January 28th, 2011

My husband helps me to the bathroom, ices my leg before taking the kids to school. He prepares my breakfast. I’m not really hungry but my mouth waters when I smell the toasted waffle. I have orange marmalade, an orange juice and a Clementine. Talk of vitamin C. Then a bowl of granola and low fat milk. A mug of green tea. More water. The pain returns and I takes a Vicodin. Dr. Simonian office calls me to see how I’m doing. Great, I suppose considering yesterday.
Then I try to do my exercises and fail. It takes me by surprise, me the sporty girl who can kick my leg up to the sky. I’m unable to lift it. I can’t squeeze my muscles since I have no control of my leg, immobile beneath pads of dressings and ice. It must weigh a couple of kilos. Tears come to my eyes. I cry for a few minutes and then I feel better.
My friend Joan calls me. Her older son tore his ACL in both knees and he had a machine to lift his leg so it gives me hope. If a boy who was fifteen-years-old had a machine, what could a fifty-year-old woman do without? I will call my physician and seek some advice. I don’t see how I can lift my leg without help.
My writing friends like my short story and I will submit it for the contest. I read Publishers Weekly online. Great to keep up with the news in the industry.
I finish Caribou Island, not the best book for a recovery since it’s a pretty dark book. I loved the setting in Alaska, a character itself. The topic is the breaking of a marriage and its implications for the couple’s daughter engaged to a man who has already cheated on her. Although she doesn’t know it, she is aware that her fiancé doesn’t respond to her needs the way she wished he would, so the reader can already see how this marriage will possibly fail. The end of the book is both tragic and optimistic. The mother kills herself after killing her husband with a bow and arrow. The daughter arrives to the cabin they are building on remote Caribou Island. She is concerned for her parents but the book ends before she sees their dead bodies and rather ends on her decision to plan a simple wedding in Hawaii and starts a new beginning. Will she be able to do so after she witnesses her dead parents? The readers are left wondering of the many possibilities.
And as I lay in bed, pain shooting in my knee and leg heavy like a log, I think that everything is also possible. The best and the worst.