In my last post, I talked about how my cat Kizzy has been a dick lately. Shortly after I wrote that post, I took Kizzy to the hospital for a week. Last year he had PU surgery because he kept getting blocked -- he couldn't pee -- which can be fatal within 48 hours. After the surgery, I thought he couldn't get blocked again.

I was wrong.

So we took him in last Monday and he was blocked and they catheterized him and kept him for an entire week in the hopes that he would heal after being unblocked and flushed before the catheter was removed and thus would not form so much scar tissue. I went and picked him up this Monday after we got back from #BlogHer16. He's on a completely wet food diet, he has a new water fountain he won't drink out of, he's offered only bottled water out of various containers. We are trying everything we can.

I'm trying not to be pessimistic, but I'm not feeling like he's out of the woods yet. I'm feeling like all I can do at this point is try to manage my fear and anxiety about my cat, and I'm struggling. If he blocks again, even on the bottled water and the wet food diet and after the surgery, there's nothing more to be done. It's only been a few years since the epic struggle of Sir Charles Buttonsworth with megacolon, another fatal and impossible condition that we couldn't do anything about.

This is weighing heavily on me.

Also weighing heavily: I thought he was just being a dick instead of trying to tell me in the only way possible he didn't feel well.

So I take this away: When people or animals are assholes, consider first whether they are in pain before you get mad.

Over and out.

(Editor's Note: I met Bonnie years ago via the blogosphere and love her work. I hope you'll enjoy her post on body image and motherhood, and please check out her collaborative video project on The Shape of a Mother. - Rita)

When my daughter was born almost fourteen years ago, I was utterly unprepared for the extent of physical changes that would come along with the pregnancy. Afterwards, I felt torn between the awe and pride I should have been feeling for what my body did, and the shame I actually felt for looking nothing like the pictures I saw in magazines.

I assumed I was the only one dealing with this so I kept it to myself for a long time. And then one day, almost four years later, I happened to catch a glimpse of another mom’s belly and in that instant I knew this was actually a totally normal thing. It was such a relief to be able to let go of that self-hate I had spent so much time focused on and I wanted to make that knowledge available for women worldwide.

I wanted everyone – mothers, women who aren’t mothers, and men – to know mama bodies are normal. So I started The Shape of a Mother. It’s been just about a decade now and I’ve published the stories of about 2,500 moms in that time. Here are the top five things I’ve learned working with women and body image.

1. We’re harder on ourselves than on anyone else. Probably the most common comment people leave on the submissions that are posted is something like “Wow! You’re my body twin! But you look way better than I do!” Logically, if two people look that much alike, we can assume they probably both look equally lovely. And, certainly, if you saw two friends of yours who looked alike, you would think that neither was more beautiful than the other, right? But when it comes to ourselves, we are far more critical. How I have learned to handle this in my own head is to change my internal conversation. I pretend that I am talking to a friend, or that a wise friend is talking to me. Suddenly the words I think to myself are much kinder and over time it has made a huge difference in how I feel about myself.

2. What seems like a curse to some is a longed-for blessing to others. There are women who would do anything to be able to have their body blemished by pregnancy. Some women are struggling with infertility, others with miscarriage. There are mamas who have had stillborn babies and who wished there was some stretch mark or loose skin or something to mark the fact that they became a mother. This logic follows through to general health, too. Some people think their legs are ugly, others wish their legs worked at all. This isn’t a competition for who has it worse and I don’t intend to make it seem that way, but it can be helpful to remember to keep your own worries in perspective. It can remind you to find beauty and wonder in what you do have.

