Breaking with the past

I got bad news yesterday, and I’m trying to get it into my head straight instead of how it’s stuck jamming in crooked.

I went in for my final examination, and my orthopedic surgeon told me that at this point, my ankle is pretty much as healed as it’s going to get. He said it was a very severe break and implied that I needed to come to terms with that. He told me that eventually my brain will compensate and the pain won’t bother me as much.

All of this sucks. My ankle still swells up like a sausage after even the tiniest exertion, and it hurts to walk, um, pretty much all the time. Yeah, all the time. I lie about it and say it hurts after a distance of four blocks, a number I’ve sort of arbitrarily picked, but, no, it’s pretty much always painful.

A different medical practitioner in my life thinks this isn’t how I’ll be eternally. He thinks that it will take incredible time, but that slowly I should feel better. Even if it takes more than a year, he believes my ankle will improve.

The tiny hopeful part of me wants to think that I’m not at the end of ankle road, but the much bigger suckier part of me says my life is over. Um, what doesn’t involve walking or standing? I love to nature hike, I love to be a tourist and walk everywhere, I love freedom to move, option, possibility.

I feel like this bank vault door has slammed shut and closed huge swaths of my life to me. I can barely walk across a gravel driveway, how am I supposed to hike on a dirt trail? My doctor said my brain will eventually ignore the pain, but when? Ignoring pain can’t happen soon enough. My brain power needs to kick in and tell my swollen ankle to keep going, that it’s not that bad.

Between the physical pain and its mental barriers, I feel trapped. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, right? But how am I supposed to even take that step? I can see the journey, but the threshold is so high and terrifying.

I used to tell myself that tomorrow would be the first day I would take that step to a better place, but I don’t feel like using that metaphor anymore. I need a new frame that says “tomorrow will be better” without referring to my feet at all. I want to learn to walk on my hands and bypass the problem altogether. Alternative means of transportation to better are what I dream of.