The Waiting

Some days the headline writes itself. Today’s headline is: nothing to report. The update is that there is no update. Exactly four weeks ago I came home from surgery, and this is the first time I’ve sat down, cracked my knuckles, and realized I have almost nothing dramatic to say. Which, in recovery terms, might be the best update of all.

Almost nothing.

Here’s the one genuinely interesting thing: yesterday the first wedge came out of the boot, and friends, this thing was the size of a kitten heel. Out it came, and suddenly the foot feels more alive sitting on a flatter heel, like it’s remembering it used to live closer to the ground. There’s one more wedge left in there. But the ankle has started doing something it hasn’t done in a month: flexing. Bending. Twisting, gently, the way an ankle is actually supposed to. Small movements, sure. After weeks of the thing behaving like a fence post, though, I will take every single degree.

Now for the good-news-bad-news portion of our program. The good news: there’s no pain. None. The bad news: it feels like someone poured a bag of concrete into my shin and let it set all the way down into my foot. “Stiff” does not begin to cover it.

And the part I’m bracing for comes next. This is where the real, deeply unglamorous work begins: hours of coaxing the flexibility back into a joint that has genuinely forgotten its job. I have to do it right, too, because if I cut corners now, I’ll just end up torquing some other innocent body part later when I try to run again. NOT, and I cannot stress this enough, THAT I’M PLANNING ON RUNNING AGAIN. (We can revisit that little fib in a few months.)

So that’s the whole report: no news, one kitten heel lighter, an ankle relearning how to be an ankle. Some chapters of this are all drama and blood and hardware. This one is just me, quietly checking days off the calendar, one square at a time. Tom Petty had it right; the waiting really is the hardest part. But four weeks in, with no pain and a foot that’s finally starting to move, I’ll happily take boring. Boring is just healing wearing a disguise.