I’m still new at this whole business of breaking bones, so you can’t really blame me for not having done it thoroughly: bone chips were sent flying off in all directions, and a couple of fractures, but no clear-cut break that could have been fixed with plates or screws. My bad. All I can do now is sit and wait, and sit some more, and cross the days on the calendar until my next doctor’s appointment, hoping that I’ll leave his office in a walking boot on October 5th. If those bone chips don’t migrate back into the mother bone, though, I’m stuck in the damn cast until the beginning of November.
Bottom line: with a little luck, I should be able to walk again by Christmas. And what better present, right?
I’m two weeks into it, and already I’m feeling the toll of my new, tripodal locomotion model: my back is sore all the time, and so are my hands; I’ve temporarily lost feeling in my pinky and ring finger on the left side, I have bruises under my arms where the crutches are resting and both my knees are starting to sound somewhat creaky: one from too much action, the other from too little.
I’ve learned from a veteran of ankle injuries (you know who you are) to expect a host of indignities normally associated with the inability to do anything with your hands other than support yourself: the dropping of objects, the extreme slowness with which you do simple things, the shower tricks, the extreme exhaustion at the end of the day, etc. Add to that the fact that it all happened two weeks before we were supposed to go on vacation to Hawai’i – the first time for me- and had to cancel last moment, swallowing up the bitter fees and fines that come, apparently, as punishment for the audacity of breaking your limb unscheduled.
But I’m also learning that good things can come out of this miserable situation. I’ve always been very impatient, and this experience is really forcing me to grow that muscle of patience in neglect all these years. I’m also catching up on things I’ve been meaning to do that take time I’m rarely able to commit: reading books more than a page at a time, watching full-length movies (!), and writing.
I’m slowly realizing how certain daily habits of mine are toxic: checking Facebook and email compulsively, texting people instead of talking to them… and I’m contemplating taking steps to remedy that.
Then, at the end of this misadventure, I will have truly developed an appreciation of the little things I took for granted before: walking, sleeping on my belly, being able to carry a glass of water from one room to the next, and, yes, walking, walking, walking. I plan to do a lot of that once I get the doctor’s clearance.
Also, as you can probably tell, having a cast is having a vehicle for my friends’ artistic/satiric impulses. Draw away, I tell them, and at the very least make me smile when I look at the damn thing first thing in the morning…
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