My Ankle Needs To Get Over Itself

Seriously. I can only get around with crutches. As my daughter points out, I am terrible with crutches. I wobble, I careen around. The dogs both scramble out of my way as soon as they hear the sound of my crutches. I can't carry anything. Well, I can carry things that I can suspend from my fingers as I'm holding the crutch handles. Imagine yourself unable to walk straight and with no useful way to transport things and see what you can accomplish in a day. Plus I'm so out of shape now that my heart actually starts pounding a little when I stand up for more than five minutes. I know, I know, I'm going to work on that.

Since surgery I have repeatedly asked my husband to please do one of three things for my ankle: first choice, grab one of those Star Trek medical doodads and run it over my bones so they will knit up pronto and apparently painlessly; second choice, cross one arm over the other, blink hard and nod (like the genie in pink); or third, wriggle his nose, making that little "tinkle-tinkle-tink!" musical sound (like Sabrina). I'd go with Star Trek first because, hey, it's Star Trek, and also the other two potential cures seem to make the world jerk sideways a bit, and always go hilariously wrong for twenty minutes. His only response to my impassioned requests is to say that the late 60's clearly had a lot of wish-fulfillment fantasies. Dork. He doesn't even try.

On account of diligent practice, I can now move my hoof up and down and side to side, but not as far as it used to go. It is not far enough yet that I could walk, but I'll keep pointing and flexing. Maybe by the time the doctor says, "go," I might be able to. My foot turns beet red every time I put it on the floor. When I show him, my husband points out that I have soft tissue damage, too, so what can I expect.

I'm off pain meds, huzzah! The only real pain now is stinging from the skin being stretched too hard over the scarred areas and screws, which makes me make faces when I do my exercises, and weird twangy nerve jumping when I put my foot on the floor. To which my husband again replies that I have soft tissue damage and I should just be patient.

You can imagine what a comfort he is to me.

love,

cat