it's my 9 month leg break anniversary... please feel free to send cash and/or prozac

it has been 9 months to the day now since i broke my leg.  i no longer care about blogging about food but apparently i really love wallowing in my disabled misery.  maybe this will get me up to #5 on urbanspoon.  one can only hope...

today i just had a total emotional breakdown over something probably stupid that there is no way i am going to share on this blog.  i cried my eyes out and sank to the depths of depression and sadness.  fortunately my friend heather is in town right now taking care of me and was there to listen to me and give me a hug.  of course heather is leaving tomorrow morning which is yet another source of my stress and depression... i am going to be completely on my own while non-weight bearing for the first time ever starting tomorrow and i am terrified.

aside from the stupid, or not so stupid, who really knows, thing that started my cry fest, i was also depressed because i just feel like my life has been on hold for so long.  i know this is pretty much what i bitched about in my last post but this is my blog and i get to bitch about the same shit over and over again if i want.  i have been unable (physically and/or emotionally and/or financially) to do some of the most important things to me: travel, cook, socialize, and pretty much anything physical (the worst is not running).  for the past three weeks, and for almost three months in the fall, and for at least another month but possibly longer, i have been reliant upon other people to drive me any time i have to go anywhere.

it's not that people are not offering to do things for me or coming to visit me.  they are.  so it's not like i am lacking that.  it's that i just feel like i am not an active and participating member of society right now, and the things that i have to do on a day to day basis are much more time and energy consuming (ie- showering, preparing food, getting dressed, etc.) and so i just don't even feel much like i can make the effort to do other things.  plus normal things that people do can be either dangerous or straight up impossible for me.  examples: i went to the radiohead concert and had a drunk girl fall on my broken leg.  i went to neon's last night and there was no handicapped parking to be seen so i had to crutch a block there and a block back (fyi if you have never been on crutches: this is exhausting).  i enjoy alcohol but fear drinking any right now because i am already very limited in terms of my ability to stay on my feet and be physically stable, and falling or tripping right now would be really bad.  i went to kroger today and the electric grocery cart ran out of batteries in the middle of the store.  then i think about people who have to put up with this shit or worse all day, every day for their whole lives and i feel like i am just a dumb miserable whiner.

a lot of people including myself are depressed for a lot of reasons but i have just been really overwhelmed by how depressing and emotionally taxing it is to be completely unable to live my life the way i want to live it for such a long period of time.  i am not bothered by asking for or accepting help from others, i think we all should help each other and i would definitely help anyone who needed me.  what brings me down is just the feeling that life is happening and i am not a part of it.  and it's impossible to explain this feeling to people who don't get it.  i feel more alone and more lonely than i have ever felt in my whole life, and i am not new to feeling totally fucking alone.  worst of all, being around most people does absolutely nothing to improve this particular brand of loneliness... if anything, it can make it even worse.

it's not like i was living my life that great before i broke my leg.  the very day it happened, lavine and sarah and i were hanging out at my apartment before oktoberfest and i was giving them my same old tired monologue about how i didn't think i should stay in cincinnati much longer and i felt that i didn't really fit in here and i was sick of my job and of living in a place where i had very few truly deep connections with people and of having way too many weekend nights where i was sitting at home by myself and of the feeling of being stuck in a sea of people who all wanted to get married and have babies and be insular until the end of time.  i wasn't doing anything about it, i was just sitting around bitching about it and i was depressed about it.  but doing nothing to change your circumstances because you have absolutely no other choice is just so much more depressing and alienating and lonely than doing nothing because you are a lazy asshole who likes to bitch.

tomorrow i am going to get up and go to work and pretend that i care about things and people are going to tell me that i am doing so great and i am going to smile and pretend like it is no big deal and i am not depressed and it is easy and anybody could just break their leg and have it not heal and go on about their life and be happy and functional and not a total basket case.  but for now i am just going to spew my depression and self pity all over the internet and wallow in it.

my leg got chopped open and more metal got shoved into it and then it got sewed up again and this is how i feel about that and other things

two weeks ago i had another surgery on my right leg from when i broke it back in september (fun fact: that is the second most read post ever on this blog).  here is a video of this surgery for the medically curious.  not pictured: the bone graft or the removal of five screws put in during the previous surgery, featured here.  don't watch that if you're eating or have a weak stomach.  my mom has been here taking care of me but she is leaving tomorrow.  fortunately my friend heather is coming for a week after my mom leaves.  then i will be on my own and i have already described all of my fears about that.

