A Rough Day

Today was a rough one.

The morning started with Lin and her husband coming over to say goodbye after spending their last night in their house as our neighbors. Today they closed on the sale of that house and Lin's husband left for Colorado. Lin is still here for a few more days with the kids and then she's gone, too.

She brought me this: because she is evil and likes to see me cry.

My heart hurts.

Speaking of her kids, her son was injured in a freak accident at skateboarding camp last week on the day before the movers came. The accident had, naturally, nothing at all to do with skateboarding. Someone threw a gimme cap at him and the brim of the hat caught him across the eye, cutting his cornea and causing a hemorrhage. He's been confined to a dim room and unable to do anything for five days. He goes back to the doctor tomorrow (Wednesday) to find out if he gets the all-clear or if there is still a danger of him losing sight in that eye. If you are a praying person, could you send some prayers his way? His name is Joseph and he is 12 (or he might have turned 13, I can't remember) and I'm praying very hard myself that the worst thing that happens to him is that he had to stay in bed for five days in the middle of summer vacation.

But, you know, back to me: (because this blog is all about me and more me. And then more me. And oh look, ME.) I did what I always do when I get sad. The girls and I went plant shopping (they wanted more vegetables to grow) and then we spent some time planting them. I always feel better when I get my hands in some dirt. I'm sure there is some deep psychological reason for this but honestly, I don't care what it is.

Anyway, I forgot to take pictures because the girls started bickering and Ana did something so uncharacteristically mean and underhanded to Jane that it took all the wind out of my sails. She made me promise not to blog about it, which ALSO made me feel really terrible.

Because, of course, I was already writing that post in my head.

SO, she lost her computer privileges for a week and then we had piano lessons and Jane ate 2/3 of a pan of veggie lasagna (she scrapes the vegetables off but I have hope she's ingesting SOMETHING that might count as a vegetable) and my husband came home and I left to go to my appointment with my foot doctor in Queens.

I am fortified with chardonnay and gummi bears so I can tell you the bad foot thing to which I had alluded here is that my New York doctor examined the series of x-rays that my Austin doctor had taken over the course of my treatment and noticed a marked and rapid deterioration of my heel joint.

It's going to have to be fused, which means more screws installed in my foot, at some point.

Tonight, he took his OWN x-rays (dudes, I've had so many x-rays by now that I could practically generate my own Northern Lights) and showed me exactly what he meant.

It's not so good.

And the REASON it's not so good is that as soon as those bones are fused in my foot, you can start the countdown. Within five years, I will need my ankle bones fused.

Tonight I asked, "And then what?" and he was sort of vague. He said, "Well, there are no good options for joint replacement of the ankle and then it just starts progressing up from there." ( I didn't ask any more because, hello, Fear of CRYING Alert.)

So, it seems to me that since my very mobility is in question, the best thing to do is to put off for as long as possible this next fusion, right? So, we're starting with a full 3D CT scan next week so we know what we're dealing with and to see if we can't figure out a way to slow the joint deterioration down.

Oh, and while we're at it? I'm wearing lifts in my shoes to address the tendinitis in my Achilles tendon that I've developed and the OTHER foot has this very strange dressing on it for the plantar fasciitis I've developed in IT. Because I thought it would be fun to try to figure out how to limp when BOTH feet hurt.

Could my life BE more glamorous?

But seriously, you want to know something? I think I figured it out, this foot thing. When I got the news about my heel, I got really, seriously, hide-the-scissors-before-I-cut-my-hair-myself depressed. My limited mobility over the past year and a half has had an adverse effect on my life. I'm not the active mom I was. I have a limited number of steps in my day and I tend to hoard them. Sometimes I don't go back up the stairs to tuck my kids in back in bed. Sometimes I have to stay home when I could be going on field trips or other adventures. Sometimes I have a momentary impulse to run over those cute young things I see jogging so blithely down the road. It's been very hard. The thought of losing even the mobility I DO have is rather devastating to me.

But I think I understand the lesson out of all this. You know how I always need to try to make some sort of sense out of why things happen, right? (Okay, so sometimes I just make them right up out of thin air. So sue me.)

I think the lesson is that I need to stop waiting around for some sort of miraculous healing to occur before I start living my life again. It's not going to happen. This may be as good as it gets.

So, by golly, I need to get off my kiester and start using the muscles I do have. My feet have not really affected my stomach muscles-- hello! There's no reason I should be working out the muscles there or in my arms or my back or...um, my BRAIN. I've been ON HOLD for over a year now. It's time to be a Jamaican bobsledder--I mean, did THEY give up just because of a little thing like a lack of freezing temperatures? It's time to stop making excuses and to start making some progress.

And you know what? On my way back from the doctor? I saw a guy on a Harley wearing a Broken Spoke T-shirt. Clearly, that's a sign that I'm on the right track.