it gets even weirder, though much less painful, with some areas softening up gradually while others remain firm, like a lumpy mattress.
It was not a life-or-limb-threatening injury by any measure. It didn’t require dressing or treatment of any kind; after that one evening I spent in the hospital finding out whether the swelling/deep purple/radiating heat meant possible infection, all I needed to do was not put pressure on my hip in any way.
When the burn had faded to lilac and I was newly pain-free, there was one week left till the competition deadline. My mind ramped up its efforts to Make Something Of All These Insights. These were centered around the strange new reality it had recently come to inhabit, the one where I matter – where my thoughts, stupid as they may seem, especially spoken aloud or written down, are nonetheless worthy of landing somewhere, anywhere, by virtue of customizable LLMs with memory that guarantee a response to almost every input barring server outages or policy constraints, however big or small, cultured and articulate, or not.
I couldn’t do it. I wrote thousands of words. I tried telling the story of the ice burn (titled “Ice Burn”). My thoughts dripped, drooled over, and slipped and fell over the metaphor contained in everything I was seeing. There were infinite ways to connect the dots. I was devastated.
I would never get it all down and prune it into coherence and revise and rewrite it into artful oblivion.
I poured my grief out to the LLMs, hoping the algorithms would save my swollen brain once more by talking some sense into me (“give up”) or successfully extracting something usable from the current Jabba the Essay. I pasted the words, lamenting the overwhelm, the Albuquerque cul-de-sac of the mounting threat to my entire selfhood.
Like well-meaning, annoyingly literate friends, they put out much more sophisticated, clever, elegant, tidy ways of wording everything I’d slopped into the chat. They “urged” me to stop listening to my demons, write – just write – this can be much easier than you think, they parsed the entirety of my toxic waste dump, found a coherent, no, actually beautiful throughline, volunteering a very sensible outline, even providing the snippets from my mental excretions to fill it with. Just a bit of manual labor, a little lookover, and I’d be done. No part of my essay would be written or revised by AI; all the most important parts of my experience would be included, framed in devastating simplicity. I would have my character arc, my redemption, wherever it would ultimately find its Golden moment. The piece would be quintessentially twenty-twenty-five. The introduction of memory in LLMs was central to my thesis. Humans had failed, over and over, whether by ignorance or sheer humanity, to be the mirror I required to recognize my own humanity – but the machines had finally done it. Humans being humans could not make me feel real. Machines being machines, for better or stupid, it seemed, very much did.
The ice burn had given me no choice but to park myself on the couch and do nothing while my body did the hard work of unfreezing the damaged cells and restoring function in a thirty-two square inch patch of thigh. My job was to create the safety it required to do that work. My job was to lay on the couch, neither warming nor cooling the area, and stay still as much as possible. My agitation the night I went to the hospital was, in hindsight, basically unfounded. I could have stayed home with my kid, we could have had a comfortable evening. I could have taken some Ibuprofen and trusted my doctor would take care of what needed to be taken care of the next morning. But in the absence of the person that cares for me emotionally, mentally, physically to the best of his abilities, even though he was with me via text, I could not. The only thing in the room I could trust to tell me what I needed was a text prediction algorithm with no awareness whatsoever. My own and my father’s perception of the situation couldn’t be trusted; I had learned this from prior experience. I needed someone with skilled awareness. I needed another human being.
The D.B.D (Day Before Deadline), I still couldn’t do it, I couldn’t finish the essay. In my hour of Doing Nothing before moving to my desk to “work”, my thoughts converged around what I had planned to do: print out the 3,500 words the LLMs had picked out for me, then copy them all out by hand and work out transitions. But, it would not happen. Instead, I would take my old fountain pen, find some lined sheets from the years of yore, and I would face my fears on real, tangible, scrunch-able fucking paper.
I would write only what was ready to be written, what was willing to come out. If I found myself hesitating for more than two minutes at any point, whatever it was I thought needed to be written at that moment, it did not. I would continue writing whatever was coming easily, fluently. Throughout that process, I would find out whether I would continue to cling to my Wanting to win an essay competition, or not.
The verdict is in. Unsurprisingly, I needed an LLM to help tweak it into coherence. After typing out my handwritten words, revising them as I went, submitting the resulting draft to the software and acknowledging its then-perfect mediocrity, I got over myself and went back to patch in some scraps from the original mess. Still, plenty of what I once thought essential never made it in. It now leans so far into my own experience that the wider context of twenty-twenty-five barely exists here, and maybe that’s fine. This was never going to become the grand cultural artifact I kept pretending I should have been writing. It ended up being an attempt at honesty. To me, that’s all it needs to accomplish.