3. There is no one right answer. There is no one right body shape and size. There seems to always be competition between moms (or women in general, really). One mom’s body doesn’t change too much after pregnancy. A second mom’s does, but she works very hard at eating a certain way and exercising a certain amount and she finds that her body eventually looks the way it did before. A third mom might be dealing with health issues that prevent her from exercising the way the second mom does, or she might be dealing with financial issues that prevent her from eating the way the second mom does and the result is that her body remains changed. Yet another mom might find that she simply prefers not to exercise or to be careful about her diet and that the way her body changed doesn’t bother her. And, of course, there are the moms who do all the things and their bodies still remain changed, at least in some way. All too often, we forget that the world is diverse and we see it only through our circumstances. It is helpful to eliminate judgment entirely and simply listen and offer support. Instead of saying, “You just need to work harder at making time!” Try to say, “You don’t have time to exercise? I know how busy you are! And you look beautiful as is!” No need to argue about details, just lift each other up. Trust that what other people say about their experiences is true for them, even if it isn’t for you.

4. Language is important. You might notice I try to phrase things carefully. I say “bodies that don’t change after pregnancy” instead of “bounced back” or “got her body back”. And I say “and you look beautiful” instead of “but you look beautiful.” Because words carry more meaning than just their dictionary definitions. We hear what people say to us through the tone of their voices and their expressions, but also through our own histories. By choosing words carefully you can avoid alienating someone or creating animosity in your relationship. By choosing words carefully, you can show compassion and let someone know they can trust you; in turn, maybe you can trust them back.

5. When we are brave enough to share a secret fear, we open the door to empowerment. That’s the crux of SOAM. I kept my fears secret for so long because I was afraid of being judged, but when I finally got brave enough to mention it to my friends, they joined the conversation in relief. I opened SOAM officially on July 5, 2006, and I asked my friends to share the link. I was worried it would fall flat on its face, but the world was full of isolated women, thirsty to know they weren’t alone. The website exploded and less than a month later I was getting calls from media giants like the London Guardian. In that month, I saw the face of the world changed – just a little, but changed nevertheless. Because the women who submitted their pictures to me were brave enough to do so. Coming together to talk about the scary things is one of the most powerful things we can do as humans.

Working with SOAM has changed my life completely. It’s given me an unexpected career I never could have dreamed up on my own, and it’s taught me compassion, perspective, understanding, kindness, and how to be brave. I hope, in turn, I can share these gifts with the world.

October 17, 2015 - complete third half-marathon

December 18, 2015 - 5:56 pm - complete hour-long cross-training workout at the gym

December 18, 2015 - 11 pm - fall hard on ceramic tile in my kitchen

December 19, 2015 - diagnosed with broken fibula

January 6, 2016 - surgery to put plate and five screws

February 11, 2016 - surgeon clears me to start transitioning to weight-bearing on injured leg

February 12, 2016 - start physical therapy

March 7, 2016 - cleared to use nonimpact cardio machines other than stationary bike

March 11, 2016 - today

As I spent countless hours this winter lying in my recliner with my leg propped up on three pillows and wrapped in ice, I discovered A&E's Fit to Fat to Fit show. I have never watched The Biggest Loser, because I don't like the format very much. I never miss an episode of Fit to Fat to Fit, though, because I need to watch those personal trainers who gained hella weight return to the gym. I myself am returning to the gym, and it's hard.

I started working out when I was in high school and developing a pretty gnarly eating disorder. I've had to break the mental connection between calories in/calories out because if I do that I have a tendency to both overexercise and overeat. The brass ring that's so hard to catch is figuring out how to exercise the right amount without always tying it to weight loss.

For all of my adult life, I've been terrified of breaking a leg because it renders exercise almost impossible. I always assumed I would blow up like a blimp if I couldn't exercise. And that didn't happen. I did gain probably five to eight pounds, but it's hard to tell if that's because of the broken leg or because of winter. I do usually gain weight in winter and lose it in the spring, like a lot of people. Still, five to eight is a manageable amount and I know it will come off. I have gained and lost the same five to eight pounds over and over during my adulthood. What I haven't done is come back from immobility.

The least amount of exercise I've had since I was seventeen until I broke my leg: three times a week. Somehow, through all the business trips and vacations and illnesses and with the lone exception of the first six weeks after childbirth, I've worked out hard. And, I haven't not exercised this time -- I did floor barre and arm weights every weekday and crutched around as much as I could on the weekends. But that's not the same. I didn't break a sweat really until I started stationary biking when I could put weight on my injured leg.

