pieces of me

I recently had part of my hamstring detached, braided together and then placed where my ACL used to be, somewhere behind my knee cap. I also had a part of my meniscus removed, “5%” of it, and another side of my meniscus was stitched up to repair a tear.

Its been exactly 3 weeks. Today marks 3 weeks since I had the surgery and the bruising has almost all gone, the swelling comes and goes on a daily basis, but there is so much about this surgery I find hard to explain to others and hard to come to terms with myself.

My kneecap, until yesterday, was “not tracking” in the right way, so with every third or fourth step I would falter because it felt like someone had tied a rubberband in a knot, right inside my knee, and it would release and slam something in there, causing me pain and discomfort, but more than anything, causing me to get “stuck” in a certain way, like I couldn’t extend my leg further or bring my leg back in.

This hasn’t happened today, at least, not since waking up. I think its because I did all the possible exercises I could to activate my quads and somehow I have managed to bypass this “misfiring” and get my kneecap and my quads to work the way they are supposed to.

I’ll be honest with you, the pain is non stop.

I wake up in pain, I go to sleep in pain.

Its sore, I feel angry at myself, angry at the world, angry about every little aspect of how my future will turn out.

And its not logical, this anger, its just a side effect of being in pain all the fucking time.

It doesn’t help that I know I have cysts all over my liver. It doesn’t help that I have two decent sized lesions on my liver that I won’t know are tumors unless they have grown by my next MRI in 3 months.

And you may be wondering why my liver comes into this at all, well, NSAID’s, anti-inflammatories, Panadol, Advil, frikken any kind of supplement I want to take to help me boost my immune system, manage my pain or help me sleep…all of these things can add to my liver grief.

I don’t know if I am feeling depressed because my liver function is poor, I don’t know whether I am tired every fucking morning because of my liver or if its my fucking leg and all this pain!

The physiotherapist said that the pain is real, but the fear of it is in my head, and the more I fear it, the less I will move and the less I move the more rigid my knee will become and in the long run, that is not what I want for my leg. Easy to say, but I am curious if he has ever torn his ACL or had surgery to reconstruct it!

All the advice I get is about how to rehabilitate from an ACL surgery, there isn’t a real consideration about the meniscus surgery except to say I have to be a bit more cautious than if I had just done the ACL surgery alone.

Nice.

Useful.

Really fucking useful.

Anyway, I have a pilates session today. A private training session to teach me how to use a reformer. Its like a medieval torture table that you aren’t strapped to unwillingly, but yeah, you exercise on it!

I did pilates before, heck, I even got an instructor certification in mat work specifically for this sort of shit, physiotherapy based rehabilitation, spinal alignment and such…but it was mat work, not the reformer.

So I know that pilates will help me, I know it will strengthen my body all around and focus, most importantly, on my core strength, which right now is kinda shot to shit because of this lopsided, peg leg problem of walking in circles.

I jest, of course, I am not walking in circles, my bipedal gait is actually pretty deliberately decent, but it takes pain and overcoming it in order for me to just walk heel-toe-heel-toe. I still can’t fully hyperextend my leg, I am stuck with this slight bend and although I am not hopping around on my toe like Karate Kid, I do feel like it sometimes, “the crane”!!!

I guess what I needed to put fingers to keyboard about it this, depression. Depression that you figure out is depression but you know pretty certain where and what triggered it because, duh, you know depression and understand it, you recognize it the way you would a friend.

I wake up tired. I go to bed before 9pm if I can and I still wake up tired when the kids wake at 7am. I rummage in the cupboard for food I don’t want to eat or need to eat. I just don’t fucking care that my hair looks like a birds nest or my eyes look a bit dead. My legs are unshaved and my brows overgrown. My skin is a bit of a greyish tint. I don’t remember to drink water, I sit around all day in my jammies or mismatched clothes and I just can’t fucking help myself.

I know this place. I have been here before. Its a way too comfortable place to be, let me tell you, and it takes every fucking thing in me to push myself out of it and say, enough is enough. Today, get out that fucking door with clothes that match. Brush your teeth like you mean it. Drink that second glass of water like you know you need it. And for fucks sake, just do your exercises, walk on your frikken swollen leg and stop feeling sorry for yourself!

You know, my knee hasn’t misfired today. Its swollen, its not like I am running anywhere, not even to the loo, but the kneecap is tracking perfectly today.

I believe its because of all the quad exercises I did yesterday, with the resistance band, that made my knee this frikken swollen today, that had me sleep shit last night coz I couldn’t find a comfortable way to lay my leg. Yep, thanks to those very exercises, my kneecap is tracking where it should be and although I am in pain, there is no extra unpredictable pain to add to that. Woo hoo.

I managed to get a lot of work done yesterday.

Work, I say that like I am so busy.

I work, when I can, when I can drum up motivation to organize myself, its a different pace, a different reward system, working for yourself vs working for The Man.

I used to get a decent salary when I worked for The Man. Enough to fund single parenthood, a small 2.5 bedroom in a not so down and out neighborhood and a domestic helper to clean said apartment and watch the kid while I toiled.

