Lilly

1. I wake up before my body does. My brain is working lightning fast, trying to figure out if there’s any pain and why I can’t sit up and if the IV is still prodding at the back of my hand. Apparently I am sitting up now, but I don’t know how I got there. I’m trying to open my eyes but they keep falling shut and it takes more effort to keep myself conscious than it does to lift two hundred pounds.

2. The needle leaves a tiny dot on my skin and beneath it a faint bruise, barely there. I clench my fist and play Spot-the-Vein.

3. The painkillers make me nauseous. I curl up on the couch and dig at the tendons in my wrists, trying to find the trigger points that I used to press on when I was little and got carsick. Sometimes I fall asleep. Sometimes I just wish I could.

4. We go in for my first post-op appointment a few days after the event. The nurse very carefully peels off the bandages and cotton wraps on my ankle, explaining what she’s doing at every step and checking my pain levels routinely. The surgeon comes in to remove the last of the dressings. “The swelling looks normal,” she says, pleased, “and the bruising is nothing out of the ordinary.” I can’t see the two largest incisions, just the tiny ones on the top of my foot, each held shut with a single stitch and ringed by discoloration. She wraps everything back up and the nurse comes back to fit me for a cast. “It’ll feel a little tight,” she tells me, and slowly bends my ankle into position. It feels like finally cracking my back after slouching for days.

5. I can go down stairs but I can’t come back up. I try to hoist myself into the house braced on my mother’s shoulder but there is too much give to it and my foot bumps around in the cast, too-new muscles trying to tense and sending shocks of pain rocketing up my leg. When we finally make it inside I have only the energy it takes to throw myself on the couch and try to breathe again. Everything else can wait. It’s going to have to.

6. Three weeks left in a cast. Two weeks after that in a boot.

7. I can do this. ♦