According to my physical therapist, I'm still likely six weeks away from running.

And then once I can run, how far will I be able to make it? Not far.

I remember the first time I decided to run a half marathon. I could only run three miles. Every time I ran, I added a block.

I don't want to go through this again.

I don't want to fight back from nothing.

I've spent all winter making the tiniest incremental progress and it is so slow.

And so I love Fit to Fat to Fit, because the trainers who gain stupid weight in four months have that moment when they get back in the gym or out on the sandy beach and they're trying to run and it's so not happening. Then at the end of the show, there they are, looking more hard-bodied than I ever will (I have no intention of becoming a personal trainer, for one thing, and I'm at least ten years older than anyone who has been featured, for another). I don't want to be hard-bodied, but I want to get back to being able to run for an hour straight.

Right now, that seems impossible in my darkest hours and so far away in my lightest.

The one thing I can cling to is the memory of my husband saying, "Stop looking at them and comparing one to the other," when he caught me sniffing back tears as I studied my left calf and ankle and my right. My left calf looks like a runner's calf. My right calf, four weeks ago, looked like an uncooked piece of chicken. Zero definition, puffy, slack. Today, my right calf doesn't look like my left calf, but it no longer makes me reach for a crockpot.

I can do this, I know I can do this, but if watching twentysomething personal trainers grit their teeth and jiggle their new belly fat and try to hold a plank makes me feel better, then dammit, pass the remote. I won't apologize.

And I signed up for a 10k in September, six months from now.

A girlfriend brought me lunch yesterday since I still can't drive. We've known each other since our kids were babies, I suppose almost twelve years now. Over soup we talked about everything from work to our health -- we both had a rough 2015.

"You know," she said, "it's true. You don't realize how when you have your health, you have everything, until you don't."

Yeah.

We're young-old, both in our early forties, still running (when not sidelined by said health), still trying to eat healthy. Nobody's thrown in the aging towel or anything. But suddenly in the past few years, the conversations of our friend group have morphed from potty training to WTF did I really get tan lines on my forehead wrinkles? Initially, the talk was more that of shocked realization -- the first discovery of a gray hair, the first mammogram, the first night sweat.

I think we're in the anger phase now.

And I wish I were more tranquil about it.

---

It's true I've been dying since I was born, that's the way it goes, circle of life. The problem is that now I realize it. My hands on the keyboard wear the same wedding ring but they aren't even remotely the hands my husband held at our wedding in 2001. I remember at the time looking down at my hands and wondering what they would look like when they started to age.

And now I know.

---

Last night I was trying to explain to my mother, who is here driving me to appointments while my husband is back to traveling for work, what I've learned about getting up off the floor with a broken leg.

"You have to flip over like a bug, then you get on your knees and you can get up that way."

"But when you're my age, your knees hurt, too."

Oh.

I get so much of my personal happiness from moving my body. This broken leg has taught me how much I value my physicality, the feeling of movement, the deep breath of air needed for a big push. My personal agency, my ability to get myself from point A to point B without help and without pain.

I'm so mad about getting old.

---

I'll look back on these words when I'm 62 and wonder how I possibly could've thought I was old now. I will and I won't. Right before I burned my journals from my twenties, I read them, and I didn't laugh at that girl. I understood her, I remembered her, in some ways I pitied her because she was really unhappy and anxious and still a little bit ill. And she really hated the body that worked so well at the time.

Is it too much to have a healthy body and a wise mind at the same time? It must be, because that's not how it works. As the body falls apart, the mind realizes its worth.

My dad told me he watched a documentary about Alzheimer's and they said to make a recording of all the songs you loved when you were young and give it to your children. Then if you get the disease the recording will flip a switch and you can enjoy the long-term memories.

Then he told me what to put on his.

His mom died of Alzheimer's.

---

I told my mom as she stared at the saddle we got for my daughter that I couldn't remember saying goodbye to my horse. She told me I was there, that he walked willingly into the trailer of the buyer. I'm sure I cried at the time but sometimes I think it hurts me more that I can't remember than whatever I felt at knowing he was leaving my life due to my own choices, because I wanted to be a normal teenager and not someone who came home every day to muck out a stall no matter how much I loved my pretty bay.