i have been laying around on my ass for two weeks although i did manage to go to radiohead on tuesday, and i have to give a shout out to the staff at riverbend for being totally amazing and bending over backwards for a neurotic anxiety ridden nut case in a wheelchair.

i have watched all of downton abbey and half of dead like me and a bunch of mad men and girls and the new girl and a bunch of movies that i can't really remember right now except walk the line and about a third of citizen kane and i have to say i do not get what is so great about that movie... boring.  one day i will write a story about the time i went to the hearst castle and it will be a lot more interesting than that movie, and the story is actually not even very interesting at all.

i have read some books and a lot of news and blogs and david sedaris and i have eaten very well.  i know that there are at least nine cats wandering around my street and i pretty much know their schedules and habits and who is friends with who and who hates who, at least among the cats.

here is what my ankle looked like yesterday

i was going to try to write a lot but it turns out that you have nothing to write about when you are not doing anything, and despite suggestions that i should try to write while drugged the percocet made my brain slow down so that i really had even less than nothing to write about and absolutely zero incentive to even try.

i have been spending a lot of time thinking about what the hell i am doing with my life and why and have not come up with a lot of good answers.  i'm feeling kind of done with this whole law thing, although i need to do it for another four years in order to get my loans paid off.  maybe i'm just feeling kind of done with my current job.  my office has been bleeding people for years, the best and smartest people are almost all gone and the majority of people left either probably could not function anywhere else or haven't been there long enough to realize they need to get the hell out or want to get the hell out but just haven't been able to yet.  office morale has been consistently falling to new all time lows for years.

i feel dangerously close to getting sucked into the abyss of terminal monotony that seems to engulf people who have been working in my office for too long.  you just handle the same cases over and over and over and they are all depressing and everyone's life is just as shitty at the end of the case as it was at the beginning of the case and the clients are all miserable and the opposing counsel are all assholes and you lose your ambition to actually be creative and dynamic as an attorney because you are buried in the mountain of the same old cases and problems that keep coming and keep coming and keep coming, especially now since there are way too few people to handle the work, and nobody feels appreciated and no one has the time or energy to push themselves professionally or intellectually and everyone is overworked and underpaid and all the people who you liked and respected and trusted, and who liked and respected and trusted you, are gone.

here is what my leg looked like a week ago

aside from work i feel dissatisfied too.  i have been in cincinnati for six years now, way longer than i ever thought i would stay, and while i do have some people here who are important to me, it just doesn't feel like enough.  i've done everything i can possibly think of to make this place feel like home (living in different neighborhoods with different roommates or alone, volunteering for a variety of different causes, joining a running group and a kickball league and a book club, starting and running cincinnati imports, blogging, taking classes in meditation and wine tasting and golf and japanese, and probably other things that i'm not thinking of right now) but none of it really has made it feel like home.

on top of that, i have had what i feel like is a record breaking number of people who were close friends here in cincinnati either move away or else turn out to be completely fucking bat shit crazy.  the few people i feel truly close to here are too busy with all the other things in their lives (spouses, children, family obligations, work, travel, their friends from high school, whatever) to be in my life as much as i need them to be.  most of my closest friends live in other cities and i look at their large fulfilling networks of smart, adventurous, socially conscious friends who they spend time with almost every day of the week without clinginess or cliqueyness or codependency and i feel depressed that i have been living without that for six years now and what the hell am i doing with my life?

being in varying states of immobility for the past nine months has put me in a position where i have been pretty much locked into place physically.  you can't just up and move when you can't even walk, and you can't really seriously try to get a new job when you are going to have to tell a potential future employer that you are going to be needing them to give you a few weeks off for major surgery right after you start, assuming you can even get them to hire you in the first place.

