Healing from the Inside

I broke my ankle on Friday, April 27 2012. It was my husband's birthday and we took a little hike, which for the most part was a nice little ramble at the shore side behind the Seabreeze Cafe. At the end of the walk, we decided to take a shortcut over a large hill, the downside a quarry of sorts where East Bay Regional Parks are doing some dirt excavation. Somewhere part of the way down, my left foot hit a crumbly, gravelly patch and shot out in front of me, while the right leg neatly folded slid directly under me, hyper-extending the foot. A loud pop was the only telling sign that something rather seriously wrong happened. My foot look more or less intact, with a new hard lump on the outer side. Pissed and slightly nauseous at the rising pain, I hobbled the 1/4 mile or so back to the car. No way it was broken, we were thinking.

A few hours at Kaiser proved us wrong.

So it's Wednesday now. Four days into this. I have a nice new red cast that is tightly strangling the ankle. It is a walking cast so it has to be tight. Yesterday morning the aching of it, so tightly encased, made me panic with claustrophobia. A sense of intense fear gave rise to an immediate necessity of removing the thing. Deep breaths didn't help. Getting up and moving around a bit didn't help. I turned a fan on and let the rush of air blast my face. Breathe deep. I feel trapped.

Here's the beauty of social media, however. An old friend of mine who wrecked her ankle last year during roller derby messaged me. She gave me some tough love, which for her sounds something like this "Dude, cut that shit out and let yourself heal!" There was more, including her amazing blog in which she chronicled the saga of her broken bones -- fibula, tibia and tendons wrecked -- surgery, post-surgery, doing it without pain meds (not because she's superwoman, but because they all make her so incredibly ill).

Sara is a sincerely tough cookie, but she's incredibly intelligent, empathetic, thoughtful and right thinking. Our on-line conversation gave me a place to start letting go and allowing this to be what it is. There's nothing I can do to change what it is, and I can't hurry the pace of my body's healing itself.

Next Monday, I will find out whether I got lucky and merely have to stump around in this awful cast for six weeks, or if I will have to have surgery to repair and pin together the gap between bones, which will add several more weeks of healing time and will effectively render me in no weight-bearing status. I'm putting all my positive energy into healing that little gap.

I am no longer panicking, I'm just letting go.