My Latest Challenge

Yes, my silence since the last post means that I’ve been working on my novel.

I’ve had limited writing-hours and have been focusing on what I’ve thought most-important at the time (meeting the kids last week helped with that).

As much as my dropping stats pull at me, I don’t want to feel obligated to post just to post, so I won’t pretend this blog is *important* to anybody but me.

Speaking of personal stuff, now that it’s past I can tell about my latest “trial and tribulation:”

I twisted my ankle severely on the 18th of March.

I know the date because I had 3 hours of errands to run with my kids that morning, and one of them was to pick up Enchanted on its DVD release date.

Well, we did the three hours of errands and got the movie— all after I jumped off the porch and landed my full weight on the side of my foot— but I must have been building up pain for when I got home.

I got the kids down for nap though I was hobbling by that point.

Afterwards I was under ice with my foot up for the rest of the night, but I don’t think it stopped hurting before 10 or 11.

It was interesting to watch the coping mechanisms pile up.

  • Jay came home early from work and went in late for several days.
  • I learned to quit caring about what the house looked like.
  • We saw Enchanted three. times. before it went back. It was a one-day rental.
  • I bought a higher percentage of fast food while Jay was gone on his (5-day!) snow machining trip.

~

Pain always seems to surprise me.

I’ve had three babies, cut myself (not on purpose), even burned part of my lashes and eyebrows off (another story, also not on purpose), and every time I feel surprised.

The odd bump, a child’s innocent climbing, could elicit a gasp and over-protectiveness for the next half-hour.

~ ~ ~

The frustrating thing about a foot/ankle/leg injury is that it affects your whole life.

Even if you break your dominant hand, it seems you wouldn’t have to slow down much: your weak hand learns to cover for you. With your leg out of commission you are literally off-ballance and it affects everything.

I couldn’t make dinner, clean house or (for a while) even fold laundry.

Yes, I could sit to fold, but there was no surface on which to lay clean-folded laundry (some of you know what I mean), and I couldn’t create any such surface myself.

I found myself in a state of almost greater dependence than I did last summer when I had pneumonia. At that time I was laid up in bed, physically weak and occasionally brain-fogged. I had reason to be sick (lungs not functioning efficiently) and so could understand my limitation.

This time my brain was not the least affected, and literally the only thing wrong with me was a little 2-3inch patch on my left side.

Very frustrating.

I coped by falling in love with a whole new T.V. show on Hulu, but that led to Jay being frustrated with his (mostly) able-bodied wife sitting around watching T.V. all day (never happened before).

The one positive thing was being personally aware of the limitation I had placed on my main character in giving her a club foot. I started thinking of my favoring and lifting in the framework of “long-term.”

As in, I’m just doing this for a few weeks, so this will make do, but she’s been doing this her whole life, so what’s different?

It provided the illusion that I was productive in at least one area of my life. And that helped, sometimes.

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