You may recall in a post from a couple of months ago entitled Two Lymes and a Lemon I told our collective tale of woe. To recap The Brains and The Bean were both being treated for Lyme disease and I had taken a fall on little more than a gentle stroll up Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh. The Lymes are doing well, though those familiar with the disease will know that it is the hidden damage that is hard to quantify … there may be none, there may be much but life, in our collective opinion (Two Brains and I have pulled rank on The Bean and made the decision for her) life is too short to worry about mightbees.
But. Big but. It seems little old attention seeking me has been less fortunate. My leg continued to give me grief and it became apparent that I have something called Foot Drop (which sounds like the Dropsy so loved of Shakespeare but is in fact a condition that means I can’t lift my foot. So my left side wafts with my usual elegance and grace (no, really) and my right side has a high step and flop-foot like a bizarre half human-half duck creature). Eventually, having travelled to France for a couple of weeks and back to Britain for a couple more weeks with the Agèd P and returned to Massachusetts, I was able to present myself back with the Doctor who was clearly concerned that I was still having problems and indeed those problems had increased. So I had an MRI. Actually I had two, because I’m greedy …. one for the ankle and one for the calf. That thing when your Doctor rings and opens the conversation with ‘you sure did a number on that leg’, that thing is the unwanted herald that you know the news isn’t going to be an invitation to pop the cork on a good bubbly. And it wasn’t – a fractured tibia at the ankle, a severe tear to a tendon and muscle down thereabouts and a fully snapped ligament. And moving up to the calf a further fracture to the fibular and somewhere in the whole mess a squished perineal nerve which is the thing that sends the messages to your foot to move up and down. Hence the one-sided duck-walk. I’d prefer a cake-walk. For now I have to settle for a comedy walk since it appears the ligament (its the one that joins the tibia to the fibular) may be responsible for the fact that my foot is increasingly insistent that it needs to, really and honestly needs to, veer outwards giving me a gate that amusingly resembles the waddle of a penguin. An odd bird indeed, that 6′ penguin-duck-bird. One specialist has given me a prognosis of running again next summer, tomorrow I see a second. What will be will be but the whole damn sorry scene does bring to mind Dumbledore in Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone ‘The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing and should therefore be treated with great caution’. I really, really wanted the truth but it turns out not THIS actual truth. Heyho. So many worse off. Too many. Far too many. And I dedicate this piece to all of you. You know who you are Terry and Clare and Kerry and AJ and Kat and I’m sorry I can’t do links because my Mac has decided I’m moaning too much and has malfunctioned to take the attention away from my whingeathon. Next stop Apple Hospital.
I picked this image for no particular reason except that the tree that has fallen into the water is absolutely perfect and it’s reflection entirely unblemished, the water itself seemingly unpeturbed. Which is probably how I appear. Deceptive these appearances can be, don’t you find?
PS: Since the author of Harry Potter (J K Rowling like you didn’t know) is a resident of Edinburgh and the taxi driver who took me to the A&E there sang her praises loudly as the most remarkable woman who gives so much quietly, it felt appropriate to use a quote from one of her characters in my title.
Mirror was the Weekly Photo Challenge a couple of weeks ago …. this is my belated entry