Regarding Pressure

So. It probably would make sense at some point to mention a few things about me. Namely, who I am in a general sense of the word.

Who I am at the moment is a high school senior attending an overly competitive Minneapolis independent school with fewer than 48 hours to go until I submit my first college applications. I also have fewer than two months before my entire academic performance more or less tanks (or maybe not? it'll be interesting…from the looks of things, I'll be missing a solid amount of classes with my friend the frame). Simply put, my expectations for myself are high. Way too high.

At which point it makes sense to mention the first major impact my friend the frame has had on my life. This thing has added so much pressure to my interior expectations for myself. It has added a ticking time bomb to the timeline of my accomplishments.

T-3 months.

T-2 months.

And so on.

What happens when the timer reaches zero, I have no clue (I mean, I sort of know—I'll be put under general anesthesia, wheeled into the operating room and have a frame placed on/in my leg). But what I'll do with it on…well, therein lies the interesting bit.

I don't know what I'll do with the frame on.

Which is why, at the moment, I'm determined to push myself past pushing. Seize the moments I have left for academic performance. Go—go—go—go. Dominate these next seven weeks (or however many it actually is). Build up a reserve of goodwill.

Less than two months and counting.

I wish I could just relax.

First Post: Two Months Remaining

There’s this image I haven’t been able to get out of my head. It's funny: some days I see it in tones of sepia, sometimes in full-blown oversaturated color, but the basics remain the same. Some days I look at it and know it's not true and other days I all I want is for my image to be true.

Here it is: a leg, encased by ropes, drenched by sunlight pouring in through an open window. What the sunlight reveals is that, beneath the ropes, the leg isn’t straight. It’s crooked. Deformed. And off in the corner, there’s a lever attached to the ropes by a series of gears and wheels and pulleys. Somebody pulls that lever. The ropes tighten. Pieces in the leg rearrange themselves, fit themselves together just like they were supposed to fit in the first place. Problem solved.

The ropes come off and the whole world can see a nice, straight leg.

Look. I know it’s a fantasy. I know it’s wish-fulfillment. I know that in real life the ropes would do nothing, and if they did blood vessels in the leg would stretch and burst and perhaps the entire thing would need to be amputated.

My leg is crooked.

I have a disease, multiple osteochondromas (that’s how I think it’s how you spell it, though I could be horribly off) that causes my bones to spur off in a multitude of interesting directions. The spurs look rather fascinating on x-ray, like the dribblings of half-melted candlesticks or the landscape of some alien planet. But they also get in the way of joints and in the way of the growth plates in my leg, resulting in the aforementioned limb crookedness.

Two months from today, I will be undergoing somewhat elective surgery to try and straighten my right leg. The procedure involves removing wedges of bone and applying something called a Taylor Spatial Frame to the leg. More on that later.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had surgery. To be honest, I don’t know how many times I’ve been wheeled back to the operating room to have my body opened up with sterile surgical knives. I try not to keep track of numbers like that. This is, however, the first time I’ve had anything like a Taylor Spatial Frame, the first time I'll have a souvenir to lug around post-op other than a swiftly healing incision.

To put it one way: I’m scared. I think I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. And that’s why I’m writing this blog. Other people have documented their experiences with these frames, but I figure the more information out there, the better. If I can ease anybody’s uncertainty about this process, provide any helpful tidbits or factoids, well, mission accomplished.

There's another reason I'm writing this. I'm writing because words have power. Perhaps not the power to straighten the leg without a frame, but the power to comfort.