I spent two hours yesterday like this.
Compact, episodic dreams packaged neatly into before and after I wake up with my leg aching dully but purposefully: I am a violent sleeper, and my dreaming body doesn't know I broke my leg until my the pain reminds it.
In the first dream, I'm wearing a silk fifties-style frock and I'm riding a train into a large city with an older man who is not my husband but in the dream I understand I will be ousting his current wife. We arrive in the city and walk a long way until we enter a building that looks abandoned on the outside but inside has been remodeled as a chic Hollywood agency.
I am given a combination office/studio apartment and a new silk dress. The old wife's office/studio is next door. I have new earrings but there is a hall in the back of my studio that is dark and dank and I suspect it leads to a sewer.
I wake up and wonder if I should stop watching reality television before bed. Take the Advil. Close my eyes.
In the second dream, I'm part of a team tasked with standing upright for forty hours. We can walk around to make it less boring. I get in line to take a series of physical challenges in an old water park, and when I finish and towel off I'm elated to hear at eleven my forty hours will be up and as my prize I get to ride a dolphin.
I've been awake now for six hours and still remember this, though beyond the water park the rest of the forty hours are now gone.
I also forget whether or not I'm displaced by a third wife in the office building or what was in the tunnel.
Having spent the Christmas holiday hobbling around my relatives' houses from crutches to rolling chairs to recliners to shower stools to my parents' bed because then I don't have to take the narrow stairs and am steps from a bathroom, I now understand why old people constantly talk about their health.
Especially with people who knew them when they were younger.
Using a shower stool and having to sit on the bathroom floor to put on makeup has been humbling. As has asking my seventy-year-old father to shovel the steps so I can hop my way down on one leg with breaking it, too.
I want to call everyone I knew in college, all those people who knew me when I was young and strong and capable of staying up for twenty-four hours, all those people who knew me when I was invincible, and scream, CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT?
This was not supposed to happen. We were not supposed to ever use shower stools or get cancer or develop auto-immune diseases. We were supposed to stay forever the age we feel inside.
We were supposed to stay invincible.
When I look at my sister and cousins, if I cry it's because you knew me then, and what if that's gone? I mean, I know it is and if it's gone for me, what if it's gone for you, too? How do we figure out how to float to the top now if it won't be physically effortless? How do we cling to the awesome we have buried somewhere under the doctor appointments and gauze?
If I feel that now after a broken leg at forty-one, I get it why old people drink coffee and blink at each other as yet another friend announces evidence of her mortality.
We were supposed to stay invincible forever. Dammit.
On Friday night, I was going to put my dishes in the dishwasher and head to bed. I stepped from the carpet of the living room onto the tile of the kitchen floor and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor on my ass with a broken glass in my hand. I sat there in total shock and pain as my husband cleaned up the broken glass and asked me if I was okay. I ended up hobbling to bed. He brought me ice and I put a compression sock on, thinking I'd probably sprained my ankle and would deal with it in the morning. It didn't hurt that bad at the time. I fell asleep with the ice on my leg.
The next morning, I could feel the weight of the blanket as I lay in bed. I really had to pee. I could tell none of the next steps were going to go well. I couldn't put any weight at all on my leg, so I hopped to the bathroom, took care of business, brushed my teeth, put on deoderant and some sweats and took the stairs on my butt, toddler-style. Then I called for my husband to drive me to urgent care. As we were trying to get in the car, he wanted me to lean on him but that hurt too bad. As we drove, he said if it was just a sprain, leaning on him wouldn't have been an issue. I started to get worried.
At urgent care they took some X-rays and told me I'd broken my fibula. They gave me a splint and some crutches and told me to make an appointment with an ortho doc. Today I went to a walk-in ortho clinic and got a stress X-ray, which is when the doctor grabs your broken bones and yanks your foot toward your ankle to see how big the separation between the bones is. The first time didn't work, but the second time I felt something go POP. It is sort of befuddling to me how I didn't scream when this happened because when I got the initial X-rays on Saturday morning, I was weeping like a baby every time the slightest bit of muscle would slide over the bone where it was broken. All day Saturday and Sunday I felt like I had severe menstrual cramps in my calf bones and popped hydrocodone every six hours like a boss. This morning, though, I woke up, felt okay, took two Advil and didn't kill the doctor when she grabbed my broken bone and squeezed. Funny how the human body works, eh?
She came back and drew a picture on the paper of the table and showed me if you break your leg HERE, everything's hunky-dory, and if you break your leg HERE, you definitely need surgery, but if you break your leg HERE (where I broke my leg), well, it's debatable. Then she told me after the bone-popping thing she'd be shocked if I didn't need surgery, here's my partner's card.