more surprising than the physical effects is how introverted i have become since september, when i first broke my leg.  i just no longer feel like i want to be around very many people, and in fact can hardly stand to be around more than a couple of people at a time.  i had a party at the beginning of april that made me want to swear off hosting parties forever, and at a cincinnati imports event at the end of april i did nothing but sit in the corner and check my watch.  i just don't like very many people that much anymore, and i especially don't like them in groups.  i feel like so many people are silly and ridiculous and superficial and self absorbed and while i always used to try to find out what was interesting in people, now i just want them to leave me alone.  it's hard for me, and others, to understand and accept since for many years i was one of the most social people in any group.

it would be easy to say that this is depression and maybe it is.  i never think i am depressed when i am, and it is never clear to me that that was my problem until much later on, when i am happy again, and i am like "shit, i was depressed."  but i don't feel sad about not wanting to be around people... i just feel relieved.  i still feel lonely though which is the problem and why i am writing about it.  but one thing i am sure of at this point, which i think i never really realized before, is that knowing a lot of people, or meeting a bunch of new people, does not do anything to relieve loneliness.  the key is to know people (even just a few) who for whatever reason make you feel not lonely, and to be able to spend as much time as you want with those people.  and i do not have that particular combination of factors in my life right now.

what i need is to be able to spend my work time doing something that allows me to feel autonomous and creative and challenged and valued and my free time with a group of people with whom i feel a close bond and shared common values.  these things are both missing from my life.  it's the same tune i have been singing since i moved to cincinnati really, and it's depressing to realize that maybe nothing has changed and maybe this just isn't the place for me and never will be no matter how hard i try.  maybe i have given cincinnati my all and it's time to move on... once i can actually move again.

this post is not about food, but i promise to still bitch a lot

there is at least one person out there who still wants me to blog, even if all i am going to write about is vomit-inducing amounts of pus oozing out of a boil on my ass. the time has come to give the people/person what they/she want/wants.

on saturday during oktoberfest (september 17... oh my god that was three months ago) i was doing what normal cincinnatians do during oktoberfest... prancing through the streets with mobs of other people with both fists full of giant mugs of spaten optimator (7.6% alcohol) with a name tag on me that said "hans" and stuffing a giant bahama mama down my throat. odds are i was also yelling inappropriate things and trying to grab the ass of anyone wearing lederhosen. this is the same thing i have done at oktoberfest every year since discovering it, and it is one of my favorite things to do in cincinnati.

the optimator and i have a long and sordid history. each year at oktoberfest, i attempt to conquer it, and each year, i lose. the goal for me is to get optimated (taking full advantage of the optimator) without wreaking general havoc on my entire body. to date, i have not been able to accomplish this goal, but i am no quitter. my getting optimated usually ends in me alone in front of my own toilet in a pool of vomit. nothing to be proud of but nothing that catastrophic either.

this year the optimator had other plans for me. "enough of your mockery, 'hans'," it shouted. "i am taking you down this year!" and take me down it did. a quick jaunt into a cobblestone alley, a twist of my leg on some mud, two loud cracks in my right leg, and i was down on the ground on my ass. "i broke my leg!" i started yelling. my friend lavine came running. "no you didn't," she said. "get up."

the very last pre-break photo

"i can't. i broke my leg." lavine rolled her eyes. "maybe you twisted it or something." (i would like to note for the record that this is the exact same reaction lavine had during another infamous incident, known to all my friends as "the time liz broke her nose in an alley in spain").  "no, it's broken," i said. "you have to call 911." neither of us had our phones on us though so lavine had to leave me to go get hers. lavine ran off to where we had left our stuff and our friend sarah, which was about a block away.

lavine returned soon enough with sarah. they started to try to convince me to let them go get the car to drive me to the hospital. 911 still had not been called. i was still laying in a muddy alley in the dark. then they decided to tell the rest of our group what happened. i was again left alone in a dark alley. i heard a dude come up and pee nearby. i wondered if his pee was going to get on me. i wondered if i should yell to him to get him to call 911 but i was afraid i would scare him.

after a while, i realized i was still laying in an alley with a broken leg. after all this time i finally decided to look at my foot. if you are laying in a mud filled alley, your foot should be pointing up towards the sky. mine was not. my foot was pointing toward my left foot. "that's strange,"i i thought. i sat up and pushed on my foot. it flopped over and then was pointing off towards the right. i thought to myself, "my foot is flopping around like a fish. that makes me feel like i am going to vomit and pass out. if i vomit and pass out, i am going to die by choking on my own vomit in this dark mud filled alley. i have to do something about that foot."