Is it winter? Is it the broken leg? Is it the January of pop culture death? Is it my daughter preparing to leave elementary school? Is it my helicopter daughtering of my aging parents? Is it 27-year-old Adele singing about when she was young? Is it seeing Princess Leia look like a grandma?

Why am I suddenly so mad about getting old?

Is it because I secretly believed if I just kept running my face and hands might age but my body would work right until I dropped dead ... and then suddenly I couldn't run anymore?

---

When I was a kid, I believed that once you turned forty, it was over. You gave up, you stopped wearing makeup, and you settled into the Barcalounger with the remote and Lawrence Welk.

When I was in my twenties, I started seeing more and more seventy-year-olds sailing and running and skiing. They seemed like they looked younger, too, probably because they were wearing jogging suits instead of polyester pants and nurse shoes. Collectively, Americans seemed to stay younger longer when those damn Baby Boomers refused to go softly into the dark night of middle age. I got excited. I bought in: I'll just stay young, then.

Now I'm not sure how you're supposed to get old. It doesn't seem as clear-cut anymore now that Harrison Ford is one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood in his seventies but Peyton Manning is washed up before he's forty. What's old? What's young? What is the standard to shoot for? Do we die in harness, can we retire even if we want to? Do we prepare mentally to work until eighty or live on a fixed income and eat cat food at sixty-seven?

Damn, I'm so mad about getting old.

"I don't feel funny anymore. I've started to wonder if I've changed," she said.

She's one of the funniest people I know. I'm sure she hasn't lost her wicked talents. But grief is pain and pain is work and she's not done with the work yet.

I don't doubt, though, that she's changed in a different way. Pain -- physical, mental, spiritual pain -- changes us.

This winter I've lived in a physical house of pain. I broke my leg before Christmas and had surgery to put in a plate and five screws on January 6. The physical limitations of crutches also brought on a lot of emotional pain. They robbed me of my main anxiety coping mechanism, exercise, as well as my freedom of movement. I can't carry anything using my crutches, I have trouble with stairs and I can't drive.

After my surgery, I had a nerve block for the first eighteen hours. The doctor told me to start taking the Oxycontin before I went to bed because the block would wear off during the night. It did, and not even the Oxy could touch the flames shooting up my calf. I ended up calling a pharmacist in the morning and asking if I could take anything else on top of it, something that blew my mind since normally I don't need much painkiller at all. Two Advil on top of Oxy later, I finally fell into restless sleep.

That whole next day passed in wave after wave of red-hot burning pain where the plate was. It felt like labor contractions, only in one little 3"x2" area. I willed myself to just bear this part, because at least the surgery was over and the path to healing finally seemed clear.

I'd get through this post-surgery week, then I'd be on crutches a while longer, then someday, I'd be able to put weight on my leg again. And then I'd walk. And then I'd run.

Soon after that horrible day, my pain turned a corner and I was able to drop down to one pain pill instead of two every four hours, then one every eight, then just two Advil, then one Advil, then, finally, no Advil. The only pain left now is the muscle ache in my shoulders, neck and arms from crutching around and the psychological frustration at not being able to exercise or drive. I don't depend on others well, nor do I like relying on other people to be able to leave my house.

In the midst of all this, I read Dan Ariely's THE UPSIDE OF IRRATIONALITY. In this book, Dan reveals a lot about his own personal experiences with burns over 70% of his body from a military accident as well as his adventures as an academic researcher. He really caught my attention when he delved deeper into pain.

I told my grieving friend about Ariely's studies, thinking it might help her, because what Ariely found was fascinating. After recruiting and testing a bunch of ex-military people who had either been injured, not been injured or had a disease, he wrote:

Moreover, we found that there seems to be generalized adaptation involved in the process of acclimating to pain. Even though the people in our study had endured their injuries many years before, their overall approach to pain and ability to tolerate it seemed to have changed, and this change lasted for a long time ... I suspect that people with injuries like mine learn to associate pain with hope for a good outcome -- and this link between suffering and hope eliminates some of the fear inherent in painful experiences. On the other hand, the two chronically ill individuals who took part in our pain study could not make any connection between their pain and hope for improvement.

