One Month Remaining

One month from today, I will have major, life-altering orthopedic surgery involving a stay at the hospital lasting multiple days, a stint in the wheelchair, months of struggling with stairs and perhaps the world's least attractive medical device. I feel really quite calm about it, much more so than I did a month ago. Then, I felt like the entire world was piling up and I was trapped beneath a massive wave, an accumulation of detritus and objectives and future stressors.

But now?

Now I'm sitting on my bed in loose-fitting jeans and a comfortable t-shirt. My legs are crossed in front of me. I'm breathing easily. Outside, temperatures have plunged into the realm of uncomfortable (even when one is armed with warm jackets and scarves). But inside four solid walls, I'm really quite comfortable, thank you very much.

Perhaps this calmness is because said procedure will provide a cure to one of my current afflictions. My right ankle currently exists in a perpetual state of twistedness. Most of this twistedness seems to come from my leaping around on stairs like a lunatic. Yesterday, however, I was standing on the stairs. I was not moving. And…the ankle twisted. I'm fairly certain that the geometry of the leg leads to problems with the ankle (the interior of my right shoe is built up to help keep the foot happy). With my friend the frame, the geometry of the leg will be fixed. Hence, no more ankle twisting.

Perhaps this calmness is because I just received hopeful tidings regarding life immediately post-frame. One of my friends' mother recently broke her leg, shattering her tibia and fibula (from what I understand) and had a frame put on. On Monday, the frame was taken off. Apparently life immediately post-frame is somewhat straightforward to adjust to. This bodes well.

Or perhaps this calmness is simply because I just spent five days lounging around the house, trying to chill out. It's telling that my major accomplishment over Thanksgiving was finishing The Stand (1400 pages later and, despite the book very clearly ending, I've spent enough time reading it that I'm not fully convinced I actually turned the last page). Which is to say, I'm rested now.

There are still unknowns ahead. The pre-op appointment has yet to be scheduled. Despite doing my best to read up on how it feels to have your leg impaled by a Taylor Spatial Frame, I'm not really prepared for such an occurrence. I struggle with the idea of being unable to walk.

But…again, I'm calm.

Will the experience be interesting? Undoubtedly. But I should also survive, fairly easily, to tell the tale. And, in the end, my leg will be straighter.

And, hopefully, my ankle will have escaped its current state of perpetual twistedness.