Life

Come home.
Check mail.
Cook meal.
Wonder what to to next.
Turn on computer.
Peek at others' lives.
Feel cold.
Hear phone ring.
Check email for umpteenth time.
Turn off computer.
Wonder what to do next.
Think about a movie.
Think about a book.
Wash dishes.
Make bed.
Check to see if front door is locked.
Stand on front porch and look at moon.
Wonder what to do next.

Ruby, no slipper

I've told a friend that I'll write something about my injury for his company's blog. The small nonprofit sends doctors to very poor nations to provide those who need them with prosthetic limbs; I suppose many of the injuries are due to American landmines. My experience is only in some distant way comparable to that of a person born with a clubfoot or shorn of an arm, but I will try to convey something of what it's like to move between ability and disability, how confusing it can be, how it directs your vision into the mirror even as you suddenly see every broken person as a sister or brother.

I've been walking for a few weeks without my crutch, but I have a limp, my calf muscle is weak, and if I stand still for a minute my foot becomes bloated and ruby. My surgeon told me he believed I'd always limp, so of course I will do all I can to prove him wrong.

Seeing something else

You're sitting with a friend and you're talking about what you see. It's a field, it's a bay, it's a city. As you talk, it becomes clear that what you see is not what she sees. You keep talking about different things, sort of trusting that your friend simply sees something you'd see if you were in her place. Because masts, trees, rocks, clouds, and cars block your vision, but from where she sits no cloud or giant is in the way. You move over a bit and you say, "Oh! Yeah!"

Everything is a little different for having seen what you couldn't, but you shift back and now you're right where you were.

Walking, not walking

When my esteemed surgeon, Jack Schuberth, told me to wean myself of my protective plastic boot over three weeks, I thought that was an awfully long time. But now I doubt that I'll lose my crutches by the three-week mark. To my surprise, walking is very painful, two weeks after Schuberth spoke. When I do put aside my crutches, taking more or less normal steps, setting all my weight on my left leg, I can go three or four steps before pain begins to shoot from my heel.

This injury has marked one of the few times in my life when I've desperately wanted to be normal. The discovery that I suffer from osteoporosis exploded that hope. But I do want to be able to walk, and I do not think this much pain is normal.

How my foot looks

Until Thursday afternoon, I'd been permitted only occasional glimpses of my injured foot. Between casts, while wheeling from podiatry clinic to X-ray, I stared and on occasion touched the strange flesh that had once been part of me but now belonged to doctors and nurses and technicians—and to that same category of existence that lodged many of my life's unpleasantnesses, and which was understood to fall outside of The Meaningful, The Useful, The Relevant.

Now the foot and the leg attached to it are naked, and though they are far from perfect, their care and improvement have been left to me and to an occasional black boot, no longer to a bent plaster tube.

This is not my foot as I remember it. The skin is dry, peeling, wrinkled, splotchy. The area around my ankle is swollen and I don't recall that freckle. There is a cut along the left side of my heel, with tape strips crossing it. Some dried blood. Much of the skin is shiny; what isn't tends to ruddiness. I can wiggle my toes and rotate my foot, but I don't do much of the rotating because it hurts a little.

The leg, too, is foreign. Bruises streak and stripe it, and I did not know that bruises came in such colors. Much yellow, some purple. The calf muscle is gelatinous, unsightly.

Lots of skin is flaking and sloughing from the toes and between them. I've been leaving the cut alone, but I suspect that while I sleep the cat or I may try to lick it. Maybe it tastes metallic, or maybe it's like licking a battery.

My heel

On July 25 I broke my heel bone. Since that time I've been unable to set any weight on my left leg, which has changed things for me. For instance, here's how I get my mail. I put on my knapsack and crutch my way to the mailbox. I then lean my crutches against the fence, balance on my right leg, and unlock the mailbox, hanging onto it for extra balance. I then struggle out of my knapsack, unzip it, and use my right hand to hold the knapsack while using my left to stuff mail in, all the while wobbling quite a bit. I then zip closed the bag, shoulder it, close and lock the mailbox, and lift my crutches from the fence. Soon I'm back inside--unless I'm so tired by all this that I make it no further than the chair on the back porch--and I set my crutches against something and allow myself to fall onto the floor. I love the floor.

The furthest I've walked since my injury is around the block. I've done that three times. Mostly I just sit inside or, better, lie on the floor, listening to Mitsuko Uchida play Mozart's piano concertos. Which is not all that different from how I spent my time before my injury. Except now I don't even walk to the grocery store, the prospect of which makes me anxious. I may try tomorrow.

I was misdiagnosed. My ankle was terrifically swollen and the nurse who looked at the first x-rays concluded that I must have strained a ligament since the ankle was not broken. She missed the line running through my calcaneus. So I went home. Later I had to visit the San Rafael emergency room to get a cast put on. That was July 26.

On July 31 Jack Schuberth opened my heel, aligned the odds and ends that had once been my calcaneus, and drove four metal screws through them, an especially long one from the back of my heel up at a forty-five-degree angle, the three others at a right angle to that. I think I now have some titanium in my left foot, but I keep forgetting to ask Jack what sort of metal he chose.

The operation left me with a nasty case of contact dermatitis all over my back and sides, but I've had no pain and have consumed none of the vicodin I was issued early on.

And sometimes music is something else.

Wow, his ear is really big.