It's fortunate I read this book so soon on the heels (ha) of my surgery when my memory of that searing bone pain was so fresh, because I really think Ariely's onto something. Yeah, the pain sucked, but I completely associated the post-surgery pain with progress, much more so than I did the fresh-break pain. This in turn made it easier psychologically to muscle through post-surgery even though the magnitude of pain was far worse. It's like the pain of childbirth, I suppose -- pain we deem necessary.

Maybe that's it -- maybe how we feel about pain depends on whether or not we deem it necessary.

I told all this to my friend, and then we sat on the phone in silence for a minute. It was one of those moments you get maybe once in a week if you're lucky when the workday bullshit lifts and you see the world for real before the computer dings or the phone pings or the kid walks in through the front door.

We hung up and the bubble of meaning popped, but I'm looking for the growth in all pain now. And I'm still very eager to run again someday.

33 days since I broke my fibula.

14 days since the surgeon put a plate and 5-6 screws in my leg to fix the unstable break.

Yesterday I went for my surgery follow-up appointment. The PA and I talked about how putting screws in bones was pretty much like hanging a flat-screen TV -- you better put the screw all the way into the other side of the bone or you're not sinking it into the stud. I stared at my X-rays in horror and fascination.

They took out the stitches. The skin puffed around them like flesh pie crust, rather inhuman.

As I left with instructions to come back in three weeks and start moving my feet around three times a day, I both cursed another four weeks on crutches and thanked God once again this is injury and not illness. I view injury differently than illness, and I'm not alone in that.

I'm reading THE UPSIDE OF IRRATIONALITY, by Dan Ariely, who at 18 was burned over 70 percent of his body in a military accident. His experience gave him an interest in people's ability to tolerate pain and the events preceding their tolerance. He hypothesized, for instance, that those who had bad injuries could tolerate pain longer because they would equate it with healing.

He and another researcher set up a study in which they recruited folks to stick their arms in hot water for as long as they could stand it (they had to pull their arms out before they really hurt themselves). However, they forgot to exclude people with illnesses from recruiting and ended up with a few who had diseases. The ill people had a lower pain tolerance than the control group, while the injured group had a higher pain tolerance. He wrote:

"I suspect people with injuries like mine learn to associate pain with hope for a good outcome -- and this link between suffering and hope eliminates some of the fear inherent in painful experiences. On the other hand, the two chronically ill individuals who took part in our pain study could not make any connection between their pain and a hope for improvement ... in the absence of any positive association, pain must have felt more frightening and more intense for them."

Ariely acknowledges the accidental inclusion of ill people wasn't statistically significant, but his theory makes sense to me, particularly after this latest foray into pain. The day after surgery when my nerve block wore off, I could feel the plate and screws in my bone burning and throbbing like Anakin Skywalker after Obi Wan gets the high ground. It did indeed help to know the pain meant the plate existed, and the plate would ensure my bones healed correctly so I can run again without fear and without ankle arthritis. I just kept picturing that as I breathed through the burn and counted down the minutes until I could slam more Oxy.

In my outings on crutches, I've noticed people reacting to me in a way they haven't since I was pregnant. I have a theory now (and I'm sure I'm not the first) that people are the nicest to people with obvious short-term injuries or medical conditions, such as pregnancy, crutches or casts. Less so than they are to people with long-term injuries, like walkers or wheelchairs or canes. And illness, forget about it. Nobody wants to be in the same room with someone ill: Even if it's not catching, we're afraid we'll catch it. Some part of it.

Maybe the fear part.

It makes sense, I suppose. We don't like to think about our own mortality or how we would feel if it were us in the wheelchair instead. Crutches or a cast denote temporary conditions, ones we think we could probably live with, and that the otherwise healthy-looking person sporting them seems like us.

It's easy to root for someone on crutches.

