les bleus

Last year, when the baby broke her arm, it came out that I had never broken a bone.  Know why?  As I told the fashionable Ms Minty the other day, it is because I do nothing which might injure me. 

That is not exactly true, strictly speaking.  But it is true that I eschew the terribly risky sportmaking of the world, of which I knew bicycling in this town at my age was.  Is.  Whatever.

So, anyhow, this is kind of endlessly gruesome and fascinating for me, to be so broken & damaged & dinged.  Banged-up.  Aside from an accident during sex c. 1994, nothing has ever happened to me, really.  Except that this ankle has been sprained over & over again.  It is quite a bother and somewhat of a major betrayer.  This is the limit, however. 

The new orthopaedist, the foot & ankle specialist, came into the exam room while I was photographing the ugly bruise that evidenced itself beneath the road rash.  I sheepishly tucked the camera away, but not before she said, "Oh, that's a good idea!  You can have them to show the children later." 

I did like her quite a bit.

Instead of a waterproof cast, she demurred casting altogether & gave me a Cam Walker with a compression stocking.  It is heavy and hot & kind of a drag to wear.  After I was all outfitted & knew what the next 6 weeks would entail, medical-accessory-wise, we stopped at Dick's and I got a new pull buoy to keep my legs still & these cute-as-heck swim gloves.  I have swim paddles, but I want nothing more hard nor plastic touching me. 

Today, Mari dropped us off at the pool in the afternoon.  The children played in the play pool ("Marco ... Polo ... Marco ... Polo") with a gaggle of their friends. I carefully removed all my stabilizers then paddled along in the lap pool for 1200 yards, taking a break halfway through to read my Kennedy biography.  I am totally high on endorphins since and have not been crabby for not one second this evening and have screamed at no one in this family. 

People have been counseling me to lie down for a week now & it was making me want to burn them in their faces.  Being incapable is not the least bit relaxing to me and I am actually a little bit ashamed to be on the bench.   I have things to do. Many accommodations have been made, and I do not fatigue myself with bullshit I can hand off to the children, or just skip altogether, but they are still children & I am still the adult. Mari is here, but is on a deadline, and the least I am able to do is sit on a stool and make a couple of meals a day, calling out to the children to bring me ingredients and tools I have forgotten to load up on the rolling bar cart we set up in the kitchen.

(Rolling bar cart to shuttle ingredients over to the prep area from the fridge is v clever & I wonder why I have not always lived like this. It just never occurred to me, is all. Plus, my kitchen is not so large that I can't waste the steps, ordinarily.)

At the pool I was chatting with a neighbor in between my first & second go, and explained that I needed her to excuse me so I could get back to the business of working it off, the irritability & rage & irrational screaming, also hurling things.  She asked me if the physicians had given me any meds.  Yes, of course, I have 100 tablets of Percocet (98, actually), but my foot only hurts at 800mg-of-ibuprofen levels. 

She told me that maybe if I took the meds, I would be less filled with tension.  I mean ... I guess that might be true, but it seems like a good way to be addicted to a Schedule II narcotic in pretty short order.  I would rather just swim really hard in the pool.  It seems safer. I have risked enough already.

Comments

[Marsha]

Before kids I had an entire autumn with some kind of device wrapped around my right leg, from ankle to hip. My only souvenirs of that time are a five inch scar down the center of my leg and a numb spot the size of a, say, plum right next to it. I seldom bare my knees in public these days but when I do children (mine and others) are inevitably fascinated by the scar.

I tell you this to say that the doc was right to encourage you to take pictures. Kids find it amazing that adults, with our particular combination of the feeble and rigid, can live through the kinds of things that mark you in this way.

I'm glad you found a way to navigate things. The first few days of figuring out are awful.

[lala]

well, using swim paddles is not going to work, for even in the best of times, that is an awesome way to blow out yr shoulders, let alone when you are trying to get around on yr shoulders & two sticks. soooooOOOOoo, we are going to have to find an acceptable way for me to work it out in sustained cardio fashion or people are going to die. or at least be screamed at by an irrational, pent-up person who is not getting her endorphin fix.

driving with my left foot starts tomorrow!