Those days, yeah, there went my self-worth.

Now I have to find meaning in motherhood, meaning selling jewellery.

I used to love photography.

You’d never see me anywhere without my camera, even when I was drunk as fuck, I would still have my camera with me, never fearing I would drop or break it.

The only reason we have photos of any of my friends and I from back in our raving days was coz I brought my camera with me.

But then I had these little kids and somewhere, my mojo just got lost.

And yesterday when I busted out my camera bag with all my lenses and such, my friend who had kindly offered to model my jewellery for me, she was like, “Wow, is THAT your camera bag? Its insane! How much is in it?”

I had to think.

Camera, lenses, more lenses…tripod…a lot.

And this was the first time I had busted it out in months!

I took photos of her wearing the jewellery, and then for the better part of the evening before and after the kids went to bed, I impatiently went about editing the photos, but the one photo I took special pleasure in was the portrait of my friend I managed to capture.

All the jewellery photos are just to showcase the length of the necklaces or bracelets and how they look when worn, they have no faces in them, so yeah, that one image, that was one I enjoyed for me, not for work.

There is an understanding growing within me, that although I love being creative and I love the outcome of creativity, I do not love the process. The actual step by step process of a piece of art coming to fruition, its painful to me. Its tedious, its boring, its just fucking painful.

I love the watercolor painting, I ended up with paintings that were ok, not bad to look at…but I will be honest with you, I was shit at planning my painting. And watercolor is such that you need to plan before you just go for it because water dries and it is a very time specific way of painting. Even with my photography for the jewellery, I understood I have to do a certain thing, I aimed for making it happen, but I didn’t think about a lot of things that, in the end, made my job just a small bit longer coz I had to go back to correct things I could have avoided if I had only thought the whole fucking thing through with thorough planning.

Things like a simple crease in a shirt or a crack on the wall or a change in seating position or a change in the weather from sunshine to rain and from rain to lightening and gray skies. Using natural light is not a problem as long as you are consistent in when you take your images, all of your images for a specific purpose. Soon as the light changes, you increase your potential for necessary editing.

Ah, but now I know, I know now why they have buffers and fluffers in porn, lol. I know why they have a stylist, a hair person, a make up person and someone who just fucking straightens clothes for every shot. I know why it takes that many people to take a perfect fashion photo.

That said, I know now why its hard for me to really take off with my business, and its because I am the sourcing agent, the accountant, the sales manager, the marketing manager, the person who has to do inventory (most painful job ever), the photographer, the editor, the IT professional…fuck…you can imagine how this all can get slowed down when you are also the school drop off, school pick up, personal chef, teacher, play organizer, mediator, sleep counselor, story book reader…and on and on.

I feel like right now, where I am at, I am failing at a lot of things I am supposed to have my shit together on.

I limp around, I am in pain, I want to sleep almost as soon as the kids are asleep, and if I do some work, my day is swallowed whole. I don’t seem to have a “defer” button because, as I said, I like the outcome, I hate the long drawn out process of getting to that outcome, so if I need to edit some images, I can’t wait a day, I will do it the same day, which means I ignore my kids when they are biting each other, I ignore my husband who needs some quiet in the house while he makes an important call to extortionate financial planning companies who billed us erroneously, and I miss the fact that I am not hungry but am still shoveling rice and curry into my face while editing photos.

Editing photos that I know are just the first step, the “how it looks from afar” photos, coz now I need the “how it looks up close” photos, which will take another full day of taking photos, editing, ensuring they are all with the same amount of light, ensuring that the colors are as true to the original as is possible and ensuring I still manage to feed and clothe my kids and pick them up from school on time.

In my defense, I have had a horrendous sore throat for about 10 days now. Oh sure, I did think maybe I have cancer of the throat or something, but its very, very slowly loosening its grip on me now and maybe all I have to worry about is the reality that I had such an insane amount of antibiotics pumped into me post surgery, like right into my fucking veins, that its only natural that now that my leg has come down to half its size, my lymphatic system has sent all sorts of unknown sludge up towards my heart and my lymph nodes near my throat are bearing the brunt of it. I was in so much pain I wanted to stick knitting needles in my ears to let it out! Sadly, I don’t knit anymore.

Right after surgery I spent a few days doing inventory of everything I have in stock. Coming up with SKU numbers, making a note of quantity, descriptions of each individual piece. Wow, that was excruciating. And to be honest, I only managed to do an inventory of everything new, not the older stuff. So yeah, imagine my joy right now when thinking about all the work I have left to do and how I am going to achieve that on my own.

I have got to snap the fuck out of it.

And I will. I am. I just need to spit this out and get on with it.

Writing, for me, it doesn’t need the planning it takes for everything else, its my stream of consciousness, its all over the place and its in one place at the same time. I don’t care how I come across because I write to release anxiety, not necessarily for pleasure, but I do find peace in it. Maybe one day I will slow down enough or pull myself together enough to be able to organize my thoughts in a coherent manner, but that time isn’t now.

I’m simply not ready to make writing a painful process.