Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The One-Legged, Blue-haired Wonder

Well, this has not been as I had expected. The day after my last post (remember the one where I reported that I was just starting to get my life back and planned to run, horseback ride, go on vacation, etc?), I ruptured my calf muscle. It tore something fierce and I was slave to the crutches for approximately three weeks thereafter.

"What happened?" I heard asked over, and over, and over again. Evidently, there's nothing like crutches to make the etiology of your injury public knowledge. I told a couple folks I had injured the leg saving a frail old lady from a runaway school bus. Once, I replied it was running from the cops (both stories recycled from a riding injury circa '00). But, to put things to rest, here's what really happened: I went to start running, in bad shoes, without a warm up, on a bit of a hill, and POP my calf muscle just snapped. I felt it, maybe heard it, and couldn't even step on that leg for days afterward. It was the size of a tree trunk and took at least a week to ten days to come back to something resembling a normal leg, and by then the rainbow colors started sprouting. A grade two or three medial gastrocs tear is the likely diagnosis and physical therapy will hopefully return my gait back to something resembling normal. If not, an MRI and surgical consult is the next step.

Thusly, my week-long Vancouver vacation turned into a two day trip, mostly in the car and within a two block radius of our swank hotel. It was lovely seeing Lisa and Wendy (last seen in Melbourne, Australia February of Aught-Seven), eating Vancouver sushi, ice cream, and sitting in the sun. It had been too long since I last saw those two. Remind me why we haven't invented teleportation yet?

The first part of the month, the part where I dosed on NSAID's and spent my time on the couch trying not to throb or spasm, I spent working on a GLMA project. I spent probably 60 hours over the two weeks entering names into the databases, confirming addresses and locations and hospital affiliations. And now, after all that work, I can officially say GLMA has a mentorship program. I matched a bunch of students with mentors, notified them of their match and now am working on what I will be doing about this program at the national conference for this initiative I've been trying to get off the ground for two years! So being couch-bound, I suppose, had some advantages.

I'm still having residency nightmares, as if my subconscious still mentally sweating off the toxins of three years of torture. I'm slowly catching up on my sleep. I am working on not going stir crazy being unable to exercise or move around in any significant way. Naturally, I do get occasionally peeved, because after years of reassuring myself "it's going to be over," just "suck it up" for so many years, months, days, hours, here I am, at last free from the clutches of indentured servitude yet now trapped in a different way. Thankfully, the injury should heal okay, I hopefully won't need any surgery, I may even go back to being able to jog like it never happened. Maybe. And, I am thankful Karin's employer allows domestic partner health insurance coverage. And I remind myself, just because I'm not doing what I had planned or hoped to do, doesn't mean this isn't a hell of a lot better than sleepless 30 hour shifts and getting abused by drug-seeking patients who aren't getting what they want!

Around the 19th or 20th of the month, at the same time that Karin's 11-year-old niece arrived from Minnesota for her first real city visit, I graduated from crutches to cane and I was able to partake in all the originally planned adventures with minor adjustments! Shortly before that I had died my hair brilliant blue shades and glorified in being a new definition of a blue-haired little lady with a cane! We attended the most amazing Seattle Storm game in the history of professional sporting events! The Storm was victorious by one point thanks to a jump ball win and a stolen rebound in the last few minutes of the game. I enjoyed a Seattle Farmer's Market and a community theatrical production of The Music Man. I took a 5-hour private tour of the fabulous Woodland Park Zoo (via wheelchair as pictured above) and fed the giraffe, explored behind the scenes and learned amazing secrets of the place.

We also took a three-day camping adventure to Lopez Island in the San Juans which was gorgeous, and I ditched the cane and tried my hand at hiking a little. Slowly, carefully, I picked my way through woods, across beaches and driftwood, and held my own pretty well. Also spent a good amount of time resting and reading as evidenced at left.

Last weekend, after returning from camping, I unpacked my camping gear, packed the essentials right back up, and flew to Michigan for a very short stay where I attended the memorial service of Dr. Hugh Walker, one of those chosen family members, at whose house my Jewish family Christmased each year. It was a lovely ecumenical service at a Humanistic Jewish Temple with Gospel and bag pipes, flute, Walt Witman and so much more. Then back onto an airplane and shuttled another 2,000 miles back to Seattle to my life here.

Upon my return from Michigan, jet lagged, I lamented that I am now resigned to having lost a battle with a cold and Karin pointed out that perhaps the universe is trying to tell me to slow the heck down. That was just one of many lessons learned this month. While I have many obligations with non-profits and grassroots organizations and have previously had such a demanding "job" of being a resident, I now can recalibrate and reassess. The whirlwind of the last two weeks with a child in tow, the memorial service, as well as the realization that my wedding is coming up in less than year now, has made me think carefully about the old saying, "don't sweat the small stuff." I've decided I'm going to reel in pieces of me that are scattered throughout and redistribute this fall, focusing on home, family, and my own well-being above all else.


And, along that vein, Karin and I will be sending Save-the-Date info on our wedding soon now that our engagement pictures are complete. You can read more about the shoot at the photographer, Heather's, website here.

Labels: , , , ,