Tag Archives: broken foot

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Immobility: The Mother of Activity

How much can you do from the confines of the couch? Twenty years ago, the answer would have been, “Not very much.” Unless you knew how to knit, or had a lengthy telephone cord (remember the one fixed to the wall in the kitchen with the thirty feet of coiled cord?), there was little else to do from the couch but sit and ruminate. Considering how the Internet has changed everything in a very short amount of time, I find myself wishing I was recovering from foot surgery twenty years ago rather than in our progressive present.

Shaved? Check. Bandaged? Check. Orange? Check.

My bandaged foot is propped in front of me, unwilling to accept any weight yet. There’s a tray next to me with various medicines and doctor’s orders – an empty yogurt cup lies next to me, waiting on my poor nurse to clear it. However, despite my pathetic immobility, my laptop is where its name implies it should be, and the Internet is working. Thus, the world is my oyster, even if I’m not currently in the mood for seafood.

Since collapsing onto the couch – that which I have appointed as my recovery spot – I have not been able to escape responsibilities. In the past twenty-four hours, I have sent e-mails requesting information on various rentable rooms for when Leigh and I welcome visitors in the coming weeks, I have sought to gather all the relevant information on our little Renault Clio in order to finally sell the darn thing, I have tended to our finances, I have read the day’s major headlines, I have researched my medication, I have scheduled a doctor’s appointment for later today, and I have continued the drudgery of a seemingly never-ending job search. All this from the semi-comfort of the couch, with nothing more than a computer and a telephone. I find this both remarkable and disconcerting.

Remarkable because despite being unable to walk, I have done more in the last twenty-four hours than some people do all week. Disconcerting because a certain thought has begun to nag at me: When did life become so involved and cluttered that simply lying back and waiting for my foot to heal would mean falling behind on a half-dozen different tasks? It makes me feel uneasy to realize that despite already doing so much, I am still behind in several things. There are still some grades to upload (thankfully, it’s Spring Break, so I’m not missing any classes while I recover from surgery), lesson plans to write, contacts to make regarding our impending move back to the States – oh, and that ever-elusive job to find, apply for, and hope to procure an interview. In the “olden days,” all that would have gone untended was my crops. Twenty years ago, some of these issues would still be pressing, but the absence of Internet would have found me dealing with them at a much slower, perhaps more manageable pace. The times aren’t simply “a-changing” anymore – rather, it seems transformation has come in quantum leaps and bounds.

As I wait for the swollen foot to shrink and the pain to lessen so I can actually take a few steps, I am certainly not hurting for things to do. And it’s a good thing, because it seems if I were to take myself out of this game for even a day, our world might cave in. I’m not so sure that this is a good thing, but, for now, it is reality.

Life in the present – maybe some dull pain in between medications, but never a dull moment.

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Dr. Ultrasound

Dem bones

As mentioned in an earlier post, I am waiting on a broken bone in my left foot to mend. Every night, I strap an odd device to the injured area, squirt some ultrasound jelly on a small sensor, apply it to my foot and turn on the electronic machine that apparently sends some sort of low-intensity ultrasound wave (signal? beam? photon? midi-chlorians?) that is supposed to stimulate bone growth. During the twenty-minute treatment, I feel nothing, nor do I notice much difference ever since the pain slacked off a few weeks ago. All I know is, girls’ soccer season starts March 7 and I intend to be out there on the field, in my cleats, mixing it up. If I have to put some strange, hoodoo devil contraption on my foot to accomplish this, so be it.

Seriously, though, I’ve grown quite weary of this injury, which was sustained on November 19 of last year. I’m told that this particular bone (the fifth metatarsal) doesn’t heal very fast naturally if it heals at all. While I am not a fan of surgery, at this point I would have gladly gone under the knife if it meant I could be walking normally to and from my classes, exercising without some silly modifications, and playing indoor soccer with the other “geezers” on Sunday evening.

It’s a difficult thing, waiting to heal. I suppose it teaches us patience, but I feel like just about every other experience in this life teaches us patience one way or another. I guess it comes from our desensitization for instant gratification. Patience is a virtue, sure, but perhaps the hardest one to learn.

So I’ll keep applying this strange device in the hope that, after the last programmed cycle of treatment, that little bone on the outside of my left foot will be all better – will have magically/scientifically grown and merged securely with its neighbors – and things will get back to normal. I only hope I appreciate what I’ve got when I finally get it back. After all, I think that is more important than recognizing what we had once it’s gone.

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Rockin’ the Cane: A Lesson in Fashionable Imagination

Last November, I broke a bone in my foot. I was fitted for a cast at a hospital nearby and told it would take six weeks to heal. After six weeks, that cast started to look pretty ratty. During a trip to the States for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, I sought out an Urgent Care clinic to get my foot x-rayed and have someone take the loathsome thing off, only to find out that the bone had not healed and that I would need to consult with an orthopedic surgeon to see what the best course of action would be. Terrifically boring (and frustrating) story short, I now wear an Aircast boot and administer ultra-sound therapy to myself using a little device that is supposed to stimulate bone growth. Needless to say, none of this has been pleasant…

…except for the cane.

Crutches in Germany look a little different from crutches in the U.S. – they don’t fit under your armpits, but instead look more like the kind of walking aids permanently-handicapped people use, with braces that go around the upper arms and handles to hold on to (not mention reflectors on the handles in case I feel like staggering out for a late-night hobble down a dark street). While I cannot deny that I didn’t enjoy making some people in the States feel awkward during my recent visit – seriously, do all people get those semi-pained, semi-oblivious expressions on their faces when they encounter someone they think is handicapped? – I must say that after seven weeks of using crutches, I was ready for a change. Fortunately, I found a small, wooden cane in the apartment we are staying in, and since I’ve got the Aircast boot now, I can hobble around without needing the support of two crutches. Thus, Bo now comes with a cane. Someone update the action figure!

On the days I don’t shave, I feel like I’ve got a Dr. House-thing going on, and I try to flesh out the more salty, curmudgeonly brilliance in my personality. However, when I’m by myself, I like to pretend I’m a dapper English gentlemen (it is essential, during these fantasy sessions, to avoid mirrors), some professor who smokes a pipe and reads from pocket volumes of Yeats or Coleridge. I like the way the cane tocks on the hard floors and the sidewalks. I imagine myself with a top hat … and then I imagine taking it off and throwing it away because, no, I can’t even pull off a top hat in my imagination.

When you were a child, you seemed to have the ability to turn even the most inconvenient circumstances into play time. Why was that? I think it’s because you were much more interested in the stimulation that came from an active imagination rather than the catharsis that comes through complaining.

The cane makes me happy because it has caused me to realize something. I’m thirty-one years old and I still get a kick out of my imagination, and that, as we say in Old Britain, is jolly good!