so i decide to try to prop the foot up. i scoot over towards a dumpster and push my right leg towards the dumpster. once my leg is right up next to the dumpster, i shove the foot so that it is in position, leaning on the dumpster, pointing up towards the sky the way it is supposed to. this hurt a lot, and involved some disturbing crunching noises, but i felt that it was worth it as opposed to dying due to being unconscious in a pool of my own vomit.

at this point i began to panic because i had been laying in this mud filled alley alone for a very long time (in reality it was probably about 5 minutes). i could not move and anybody could come along and rape me if they felt like it. plus, i felt that my leg was just getting more broken as the seconds passed. i started screaming "lavine!!!" at the top of my lungs.

a group of my friends, including lavine, reappeared. someone again suggested that i get in a car and they drive me to the hospital. there was no way in hell i was letting anyone touch my leg. "CALL 911 NOW!!!!!!!" i roared. an ambulance appeared almost immediately and the paramedics started the whole song and dance again. "try to stand up," they urged, which apparently i did, but i do not remember it, and then i fell down (of course you fucking morons). i kept telling them that it was broken. "that's ok," they said, "we'll just get that shoe off of you." they pulled. i screamed. they tugged. i howled. finally, these fucking nut cases gave up on the shoe and just put a cardboard splint on it. i was then in the ambulance and on my way to university hospital.

apparently i was a good patient even with all the screaming because when i got there, the paramedicts told the ER staff to give me a "nice nurse." i did get a nice nurse because i got drugs you have never even heard of before. 3 shots of morphine did nothing so they started upping the ante. they were squirmish about telling me the names of the drugs because apparently drug addicts go in there and find out what they got and then come back and request it. i argued that i did not look like a drug addict and they said you can never tell and thinking back, i probably did look like a drug addict anyway by that point. the nurses would give me little hints and i managed to figure out that i had gotten dilaudid ("it starts with a d and ends with a d") and fentanyl ("it starts with an f and it's basically heroin"). finally i felt better until they decided to send me over to radiology, where my leg was bent and moved and i screamed in more agony.

 this is what i look like when i am in the emergency room with a broken leg

after the x-rays (which showed that i had clean breaks on both my tibia and fibula, and a fracture and a bone chip on my tibia above the break, and which also finally convinced everyone that yes, i had actually broken something), the doctor had good news. apparently my decision to push my leg up against that dumpster was a good one. "you reset your own bone!" she said. "that was the best thing you could have done. if you hadn't, we would have had to do it here and it would have hurt a lot more. plus that limited the swelling, so you don't have to wait for surgery."

by this point it was about 3 am and i sent my friends home. the minute they left i started to feel ill (up until that point i had been almost punchy and making jokes at everything). i started vomiting up all kinds of shit and i felt like hell. at around 4, i was taken up to a room (no roommate!) and i had to say goodbye to my wonderful ER nurse and i cried my eyes out. fortunately i had a new nurse who was really nice. she informed me that it was her last day and she was moving to north carolina tomorrow. i cried my eyes out again. i sort of dozed in and out and at 6 am, another nurse showed up to take me down to surgery prep.

on the way down to surgery, which i was already freaking out about, or would have been, if i did not still have 10 kinds of opiates and a significant amount of alcohol coursing through my blood, the nurse gave a running monologue about how she is the most sleep deprived person on the planet. "i get home at 8 am and i'm supposed to sleep! but i have 3 kids and they just don't let me! if i get 2 hours of sleep before somebody is yelling that they need a peanut butter and jelly sandwich i'm lucky! my oldest is 8, make your own peanut butter and jelly sandwich! but he says he likes how mama makes it! so i make it for him! how can you say no to that! then it's back to work!" i am frothing myself up into a panic about how this sleep deprived lunatic is going to run us into a wall and jam my leg and crush it to bits, or i would be if i had the appropriate brain chemicals at that moment to get to that state of anxiety.

i get down to surgery and they tell me they are going to be putting an intramedullary rod and some pins in my leg and it's going to take 3 hours. they hook me up on still more drugs and i get to a state of mind where i am thinking, "wow, i am really freaking out about surgery. i am going to be in there for 3 hours. i could die." but i am feeling no emotions related to this.

