This is a guest post from Linguist-in-Chief, who you may remember from writing extensively about dogs. Dogs are somewhat the heart—or at least the context—in what follows, though not explicitly so.
Two weeks ago, I stepped sideways onto a sidewalk patch of clear smooth ice, and broke three bones in my left ankle.
In the slowed-down time-scape between my feet leaving the ground, one leg sliding back under me, and the inevitable full-force landing, I had plenty of perceived moments to recognize: This is going to be very bad. Months-long bad. This is now The Time That Happened. … and then I hit and the dogs freaked out in opposite dangerous directions and me and my adrenaline had to do everything, for hours straight: Call 911 and get my boot off and mostly NOT LOOK at the angle at which my foot now met my leg and describe my location correctly and talk to the amazing saintly strangers who helped get Bagel and Howard into our car and even drove to our house to collect my other half (who had been wisely asleep) and brought him to wait with me until the ambulance came.
Then it was time to relinquish control to the experts, while still keeping it together: the ER was reached, the bones were X-rayed, re-arranged, wrapped in temporary plaster, X-rayed again, and then suddenly, eventually, I was home for dinner with a leftover ketamine high and a set of crutches and pills. Over dinner we tried to talk through the day, reporting back and forth our snapshot experiences. Did this really happen? How scared were you? As though we’d just come from an unscheduled six-hour war.
A cast-bound ankle beside a stunning yet mournful blond dog.
Six days later, I went back to the hospital for an orthopaedic surgeon to put a permanent metal plate and two screws in my ankle. And now the war moved to the trenches: I was sent home with lingering ‘nerve block’ anesthetic to forestall the coming horrors, more serious narcotics, an extensive and complicated schedule of meds, and ultimately a weekend of the worst, terrifying pain I have ever known, concomitant with opioid highs that made me want to crawl out of my skin, while also wishing the invisible cement vice torquing my ankle like a carriage bolt would stop setting itself on fire.
By Monday, I was mostly sane. By Tuesday I could talk on Zoom. Yesterday, Friday, I went for a half a kilometer walk around the block on my crutches and later drove to campus for a few hours, and at points it was very hard but I did not doubt for a moment I could do it. The prognosis is that by Wednesday, two and half weeks out from the incident, my cast will be replaced with a boot, and that six weeks after that I should be walking unassisted.
I am now starting to integrate these pieces into a narrative understanding of what’s happened in the last two weeks. I feel several versions of the story coalescing in parallel, each one being both sharply true and also not enough. As three examples:
There’s the story frame called Cast of Characters (… get it?) in which I detail the parade of people, all somehow from central casting, who were with me that Saturday from the fall to the ER discharge. They were all remarkably good to me, without exception. Special mentions go to Good Samaritans Russ and Darlene who were just driving to get haircuts when they saw me semi-sprawled beside an icy sidewalk with two errant dogs and gave an hour of their life to help so so much, and to Theo the English ER doctor who sent me on my ketamine trip and later told me that I was “hard as nails”. When Russ picked up M, apparently the first thing he said (you need to know he had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth the entire time) was “your wife’s foot is DISGUSTING” and I am going to be quoting both of those for a long, long time.
There’s the Liam Neeson Taken framing, where each struggle and challenge I now face is conquerable with my very Particular Set of Skills. You know, like: I have all these running shorts that fit over my cast and have massive pockets, and I also have a fair amount of calf and hip flexor strength from trail running, keeping me upright on one leg now, and I excel at planning and linearizing tasks to determine which objects need to be in my backpack before I move from this couch to the next one, and also our house’s small size means it’s fairly easy to get a cup of coffee from one surface to another to beside my laptop, and so on. (If you prefer a lighthearted version of this frame, please enjoy Seth McFarlane’s Kermit doing the speech.) … There’s an off-shoot frame here in which I enumerate the plentiful ways in which it could have been so, so much worse but that can easily get scary enough to contemplate that we will not.
There’s also the Free Solo frame, because Alex Honnold climbed Taipei 101 using just his hands and feet the day after I broke my ankle, and now I’m climbing the stairs on crutches with no ropes or safety nets, trying to achieve a flow-state, and every move needs careful consideration and moderate chutzpah. Every day my body surprises and confuses me, and at times I feel like the world has been turned 90 degrees on its side, so that traversing what used to be the floor somehow requires clinging to the walls and furniture, looking for finger holds and knee wedges and obviously I don’t know any climbing terminology but I hope you see the vision.
Laying on top of all this thinking and processing and conceptualizing, there is of course the story from the perspective of our dogs. What do Howard and Bagel understand of all this? That, I will try to report in my next piece. For now: I’m lying on the couch, watching the rain and healing, and may you never, never break your ankle.
A light-brown dog stares intensely at a red-haired woman, who stares at the camera. Crutches in background.