I have an appointment with the surgeon next Thursday, on New Year's Eve. The anticipated recovery time from surgery is three months. It's my driving leg, and my husband is supposed to be traveling for work almost 100% in the month of January, and who knows how much in February and March, when I may or may not be able to drive.
A lot has happened since Friday.
Part of me is absolutely terrified because one way I manage my anxiety is to exercise. Another part of me is terrified I'll gain a bunch of weight and trigger my eating disorder. Still another part of me is already feeling claustrophobic because I can't drive anywhere by myself or run out for milk or take my daughter to school. A fourth Type A part of me is annoyed because I'm the one who constantly picks up the piles around the house and I can't carry so much as a coffee cup and if this house turns into a set from Hoarder's I'm going to open a can of whoop-ass. But then another part of me knows I can't because my husband and daughter have to take care of me for who knows how long and that is a pain in the ass no matter how well-meaning you are.
So there's all that.
Then on the way out of the doctor's office we came upon a little old lady with a portable oxygen tank. She asked if we could please drive her to her car because she'd gone Christmas shopping that day and her husband passed a way a year and a half ago and she'd tired herself out. Of course we drove her to her car and my husband walked her to the door and I stuffed my broken leg and my crutches in the car and gave myself another firm lecture in perspective.
And yes, this isn't the Crisis Olympics, but I know quite a few people who have to have surgery in the next few weeks, so I'm definitely not alone in that. We all have our shit.
I'm going to try to view this as an opportunity to not freak out and prove to myself things can go wrong without my carefully constructed world going to hell in a hand basket. But it's hard.
Like really hard.
I found myself being super happy I went to the gym on Friday because it's going to be who knows how long before I can walk again. Life changes, just like that.
Turning the lights out. Checking to see the doors are locked. Kissing the cat's furry head, watching as he shifts in his sleep and sometimes (if I'm lucky) sighs.
Pausing at the bottom of the stairs, listening, for what I never know, but I always do. Stopping into the playroom to peek at the almost ten-year-old hermit crabs whose claws clack against the glass of their tank as they make their way about their business.
Feeling my way over stuffed animals, paperbacks, discarded clothing and hangers to the bookshelf at the edge of my daughter's bed. Blindly groping for the sharp corners, the desk chair, the air cleaner and anything else that could injure me as I make my way to the head of her bed and kiss her sleeping cheek.
Turning on the bathroom fan and the shower with two different hands at the same time. Tossing clothes in the hamper and shuffling around for what passes as pajamas depending on the season. Stepping into the steam and washing off the day, rubbing tea tree oil conditioner into my scalp, rinsing off bubbles and wrapping myself in a towel. Staring in the mirror as I wash my face with the special old-lady soap that's supposed to reverse the effects of one too many peeling sunburns in my youth. Brushing my teeth with the fancy electronic toothbrush that plugs in and works way better than the hundreds of dollars of battery-operated ones I used to have. Slipping on a tshirt, padding to the bed, tossing off extra pillows, setting the alarm.
Sliding between the covers and adjusting my pillow and concentrating on relaxing my neck muscles, my tongue, my forehead. Sometimes realizing the moment my body heat begins to warm the air pockets I intentionally make around my shoulders on cold nights. Listening to the tick of the clock.
Closing my eyes.
These are the things I do before I go to sleep at night.
Today's #BlogHerWritingLab prompt is:
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Do you end your day the same way every day? What are your nighttime traditions?
Today's #BlogHerWritingLab prompt is: What food do you always reject on the holiday table? Why?
Well, remember how I said I loved the German cookie springerle? I really can't stand the German candied bread that can be used as currency in my family. Like currency, like I can trade it like cold, hard cash.
Stollen takes approximately seven years to make and is full of candied fruits and raisins. You make it into little loaves that my father hoards like bricks of gold. It can be eaten at any time of day, for breakfast, as a snack, with dinner, as dessert (like bacon).
And I can't stand it. Maybe it's the taste, maybe it's the texture of things being embedded in my bread (I don't like raisin toast, either), maybe it's rebellion against the idea that we must all love this crazy-ass holiday food.
I also won't eat mashed potatoes, any vegetable topped with marshmallows, cranberry sauce or gravy.
You?
Today's #BlogHerWritingLab prompt is: Finish this sentence with your favourite food: "The holidays are not complete without..."
My answer is: springerle. They are German cookies that have cool patterns and I never liked them until my mom made them a different way about ten years ago and suddenly they were fluffy instead of hard and I fell in endless love with them. I remember we had both the embossed rolling pin and the little wooden blocks. I have yet to make them myself because my mother is still making them for me, but she bought me my own rolling pin for when the day comes I have to fend for myself. Which I will, because even though I'm the one in the family who rarely eats the sweets but hoovers the Chex mix, springerle is important to me. Here's my rolling pin.