the next thing i know somebody is waking me up and telling me the surgery is over. i go back to my room and my friends are there. i laze through another mostly pleasant day and a half in the hospital. the food was really good. the nurses were very nice. i got used to the bed pan really fast and enjoyed making the male nurses uncomfortable by demanding that they wipe me ("front to back!  front to back!"  "i want the wet washcloth, THEN the dry washcloth!"). i had visitors and pushed a little button every time i wanted more drugs... and i got them. the next day, i was given physical therapy to learn how to use crutches, and i got some ice packs and i was sent home.

i spent the first week and a half in a soft cast. i was mostly out of it during this time because i was on percocet and was constantly extremely tired and dazed. i had conversations, phone calls, and emails during this time which apparently were totally coherent but which i do not remember at all. my mom and sister, who live in michigan, came down to take care of me. amazingly, my mom stayed with me for six weeks. she went home for a couple days in there but for the better part of a month and a half, she took care of me. she even slept on an air mattress on my floor which you would think would be really weird but it never was.

my sisters each also came, and several of my out of town friends.  and many of my cincinnati friends stepped up and really helped me in ways i could not have even imagined.  it was really amazing.  of course there were also some real duds who totally did not do shit and pissed me the fuck off, but i'm trying to focus on the positive here.

happy 31st birthday liz!  love, your broken leg.  p.s.  you're my bitch.

on september 29 (the day after my birthday), i had an appointment with my surgeon to get the cast off. my leg was doing well (i have a rod inside the length of my tibia with pins holding it in place) and he let me start using an air cast instead, aka "the boot." i was still not allowed to put any weight on it but i was damn happy to be out of the cast.

i continued to stay on the couch for a while. i was still on percocet and at that time, could not imagine getting off of it due to the pain. i began having other body issues such as lower back pain, difficulty sleeping, lots of different body aches, etc. all the things that you would expect from sitting on a couch for several weeks. i started physical therapy, but it was limited to things like leg lifts and pulling on my foot with a rubber band because i could not put any weight on the foot. i had a lot of visitors which was nice, and some friends put together a schedule to start bringing me food because i could not cook.

frankenleg, circa 9/29/11

i went back to work half days on october 10. this was extremely difficult. i was still so tired, and my doctor had told me that i had to be off the percocet before i went back to work. so i was also in a lot of pain. i would prop my foot up at work, but it would still get really swollen and painful. i had to get driven to and from work, and crutching in and out of the building, up the elevator, and to my office, was so exhausting. i would be there for a couple of hours and feel like i was going to pass out by about 11 am. i couldn't imagine what i was going to do when i had to be there longer, or how i was going to do things like get my lunch or go to court or anything like that.

on october 27, i went back to see the surgeon and he told me that i could start putting weight on my leg. he didn't give me a specific percentage but told me to follow the recommendations of my physical therapist. my therapist suggested that i start at no more than 50%, and continue to wear the boot and use the crutches. he helped me take my first steps which was really exciting! i had totally forgotten what it felt like to walk and it was very awkward.

i was still at work part time and i had been having a lot of issues because i have to go to court a lot. although the courthouse is only about 2.5 blocks from my office, it was too far for me to crutch and i had been having people push me in a wheelchair. after i was allowed to start putting weight on my boot, i decided to try to walk to court one day (november 2, if you are keeping track) because all the sidewalks were torn up from construction and it was too hard for people to push me in a wheelchair (plus i felt bad that so many people were having to take so much time to just do things like push me around).

so you thought you were past the nasty frankenleg photo... sucka!

this was a completely stupid idea. it took me over a half an hour each way just to go the 2.5 blocks, and i ended up messing up my left leg because the boot made my right leg longer than my left leg and it had had to work too hard to overcompensate. plus my right leg was in horrible pain from being overworked. my PT told me to stop wearing the boot because it was messing up my left leg too bad.