Sitting in the waiting room of my orthopedic surgeon, I saw a lot of wheelchairs, walkers, canes and amputations as well as crutches and casts. The people with various conditions of injury also wore different expressions. The wheelchair-and-walker crowd for the most part seemed more serene, or at least resigned*. The cast-and-crutches gang was like me: really fucking pissed off to be there and not bouncing around like normal, sometimes crying as I did in the waiting room after my first visit when I learned I would need surgery and months of crutches.

I'm not sure what to do with any of these observations. I may very well become terminally ill at some point in my life. I mean, we're all terminal. My sister asked why I read these weird books, but I know why I do. I want to become resilient. I want to be the Zen guy in every movie about an airline crash on a desert island who is shockingly oblivious to the situation even as the hero runs around freaking out over his lost car keys. I want to be the calm one when they are both in the exact same situation, which the hero never seems to realize as he's trying to get the Zen guy to please freak the fuck out, already, thank you?

For someone with anxiety disorder to aspire to be the Zen guy in the airplane crash is some form of the Special Olympics, I'm sure, but hey, if they can do it, so can I.

I should note that long-term injury isn't a death sentence. In fact, it's something else Ariely talks about in his book: hedonic adaptation, which basically states humans have a base level of happiness they tend to return to no matter what happens to them, including wheelchairs.

I had never used crutches before I broke my leg, and I've learned a lot. I'm on quite a bit of Oxycodone at the moment, but I wanted to write this before I forgot the desperation someone might be feeling if they stumble upon this. Feel free to share!

Three weeks ago, I broke my fibula (smaller bone in calf) and got crutches. On Wednesday, I had surgery to get a plate and some pins, maybe a screw, really not sure. Here are my tips for crutches and broken legs when your pain is low and when your pain is high.

High Pain

1. When I first broke my leg, I was only in high pain for two days before I could stop taking Hydrocodone and just hit normal Advil. This surgery has been a game-changer. I am still in high pain, though I'm hoping it will start to ease this weekend. If you are in high pain, pay very close attention to taking your meds on time. I was shocked that 10 mg of Oxycodone was not enough, but I called the pharmacist and my doc and they all said it was fine to also take Tylenol or Advil. I'm not exceeding the max dose per day of either so I will need to sub in some Advil for Tylenol today. If you're in high pain, don't move. Keep the leg up way high, drink water, ice the back of your knee if you can't feel it through a splint or cast and sleep. You're just sucking resources right now. You can make up for it later.

Low Pain

1. Be in decent shape to begin with. I'm no Olympic athlete, but I could raise myself from sitting to standing on one leg before I hurt myself. HUGE. As we get older, stuff starts to go. Don't neglect your muscle strength. You never know when you'll go ass over elephant and need to be able to balance on one leg for 20 minutes.

2. Don't use your armpits. My doc told me there are a lot of nerves in there. Set the crutches so you can fit 3-4 fingers between your armpit and the top of the crutch and put your weight on your hands as you swing out. Use your core/abs to swing yourself forward.

3. When planting your crutches on a new surface, give them a little half-turn to make sure it isn't slick.

4. Indoor stairs are best taken on your ass like a toddler dragging your crutches along with you, up or down. Much, much safer.

5. Outdoor steps are crutches first. Going down is easy. Going up can require a big old one-legged hop. If you can get someone heavier than you to give you an arm to pull on, even better.

6. Get a child-sized backpack. Put your meds, tissues, any normal medications you take, grippy slippers or socks, lotion, chapstick, extra glasses, purell and your wallet in there. Don't go anywhere without it. If you need to carry most things from room to room, you can stick them in your backpack. I've even transported drinks by first carrying the glass to the recliner in my backpack then going back for the drink container, pouring it, and taking the juice back to the fridge in my backpack.

7. Use your surfaces. My kitchen countertops wrap from the stove to a breakfast bar. I slide plates and cups from one end to the other and can make meals that way.

8. Embrace a low center of gravity. In a haze of fury the day I found out I definitely had to have surgery, I cleaned three bathrooms and my library wood floor by putting cleaning supplies in my backpack and crab walking around spraying and wiping. Crab walking is also great for getting dressed, putting away laundry and folding blankets.

