The Snowy Day

I watched the guy that got half his leg chopped off with an axe hop around effortlessly with a stick for a crutch on Yellowjackets.  
"Asshole."  I muttered.  

I went to my doctor.

"Okay!"  he announced.

"Time to walk in the boot!"

After six weeks of no weight bearing, I tried to walk on my left foot in the walking boot.  It was weird, it just didn't work.  By the time I was able to shuffle even a few inches the pain was shocking.  The whole arch of my foot felt like all of the bones were crumbling.  I imagined the metal plate and the screws that were holding my bone in place popping out and moving, free under the skin in my foot.  It swelled from my foot all the way up my calf to my knee.  

"I have to do this."  I thought to myself.

"I am returning to work in-person in a week."

There was more unexpected horrors awaiting.  Last Saturday I dodged Jimmy Carter's funeral motorcade as it drove from the Capitol to the Carter Center.  I was trying to go to the Emergency room. I can't explain my fear.  It wasn't for me.  I returned to work Monday morning, feeling shell-shocked.  My co-workers looked at me with shock.  I felt like a leper, shuffling around.  People asked me if I should really be there, if it was a good idea.  They didn't know that it was the least of my concerns.

Every day I rushed out of work and went to visit the hospital.  I would leave when it was dark.  I felt like some weird ghost in the machine.  People would look at me, assuming I guess that I was at the hospital because of my leg.  I would shuffle along to the parking deck at the end of the visit, feeling broken.  Absolutely broken.  I would get home and feed Temple and begin the long process of bathing, making my lunch for the next day and figuring out what to wear.  What was normally a quick process took most of the night.  And I was scared.  And tired.  And sad.  

The kids came back to school last Tuesday.  My students were very sweet and I was genuinely happy to see them and hear about their Thanksgiving, their Christmas, their New Year's, their break in general.  I showed them my foot, unwrapping it from the layers of walking cast that encase it.  They stared at it.  One of my more difficult students insisted on helping me re-wrap it, carefully placing the large plastic plate on the top of my foot where the stitches used to be while I strapped it down.  

A little boy walked up to me one day at school.  He's an amputee.  He looked down at my leg.

"Now we are the same."  he said, smiling.  

I tried to smile but could only move my mouth a little.

Friday it snowed in Atlanta.  They called off school.  Alec went to work for a few hours in the morning until his idiot establishment decided that maybe opening was a bad idea.  He came home and I watched from the doorway as he and Temple played in the snow, her galloping and hopping while he threw snowballs for her to chase.  

It was a huge relief, a tremendous gift after a long and difficult week.