around this time i also started to notice a small lump on my ass right where my left leg meets my ass cheek. i sort of ignored it until it gradually began turning into the most fucking excruciatingly painful thing i had ever had. i went to the doctor. "it's a boil," she announced, and gave me an antibiotic and some vicodin. it continued to grow and hurt. all i could do was go to work for a half day, sitting on a donut, and then i would go home and sit on a heating pad and pop vidodin and try not to kill myself.

i can't even explain the pain of this thing. it felt as though someone had taken one of those large really strong black binder clips clamped it onto my skin and left it there for a week. the pain was constantly shooting from the boil all the way down to my left foot. my sister came for the weekend and bought me a hot pad which i began sitting on constantly. i could barely focus on anything but the pain. my thoughts were "boil, boil, boil, boil, boil" 24-7.

people kept trying to get me to let them come over or go out and do things and i was like "no. i have a boil. i can't do anything," and nobody got it. i began to hate my friends, myself, my life, and most of all the fucking boil. the doctor had said that she could not lance it until it came to a head or it would risk serious infection. i spent hours googling "how to make a boil come to a head" and "home remedies for boils." i made hot water compresses. i choked down tablespoons full of apple cider vinegar (try that just once and tell me how horrible it is). i rubbed tea tree oil and topical antibiotic and vitamin e oil on it.

at one point my roommate walked in on me mumbling incoherently about scraping out the inside of an egg shell and putting that on it and he announced, "enough with the home remedies!" i moaned. "it's horrible!" i howled. "LOOK AT IT!!!" and can you believe it, he actually did.  now that is true friendship.  and he said that he thought it was coming to a head.

on november 9, i went back to the doctor and she lanced the shit out of that thing. the doctor and the nurse oohed and ahhed. "this is awesome!" they said. "we love boils! we sometimes watch people popping their own boils on youtube!" this is insane but who better to lance my boil? all in all, "3 golf balls worth" of pus came out according to the doctor and i felt instant, although not complete, relief. the boil did continue to hurt for about 4 more days, but it was nowhere near as bad.  my friend heather came right after that and checked my deflated ass boil for me and cooked and cleaned and even washed my possibly mrsa-infected laundry.  how do you thank someone for something like that?

this is what it looked like on 10/15/11, which is pretty much the same as now except there is less bruising and more leg hair

the day the boil was lanced i had a sore throat. the sore throat got worse and worse. it developed into the cold from hell. which then developed into insomnia from hell.  i think i actually started to go insane.  i got a prescription for ambien.  that didn't work.  then i got a prescription for lunesta.  that finally worked.  if you have never had insomnia, you are lucky.  i don't know if it was worse than the boil, but it made me more psychotic.

right before thanksgiving i was given the ok to stop using the one crutch i had been on for the previous couple of weeks, and start walking on my own.  i was down to physical therapy once a week.  it seemed like smooth sailing, other than the fact that i still had to walk extremely slow in order to not limp, and that i could not walk more than about a block without starting to have pain and swelling.  oh and the fact that my body has been consistently rejecting my internal stitches, causing painful lumps under the skin which eventually come to the surface of my skin and start oozing pus and pieces of what appear to be fishing wire.

thinking i was near the end of the road with this thing, i went to the doctor last thursday, expecting to hear the usual "you're doing great and it looks good" type doctor speak.  instead i got, "well your fibula is still completely broken.  so hopefully it will come back together.  see you in three months."  ok, what the hell.  once more i was thrown back into the land of anxiety and insomnia, thanks to hours of google searching in the wee hours of the morning.  i scheduled an appointment to go back to the doctor later this week to ask questions and bitch about the fact that i might have wanted to know that my fibula had not started to come back together at all maybe some point in oh say the past twelve weeks.

so now i am basically at the point that some people are at WHEN THEY FIRST BREAK THEIR LEG (ie- a broken fibula).  yet i am allowed to walk on it?  i think?  but i can't run for... a long time?  and i should probably _____________ but definitely not __________________.  and i will need to be doing lots of _______________ and _________________ in physical therapy.  and if the fibula doesn't come back together within one to one million days, i definitely will or will not have to have more surgery, or do some other type of unidentified treatment, or not.  yeah, i don't know because he did not tell me any of that.  thanks doc!

so that is my broken leg story.  i am planning a future post on the dos and don'ts of dealing with a person with a severe injury.  i just feel that the public needs this information.  stay tuned!