Quick Update

So peeps, trying hard to type this lying on my back with legs up the wall. Got back from doc's today - news isn't exactly what I was hoping for. In brief: She thinks the first xray may have missed a fracture (I disagree, but then I have a vested interest in disagreeing. I choose to believe that my foot was strong and healthy, bone-wise, when this accident occurred and that that has prevented a break). She said it was the worst sprain she's ever seen (if in fact, it is a sprain) and she's sending me back to the hospital for more tests. On a rush basis. Tomorrow morning. I also had to get the air cast but not so that I can use it. No, I'm only allowed to lie with my leg elevated higher than my chest doing weird massage things to it and alternating ice and heat.

I'm trying very hard to focus on the positives - of which there are many - but I can't believe I may be immobile for much longer. I'm not allowed to go back to work (though I am working full days from home) till at least the 13th. This foot hurts quite a bit. It's almost Xmas. I'm lonely for face-to-face interaction. I'm worried about gaining weight - though I'm trying to be quite careful about how much I eat. I'm worried about atrophy of other muscles and asymmetry.

I know many people live through far more injury with much more grace. I realize that, in my moment of inattention, I could just has likely have hit my head or broken my knee. Or my arm - which would totally have precluded work and blogging and so many other things.

At any rate, that's all the news that's fit to print today.

Spitting Image

OMG - I look just like this! :-):

Photo courtesy of Whorange

Flip Side

I was all about to write a litany of complaints vis a vis the foot (starting to consider whether I've torn ligaments, since I'm still bed bound at the end of day 6 and I'm occasionally losing my mind about it), when it occurred to me that I've really got to change my attitude.

Today I was talking with my friend Sandra, admonishing her for not being adequately grateful for her mobility, when it occurred to me that I was sitting there bitching at her instead of being grateful for my healthy arms (which are using the computer to work from home), my strong constitution, my every breath - you get the idea.

So here's a list of opportunities (and gratitude) about living with a healing (really hideous, painful, dare I say severe) foot sprain:

• It appears that I've been going at rocket pace for months now (ok, years, but you get the point). I'm starting to wonder if any other kind of injury could have required me, so succinctly, to sit in one spot and rest.
• I don't have the flu, which is truly the worst illness ever.
• My office (specifically my manager) has been insanely accommodating, facilitating my remote work arrangement as I heal. I am truly grateful that, instead of making me feel guilty for this injury, they are encouraging me to take care and giving me opportunities to work despite my immobility.
• This happened the evening of (i.e. right after) the final big work project I've been alluding to for months.
• Online shopping lets you buy food from the UK and clothes for your kid - all in 10 minutes. With sales, if you're smart.
• I am an competent practitioner of Iyengar yoga - my only method of exercise (nay, movement) right now. It's also foot therapy. I've got a post coming up on this in the next couple of days.
• I only had to wait 3 hours in the emergency room and I got excellent care and it was free. (Thank you socialized medicine.)
• I'm not going as crazy as I thought I would. A woman I work with managed to (in a freak accident) fall off a ravine in July and she broke her foot and ankle. She went through major surgery, followed by 3 months of bed rest, and just returned to work 2 weeks ago - in an air cast. When I heard about this I sympathized tremendously. I grieved for her. Man, I thought of her with all of my positive vibes because I couldn't imagine a world in which I might be immobilized for 3 days, much less 3 months. There's a sweet sort of irony about this, no?
• I'm not outrageously hungry. Of course, I'm not doing much moving, but I never knew how much movement and hunger correlate.
• I can't get to the food easily. I don't need to explain this one, right?
• My husband has to do all the fetching and carrying - can't say how much I appreciate not doing any cooking or cleaning up.
• I have wine and the internet!!
• As Cal says (though she had a little help from the Buddha): It is not what we carry with us, but what we let go of that defines who we are.

Here's to being here now, peeps. xo

PS: For y'all who've recently dropped by to see my sewing posts, please don't lose interest. I do lots of them (too many, according to some!). Just having challenges sewing and photographing due to the injury. I'll be back to a cross section of sewing posts soon.

Update: I must have been in a wine-haze happy place when I wrote this. Today, my zen perspective is all shot to hell. For starters, I just dropped the phone (model circa 1990 and it weighs a pound) on my face and now I suspect I'm going to have a mega black eye as my eye is all weepy and puffy. WTF?!?!?!? (Did I mention I've now officially run out of arnica?) This is to say nothing of a second degree burn I gave myself about 2 weeks ago, pressing some fabric, which is still ugly and scar-ry on my forearm. Scott just advised that he wants me to sign an affidavit indicating that he blameless re: my numerous injuries, and I can see why. Oh, why are all of these things so ugly, even as they are painful?

Update 2: I can't believe I'm posting this, but I feel the need to show y'all the state of my foot seven days after the injury:

This photo is from Scott's cell phone and I can't figure out how to make it bigger... Like you want to see it bigger...

Um, Wow...

Remember this bra? Well, Reader, I bought it and it's horrifyingly ugly. Until... you put on a top at which time it gives the most fantastic, pointy-delicious shape that it's impossible not to love it.

Not to mention the fact that it's the most comfortable thing I've ever worn in my life. Seriously, people, maybe foot injury is messing with my brain, because I'm not exactly the kind of girl who goes for comfort. (Note: If you are my real-world friend or family member, you are not allowed to lecture me about this. I know that we don't wear lingerie for comfort.)

