Day 8 at home - with bum foot and beard

The main thing about having crutches is, you can’t use your hands for anything. I guess this should have been obvious.

A couple of times I devised a way to carry the odd bowl full of cereal and modestly filled coffee cup from my kitchen (where there is no seating) to the bedroom (where everything else I need is) by clutching the left crutch with my armpit, coffee cup with left hand, and using the right crutch as I normally would. This involves a very slow process of taking a regular crutch step with the right, stopping, and swinging the left crutch forward using only my armpit, being careful not to spill the coffee. The two sides are never parallel at any one time. This process takes approximately 27 minutes.

Not being able to stand for more than 30 seconds at a time makes certain other tasks such as shaving difficult. I am finding myself growing a beard for the first time since high school. And back then it was a pretty bad beard, modeled on Dave Gahan's from circa 1993.

We all make mistakes.

There are myriad other impossibilities and challenges, as well as things I figured out how to do that I never thought I could. Like the amount of time I've discovered I can balance on my left leg while brushing teeth, peeing, etc. It's kind of astounding. The other day I was feeling my legs in bed and noticing what a dearth of muscle there was in the right leg, while the left leg was growing in size. Come and get it ladies.

One of the scariest feelings during the first week was – “Oh Jesus, I feel too much blood rushing to my foot. I shouldn't be upright this long. I need to get back to bed! Oh shit – the foot is pulsing –that can’t be good. Oh God, how do I rip open this bag of Cheerios, quickly? Errg. Aaagh! There we go – now pour, damn it.” Pouring means shaking the Cheerios box at the bowl from almost a foot away. That’s as far as your crutch will let you reach. You do everything in a panic because you think that any minute you’re done for. Gangrene or something has halfway set in, and this bowl of cereal has cost you your life.