OK, having it.
So, the ankle was getting better. It felt better to me. I was walking in an air cast and it still hurt a little bit, but the swelling had gone down and I had hope for the future. This morning, around six, I was sitting there on Sarah's air mattress (I had been crashing at her house for a few days for a variety of reasons) comparing my two ankles and thinking, man, I bet I can go for a nice long walk on Monday.
And then I got up to go to the bathroom, never fully got my balance, crashed down on my ankle in like three different directions, then slammed my face to the ground. My nose started gushing blood, and my lip swelled up, with a tooth-shaped indent in the middle of it. I screamed to holy hell. All of Beechwood Canyon must have heard me. Sarah came rushing out. I writhed in a ball on her living room floor.
What.
The.
Fuck.
I was in denial for a few hours about going to the hospital. But then my toes started turning purple, just this strange creep of blotchy color making its way up my little piggies. I kind of freaked out. Sarah - Saint Sarah, as she may now be known for putting up with all this hysteria and blood and insanity for the last day - took me to the hospital, where everyone made weird, dooming comments over a five hour period.
The x-ray technician, a smiling man with a front gold tooth, said, "I predict a cast. Legally I can't say it, but you know, that's what I'm predicting."
One nurse, who walked me to an examining room, looked at my foot and said, "I don't want to freak you out, but that looks pretty bad."
Finally the doctor, a dry, young Indian man, came to talk to me about my x-rays.
"What do you think I'm going to say to you?" he said.
"I think you're going to tell me I need a cast," I said. "I heard a rumor."
"Where did you hear that?" he said.
"Oh around," I said.
"Well it's true," he said.
It turns out I had broken it last week.
I'm not even going to get into the rest of it, waiting for the cast man for an hour, the sad little tray of hospital food Sarah and I hungrily consumed because it was like, two in the afternoon and we were still there waiting for said cast man, the kind women in the finance office who helped me get my x-rays to take to some random orthopedic surgeon I have to visit tomorrow, and beg through tears to cut this goddamn cast off and give me one of those boots I can walk around in because I swear to god if I have to spend four to six weeks in this thing (I know, I probably will, so it's probably not even worth uttering these words but I'll say it anyway), I will GO INSANE.
Either way I won't be able to drive the entire time, which is great because I live in the most car-centric city on the planet.
The sunny side of this is unclear to me at the moment but tomorrow is another day, and I will pray for some sort of revelation. Sarah said, "Well you won't get to do the things you want to do, but you'll figure out a new way to spend your time."
Personally I think I'll just be reading (here's my wishlist, for those of you who asked) and writing and doing CHAIR YOGA but whatever.
Fucking hell. This is not good. I am trying here, but lord does this suck.
(11/20/08)