Captain obvious (me) is
going to state the obvious - I haven’t posted very much about the medical
aspect of things over the past month. Why? Who knows… Clearly I have been able
to post about other things, like the awesomeness that is my moose hat, my impressive
colouring skills as evidenced by my ability to colour within the lines and my
great love of comfy pajama pants and slipper socks. So the lack of updates can’t
be put down to sheer laziness. Given a topic I like or doing something fun is
motivation enough to post something for everyone to read. But updates regarding
my leg and the nasty infected cells in my tibia that started all this nonsense have
been lacking despite several doctor's appointment having come and gone. In my little
world (which has shrunken drastically given my inability to walk without
crutches), I could just pick up from this moment and keep blogging – everything
would make perfect sense to me. But then, of course it would because I have
actually lived through it. Honestly, not enough happens in my life right now to
get the details mixed up. But it probably won’t make much sense to you. And
what point is there to a blog if the reader doesn’t know what is going on? So
now I sit here, racking my brain, trying to remember exactly what was said and
done, when and where and by whom.
If I am honest with
myself, I know exactly why I haven’t been blogging about my health. Sweet and
simple, I just don’t want to. Like a picture of an ostrich with its head in a
bucket of dirt that was pinned to a cork board in the kitchen years ago, I am hiding.
I am literally buried under a pile of pillows and blankets right now. My
doctors focus on the physical aspect of things – they poke at my leg and ask me
if it hurts, they examine my x rays and monitor my blood work, they work
together to come up with a plan that will get me up and walking someday. But I
am more than a walking talking warm lump of meat to be cut open, tinkered around
in, and stitched up. I am a human being and I have thoughts and feelings and
fears and worries. And right now, that person doesn’t feel like she can handle
very much more. And yet I still have so much more coming my way, and sometimes it
feels like it is running towards me like an angry bull. Except it’s not just one
bull; it is a herd of them in a narrow ally and I have nowhere to run, no side
street to back into for cover, no balcony to safely watch from.
I think of the next surgery
and the dreaded external fixator countless times a day; I fear the pain and
infection risk that the fixator poses; I worry that I won’t be mentally strong
enough to get through the next six months. I have always been brave and strong
(even when I didn’t know it). I have dealt with everything so calmly and
patiently over the last ten years. But over the past year things have started
to break – I am antsy instead of calm, I am impatient, not patient, I am pissed
off and angry, not good tempered. I worry and anticipate more than I hope. And
that makes me incredibly sad. I want to remember what life was like before I
broke my leg and before I got sick. But there is nothing to remember – it was
too long ago, I was too young. I can’t even dream about being healthy; my
dreams are filled with surgeries, hospitals, doctors, and worst case scenarios.
I’m not kidding. That is what I dream about every night. Sleep, the sweet
escape it once was, has become an extension of the rest of my life. And my
doctors can’t fix that. They can ask me how I am doing every three weeks or two
months or at whatever interval I see them, they can cut into my flesh and saw
my bones in half, they can write prescriptions for pain medications or
antibiotics, and they can order all the scans they like, but a they can’t make all of
this ok. So instead of trying to deal with it all, which seems ridiculously
impossible given how long I have been dealing with this health issue, I have
been hiding instead. It is too much, and I want to save my energy for coping
when it matters the most, and that time is not right now. Right now is just a
lull between the waves. So I have been, or am, hiding.
But where does that
leave my blog? That is a really good question. This blog is still the place I
created way back in 2011 to record my journey with my bone infection and I
still intend to record that journey (even when things get tough for a while).
But at the same time, I still want to hide my head in the ground and pretend
like I don’t know what is going on around the rest of me (with my luck, some
kid has probably stuck a “kick me” sign to my butt and a curious groups of
beach goers has collected around me as an avid teenager prepares to kick me
butt). Clearly, pretending to be clueless about my medical situation is folly
and it is important to keep even the briefest, most vague description of what
is going on. So while I keep pretending to hide, the next posts will be a bullet
style updates of the last few doctor’s appointments. That way, we will all know exactly
what is up at the moment, I will have a record for my blog (and myself), and then I can go back
to screaming “lalalala” and pretending that everything is ok even though the
fact that I can’t walk screams that it is not.
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