9. If you go shopping with family, use the store Rascal. I was getting weird looks until I stuck my crutches in the basket. Those things are easy to use but they top out at the speed of a lazy lap dog, so don't bother thinking this will go quickly.

10. Keep in mind you can do almost anything on crutches if you think through the task, use your backpack, take rest breaks and remember there are legless people the world over who rock their lives like a boss.

11. Exercise. I got a chair workout video and already had a floor barre video. I was doing them daily until surgery and will get back to them when I can. When I asked my doc about them, he encouraged me to do them as long as I put no weight on the broken leg. He also said keeping my legs as strong as possible will make physical therapy go much smoother. At first I worried about losing cardio fitness and I'm sure I will, but walking on crutches is HARD. When I feel good and can go along on errands, I feel
like I've run three miles after crutching for the same amount of time.

12. Shower stool. Shower stool. Shower stool. You're at your greatest risk when wet and soapy. Don't be a hero. Also only shower if you're in low pain, because it actually requires a ton of energy with a broken leg. Which is why I haven't showered since my surgery. High hopes for tomorrow. This is the longest I've gone w/out a shower in my adult life, ugh!

Anything I missed?

It's been 17 days since I broke my right leg, and the healing clock starts over on Wednesday. That's the day they are going to put a plate and some pins in there!

I'm really trying not to think about this surgery too much because I don't like the idea of having things screwed into my bones, even if it does mean they'll heal properly and I'll be able to run again ... someday. Right now that day feels very, very far away, my friends. Right now even being able to leave the house by myself in a car feels unattainable ever again, though that's dramatic and I know it. Still, one of the fun things about being an adult is being able to get the hell away from other human beings if you want to because no one is the boss of you. Except ice. And snow. And crutches. And an aircast on your driving leg.

I spent the weekend vacillating between pity parties and rocketing myself around big-box stores on my crutches just because large, wide walkways are something I don't have in my house and they feel decadent. I never thought I would beg to be taken to Target just for fun without giving birth to another baby. It turns out if you want to recreate that longing for freedom breastfeeding induces, all you have to do is break your driving leg. Who knew?

I've decided to take a hiatus from working on THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES until after the good drugs wear off from my surgery. It's been nearly a month since I took a Library Tuesday, and I fully intend to demand someone drive me there for an hour coming up soon so I can continue to write. I was getting close to being done adding new scenes and ready to go for another scrub pass before my broken leg and my daughter's school break blew the doors off my best-laid plans.

Today, though, that, too, feels so far away. I know in the grand scheme of things this will pass so quickly, but six more weeks on crutches before I can even dream of putting weight on my right foot seems like a really long row to hoe at the moment.

Having spent the Christmas holiday hobbling around my relatives' houses from crutches to rolling chairs to recliners to shower stools to my parents' bed because then I don't have to take the narrow stairs and am steps from a bathroom, I now understand why old people constantly talk about their health.

Especially with people who knew them when they were younger.

Using a shower stool and having to sit on the bathroom floor to put on makeup has been humbling. As has asking my seventy-year-old father to shovel the steps so I can hop my way down on one leg with breaking it, too.

I want to call everyone I knew in college, all those people who knew me when I was young and strong and capable of staying up for twenty-four hours, all those people who knew me when I was invincible, and scream, CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT?

This was not supposed to happen. We were not supposed to ever use shower stools or get cancer or develop auto-immune diseases. We were supposed to stay forever the age we feel inside.

We were supposed to stay invincible.

When I look at my sister and cousins, if I cry it's because you knew me then, and what if that's gone? I mean, I know it is and if it's gone for me, what if it's gone for you, too? How do we figure out how to float to the top now if it won't be physically effortless? How do we cling to the awesome we have buried somewhere under the doctor appointments and gauze?

If I feel that now after a broken leg at forty-one, I get it why old people drink coffee and blink at each other as yet another friend announces evidence of her mortality.

We were supposed to stay invincible forever. Dammit.