I entered into a whole new relationship with my left arm when I accidentally broke its elbow. I immediately felt very protective of it, checked in with it a lot, and joked about it with friends. I even named it. So in certain ways, it was kind of like having a penis for the first time. 

Angela (pronounced with a hard "g" like Germany's Angela Merkel) was so named because I couldn't straighten her out to 180°. After my operation, when I brought her home, uncasted, from the hospital, she was asleep all the way down to my finger tips. This is because the doctors had intentionally left a tube in my shoulder that was dripping some kind of numbing fluid from a canteen-like vessel. I described this construct to my friend Lizanne when she called me to see how I was doing. Her response: "Numbing fluid? Canteens? What is this F-Troop?" You probably need to be at least 45-years-old to understand how perfect that is.

The drip thing lasted for two days, and Angela stayed comatose all the while, at one point swinging away from my body when I leaned over without my sling. The move was sudden, unexpected and unpleasant, and I impulsively made the scared reaction noise "Nyahhhhh!" made popular by The Three Stooges in the 1930's. Skeeved, I decided to sit down and have a talk with Angela about our future together. It went like this:

Me: Angela that move you just made scared the crap out of me and I was hoping that we could start working together as a team. I want you to know that I'm going to do everything in my power to make you as healthy and strong as my other arm, which shall go nameless. What are your thoughts? 

Angela:

That's when I realized that this whole healing thing was on me. Angela's unresponsiveness left me feeling alone and castrated. When the numbing drip ran out of anesthesia and Angela woke up, she was more like a crying child with hunger pangs who would only eat one thing, Oxycodone. After that, it took a natural disaster, in the form of a blizzard, to make her try something new. The snow and wind left us stranded in my house, going it alone for two days. And of course there was no way that Angela and I could work together to open the PUSH DOWN & TURN child-resistant bottle of narcotics. It didn't even seem like she was trying. So the next time she needed a fix, I gave her some Motrin that was lying around in a plastic sandwich bag. It seemed to do the trick.

Angela: That Motrin was okay, but I like Oxycodone better.

Me: I miss it too.

Since bonding over our shared love for the effects of narcotics, Angela and I have been working well together. Her range of motion has progressed from 90° to 160° and she's helping out with light typing, housework and hygiene. This kind of helpfulness is something a penis could never bring to the table, so I'm grateful for what I have. I don't really know why I was so keen to have one in the first place. It must have been the pain killers.