*clears throat*

It is my great pleasure to announce today that my external fixator will be coming off on the fourteenth of June, alomst seven months after it was put on. Now that I'm almost at the end of it, I start to realize how long that actually is. You don't really realize how much time has past when you are living from one appointment to the next or, perhaps more accurately, one set of x-rays to the next. This is especially so when you are not given a hard outline of the treatment - nothing is static or certain regarding treatment with an external fixator, so there is little use in having fixed dates. As a result, one month just melds into the next, This is especially so when appointments are at regular and frequent introvals. Life becomes measured in two or three week bits of time and the line of thought "We will get to the next appointment and see where things go from there" is not uncommon. On the contrary, it is quite common indeed. So the realization that so much time has gone by is a bit of a shock. This is, I think, understandable. At some point life's horizons begin to expand again; appointments are made at less frequent intravals; perhaps health and a feeling of well-being is restored. Life is no longer determined by an illness that forces you to consider the short term part of things. You start thinking further in advance, making plans, setting goals, thinking about the future, actually creating a life for yourself, not merely sitting by as life happens to other people. All of a sudeen there are months, if not years, to dream about instead of the three week incraments your life has been lived in, governed by appointments and procedures. I think that this realization is both beautiful and sad. Beautiful because it offers the opprotunity to live a fuller life, to rediscover things you used to overlook but now seem interesting, worthy of awe and admiration, a moment of your time. But sadness, because you are confronted with that first moment of realization that you have lost so much time due to something you neither wanted or could control. It's just that lost isn't quite the right word. Loss implies that something is gone and while I have felt that way at times when I felt so ill or was so worried about my health that only glimmers of my life remained, there was still a life that I was living. Different than what I desired, yes, but none the less full of wonder, kindness, beauty, albeit all the not so fun stuff crammed in between. I'm not really sure where I am going with this anymore, so I will keep it short and end with this: what will amount to almost seven months with the external fixator is much, much more than the three to four, talmost insignificant in comparison, that was intiially expected. I think I will be a little bit sad when it goes. In a wierd way, I think it has become part of my body (and defintiely part of who I am for all that it has taught me and put me through). It has also acted as asurance that my missing bone could be regrown and that I could walk again, and a securtiy net as I have waited for the new bone to grow and harden and stay in the correct spot. But most of all I am happy to soon be rid of this hassle, excited to continue with my plans and see my hopes become reality, and so incredibly thrilled to start living my life in incraments of more than a the span of a few weeks. I think that overshawdows everything else, and I hope that what I have written here conveys the happiness in my heart.