the fall

Tuesday morning I had an optometrist appointment, and it took considerable effort to get the children up and fed and ready to leave for the day (I planned to take them out to lunch after my appointment and then to their afternoon art camp). I had the brainwave of donating a little artist's model of a cat to Becky, the children's art teacher, to use in her many classes devoted to drawing cute animals (Becky, who knows how to appeal to a small child, sometimes teaches a course called "Drawing Cute Animals" and sometimes one called "Fashion Girls And Their Pets"). We never use this model, and the Sober Husband and I want to declutter our house. Giving it to Becky made a lot of sense to me. I pitched this idea to the children, explaining that they could use the model at Becky's classes and how happy she would be to get it.

As we went out the door, Lola stopped dead in her tracks in front of me, clutching the wooden cat model. "I want to keep Kitty at home," she said in a voice which promised a full onslaught of fussiness. I nearly ran into Lola and tried to step around her. My foot landed on the edge of a thick coir mat by the front door, my ankle buckled, and I went down. Although I fell full length on the hard tiles on the top of the steps, I wasn't aware of any pain anywhere other than in my ankle, which hurt so much that I lost my vision briefly. After I could see again, I uttered some obscenities. Lola shouted, "MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY" in a frightened voice over and over again. "I'm okay, Lola," I said, trying to get her to calm down. "Mommy's okay."

I lay there for some time (I was vaguely aware that the day laborers used by my next door neighbor's contractor were unwillingly approaching, drawn by a sense of duty and Lola's hysteria) and then I asked Iris to help me to my feet. My ankle hurt a lot, but I could put some weight on it, and I could rotate my foot. "It's just a sprain," I told the girls. "I can put weight on it, so that means nothing's broken." I decided to keep going. "This isn't my driving foot, thank God," I said. We drove to the Stonestown mall, where I slowly limped to the optometrist and to the Chevy's, which the children adore. My ankle hurt more and more. I limped back to the car by putting an arm around Iris and leaning on her.

At this point, I decided I couldn't take the girls to the playground or their art class. I needed to get off my foot. We went home (where I discovered that I'd never locked the door after my big fall) and called the Sober Husband, who came home a couple of hours later. He drove the girls to their class, which was half over for the day, but some art is better than none. I elevated my foot and read "Sworn to Silence" by Linda Castillo. By night time, my ankle was much worse. Getting me to the bathroom was a major ordeal. Hopping on one foot seemed the way to go, but the reverberations were agonizing. We ended up bringing an old rolling chair downstairs to use as a sort of wheelchair.

I slept on the couch intermittently, my ankle hurting a lot. In the morning I felt panicky. Just touching the bottom of my foot was agonizing beyond belief. I turned into a drama queen, insisting that I needed to see a doctor, this was obviously worse than a sprain, but I couldn't imagine how I could get there without crutches. The Sober Husband called a medical supply store, which wasn't open yet. "Call Walgreen's," I said. Then his cellphone rang. The medical supply store owner was calling back. The Sober Husband arranged to meet him shortly to buy crutches. He reported incredulously to me, "The store doesn't open for hours, and the message says that, but the guy calls you back if you leave a hang up call to see what you want."

The crutches didn't make me feel much more mobile. The sidewalk is so sleeply canted where we live, on the side of a very steep hill, and the differential in height between the two crutches made me feel panicky. We got me to the doctor's office, where it was soon determined that I just have a severe sprain, although the doctor cautioned that "sprains like this take four to six weeks to heal." I felt like an idiot for having gone to the doctor at all and for having been dramatic at home that morning. The doctor gave me some tips on how to use crutches better and suggested I try just one. After some coaching, I more confidently crutched back out to the waiting room to be taken back home.

At home Iris fell in love with my crutches. She kept confiscating them and adjusting them for her own height, limping around the house on them. Finally I lost my temper a bit. "I am the crippled person here, and I need at least one crutch set for my height." I managed to get one back from her, but all night long she meticulously limped and used the other crutch. Around midnight she finally decided to go up to bed. "So you're all better now?" I asked. She paused. "Yes, but I'll be sick again tomorrow and need the crutch."

Three days after the injury, I'm still in a lot of pain. I feel like I'm living in a bad slapstick comedy, where my clumsy, painfilled locomotion must be hilarious to the onlooker. The Sober Husband's vicious green parrot is trying to take advantage of my weakness, and crutching past her cage is dangerous. The children are quite squabbly, despite my attempts to declare the living room "A Place Of Calm And Healing." I haven't been upstairs since Tuesday morning, and despite my continual requests, no one has cleaned the litterboxes since then, either. No laundry is occurring. On the bright side, my feral kittens really love having me sleep on the couch, and I had a breakthrough with the shyer, black-and-white one. I am going to share with my feral kitten rescue my accidental discovery that sleeping in the same room as a hitherto despaired-of feral kitten can have powerful taming effects.