ENDGAME, PART I: THE WEIGHT OF THE FRAME
The one year anniversary of when I met the Taylor Spatial Frame is in eight days. That first encounter was in a hospital waiting room. It was the day after Christmas, 2012 and I had spent the past too many months in a state of panic regarding the fact that it was time to straighten my leg. Well, not so much panic at the thought of my leg being straightened (that I was fine with), but panic at the through of my leg being transfixed with metal pins.
On its own, the frame wasn't all that bad. Sure, it wasn't about to win any prizes for beauty, but then again, the external fixator was thought up as more of a functional device than an aesthetic wonder. The two ring structure held up by metal struts worked well enough. And at any rate, it was simple enough and plenty sturdy. It worked.
And I'd argue that it looked a whole lot better like this:
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| Frame (weight: approx. 2.5 pounds), begging an 11˚ correction and still without a leg to trap |
Than like this:
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| The frame, gleefully claiming the leg. The main contributor to its decline in beauty would be the hardware store additions which attach it to the pins poking out of my skin |
I spent six days in a hospital bed and another five months flitting from couch to chair to bed. Within a period of weeks, I was able to get around without my wheelchair, which was big, bulky awkward and not particularly well-loved. Within a period of months, I was able to totter around without my walker, though the walker remained nearby, just in case. Mercifully, I never slipped and fell with the device on my leg, an event which could have been disastrous.
The first bit was, not surprisingly, the worst. The first day or so in the hospital was spent dutifully raising a massive blister. The remaining time in the hospital was spent abandoning intravenous pain medications for oral medications (and keeping an eye on the blister).
I still remember leaving the hospital. After six days, all of which more or less spent lying in a bed, sometimes watching television, sometimes sleeping, sometimes eating hospital food, it was invigorating just to leave. Yeah, I wasn't 100% sold on the car ride home (less then two weeks previously I'd been in my father's car when it slipped on some ice and was totaled and besides, I was worried about the roads, toughing out another Minnesota winter, would jostle the leg uncomfortably), but the snow outside the window sparkled and I was free.
At home, I lived downstairs, mostly in the back room with Sunny the often-sleeping golden retriever and the television. Though I'd entertained dreams of, you know, being productive and reading while stuck with the device, mostly I watched movies. When it was time to get cleaned, I used a sort of sitting-hop motion to make my way up the stairs, backward, the frame held protectively in the air.
Before too long, I returned to school, which helped considerably. With actual coursework to get through, the boredom was greatly reduced, though not even close to eliminated.
And in the spring, after some negotiations with my parents and surgeon, I showed up to help out with track, which helped even more, giving me crucial time spent outside.
On May 3, 2013, the day of the final snow of the never-ending Minnesota winter of 2012-2013, the frame was removed.
Which is really where this particular story begins.
One of the things I haven't mentioned quite so much about the frame seems incredibly obvious. For more than half a year (once you take the post-frame full leg splint into account), my motion was incredibly limited. Stairs were, for the most part, beyond me. Certainly walking with any speed at all or for any distance at all was well beyond my capabilities (if I recall, there was a time or two where I learned that if I walked too far, the pin sites bled a bit). And during that time I was still cheerfully placing too-large quantities of food down my throat.
I wasn't in particularly good shape when I was wheeled into the operating room for the frame's placement. The situation had only worsened when it was time to take the frame off. When I was weight before the surgery to determine the proper dosage of anesthesia, I recall somebody mentioning that I'd put on ten pounds. Not a huge amount of weight, I suppose, but considering how distrustful I'd been of physical activity beforehand…
By the time the splint came off, my BMI was officially (albeit barely) out of the "normal" range and into the "overweight" range.
It was a startling moment. My three younger brothers are all varsity-level (high school) swimmers, one of whom goes to national meets. I've spent enormous amounts of time at track practice with some incredibly gifted athletes. Among my friends, the picture is similar.
And then there's me. Prior to the frame, as I've mentioned, I wasn't in particularly good shape. At all. I was much more likely to focus on the latest academic assignment or spend my time gliding from web page or web page or picking up a new book to read or a magazine or something or watching a movie or… There was a large part of me which wanted to use my orthopedic woes as reasonable enough excuses for my complete and utter inability to get my act together and take care of my body. To be fair, there were some things I did. My attendance at track was a point of personal pride and I consistently put as much effort as I possibly could.
But at the same time, there was so much more I wanted to do. For a while, I had a list of roughly three goals I wanted to accomplish. The list was never written down, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a major factor in my life. As follows,
1) Don't be fat (yes, I know it sounds callous, but that's the way the list worked)
2) Run a mile in less than 10 minutes
3) Run a 5K, start to finish
Looking at my list now, it seems at once callous and harsh and completely, utterly, devastatingly reasonable. I made a major dent in the list in eighth grade, when I finished a mile in 9 minutes, 19 seconds. But as far as goal number one (which alternately manifested itself as "don't be fat" and "be in reasonable shape") and goal number three, by the time the frame was attached, no progress.
By the time the frame came off, less progress. Well, less direct progress. I'd regressed in goal number one, but the frame also robbed me of many of my excuses by opening my horizons in regards to physical activity and provided a major motivator (let us be perfectly clear: I did not go through the five month experience for nothing), not to mention reducing the possibility of very early arthritis.
As far as the third goal…I spent a lot more time thinking about it than I'd like to readily admit. If you look through Leg Plus Frame, the blog I kept while the frame was on, the concept rears its head a couple of times. Once, while talking to a classmate about the blog, I mentioned that I'd like to stop the blog when I'd run a 5K. I'd taken goal number three to heart.
I had decided I would not consider myself properly, fully recovered from the frame until I had run a 5K from start to finish.
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