one year of arm stuff – part 7 – no, really, what has recovery been like?

God, I am actually having trouble staring this in the face.

Recovery has been so fucking weird, guys.

And I thought I knew about recovery!

If you did the math, that was three years of wrestling through ankle recovery – two surgeries, 14+ pins went in and then came out again, I developed bizarre neuralgia flare-ups, I did the whole six weeks in a cast/boot twice, 18 months apart. Don’t break your ankle three ways, friends. Do not recommend. Real bad fractures in your legs are awful; there’s a really hard transition from walking to not walking, and it can take a lot of pain meds to get through the first week or two while your bones scream about having to reknit themselves. Physio afterwards was hard, humbling, frustrating, boring, and very high-stakes. Going through the world in a wheelchair, on crutches, with a cane, was a whirlwind crash course on all the internalized ableism I had, and a pretty intense confrontation with the brutal inaccessibility of our modern landscape.

But no one told me I might never walk again. We all knew I’d walk again eventually. I’ll never run again, and stairs will be kinda sketchy forever thanks to permanently lost range of motion in that foot, but I always had a date on the calendar that said “start walking again”. That date was amazing.

And while there were some very very real horrors inside broken leg recovery (technically one of the three breaks was not in the joint, hard to say if ankle or leg break, fuckin i dunno) I still had all my comfort skills: drawing; writing; crafting; videogames; I could chop vegetables and brush my teeth and open jars and use my phone without having to worry about it. I played hours and hours of breath of the wild with my foot in a cast elevated above my heart; I made hundreds of paintings on my ipad. I wrote a novella. I typed constantly.

Things were hard! But I knew when they would stop being as hard, and even while I was scared to go down the front steps of my house on crutches (they were sketchy steps, in my defense) I could fully distract myself with all these skills I had spent a lifetime learning for exactly this purpose.

Don’t miss the pain, though. Fractures are not fucking around.