When I first pulled it out of its box - yes, it comes in a box?!? - I thought, there is no fucking way. Let's just send this thing back to Figleaves. Or burn it and restore a little bit of beauty to the world. Prudence, and the fact that I'd been waiting for it for a month, first convinced me to crawl my way to the front door (10 minute expedition), then to pull it out of the box (hard without access to scissors which were too difficult to reach) and then to sit in the hallway awkwardly trying to put it on. Have you ever tried to put on a bra while sitting awkwardly on the floor. Not so easy, as it happens.

I think I'm going to keep it, if only as a novelty item. If cooler heads prevail when I am well, I can always chalk it up to a moment of sartorial insanity. And right now, as I bounce up and down while (occasionally) hopping on my good leg, it's a very good thing to own.

Some things you should know about it, in case you want to take the plunge:

• I used the word "plunge" with irony. This thing comes up to your sternum. Scoopy T, I don't think so.
• It's fascinatingly constructed out of mystery fabric but without wires and it's AWESOMELY supportive (as everyone says).
• It's insanely comfortable.
• It gives terrific 50's silhouette which I happen to love. But it's exaggerated.
• It deemphasizes breast size due to the way it distributes breast tissue. Note: It does not "minimize".
• It's utterly ugly: straps are an inch wide?!, the band is so thick it's practically a midline bra. If only it were 4 inches longer, on me it would be a longline! (Gotta be something good about the short waist.)
• It does have that retro thing going for it, as long as you wear it with attitude (she says having no attitude to bring to anything right now). With high waisted black lace undies, it would be a) very slimming under most clothing and b) rather Mad Men cute.
• It starts in a 34 back size. I'm a 32 and I'm wearing it on the middle hooks. Unlike others, I don't think the back fits super small. Instead, I will suggest it's doable if you have a 32 back and you want to give the 34 a try i.e. not too loose.
• I would go up a cup size. Everyone said that and I agree. Mind you, if I had access to try this one cup size down, I suspect it might also fit (it's in the nature of the construction, IMO, that it might). Depending on your breast shape, a couple of sizes might fit similarly.

So these are my thoughts. A woman with larger breasts is going to get a great silhouette, a supportive bra and comfort (not so bad). A woman with smaller breasts gets all of that, and a more retro-cute / less dowdy look. Note: I don't think any woman should be making this her go-to bra unless she's living the Dita von Teese lifestyle. You have to bring your mojo.

PS: You could totally run in this bra and equally easily do yoga because there are no wires but the support is optimal.

Can't You Just Taste the Egg Nog?

I absolutely LOVE this room. Silver and baby blue trees totally work for me:

Photo: Apartment Therapy

Informed Consent

Being infirm, as I am, I finally did watch a movie on Netflix, The Business of Being Born. Y'all are a pretty savvy crowd, so maybe you've already seen it. The combo of my a) never watching movies and b) having lived through my own home birth (from which I'm still recovering more than a decade later) has precluded me from seeing this film till today.

I watched it alone - Scott and M are out for dinner - and I have to say it was rather affecting, if mainly in a PTSD kind of way.

Let me start by saying, I am not the poster child for home birth.

Oh, I've been a yoga teacher since I was 19 and my parents are holistic health practitioners. I see a naturopath. I believe in the body's ability to function and heal. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, we are - most of us - designed to have children without intervention, with all of the intensity of the natural experience.

But there seemed little naturalness about my child's unmedicated birth and, on some level, I've been grappling with it ever since.

I have written about my parenting ambivalence, post-partum depression and anxiety and the challenge I faced in bonding with my daughter after she was born. I haven't talked much about the birth itself, to some extent because I don't remember it very well. I've pieced it together from stories told after the fact by my (insanely competent) midwives, my husband and my mother.

My story is complicated by a potential (but not actual) health issue my daughter was thought to be experiencing a couple of days after her birth (as I was desperately trying to recover and adapt), which resulted in a) days at the hospital and invasive procedures of the like I had so stridently tried to protect her from by having a home birth and b) a moment where doctors prepared me for the possible death of my newborn (because they didn't know what was wrong, if anything).

It goes without saying that I am eternally grateful for her health. She has thrived despite her slightly unusual physiology. I am grateful to every practitioner who worked to confirm her health. I am profoundly grateful to my parents (who, bizarrely, experienced a very similar thing with my sister at her birth - the birth, on some level, I was trying to avoid in my decision to have M at home). They stayed by my side and supported me and my husband. My friend Hilary came back from a stint in BC to be with me at the hospital and to advocate on M's behalf (she's a neonatal specialist).

But this is about the birth, not the aftermath.

It started off well - M was 2 weeks early. I passed the mucous plug early in the morning (warning - this post is not for the faint of heart) and waited for the labour to begin. By about noon I felt contractions. I could manage them. I used yoga technique. I have a high pain tolerance (my sprain, for example, which is terrible to look at, has only necessitated the ingestion of 2 Advils and 3 Tylenols over the past 60 hours. The hospital has prescribed 2 xs Advil and 3 xs Tylenols 4 times a day...)

We called the midwives as the contractions intensified. They arrived an hour later, at 2 pm (it was Easter, if I remember correctly), at which time I was in transition. The midwives decided it might be best, given a few factors, including M's slowing heart beat, to break my water. I agreed. From that point on it was all. fucking. over.

I'm not sure if you've ever experienced intense pain. I can tell you that the intensity of the pain I felt after the midwives broke my water was like nothing I have ever felt. I had a back labour from that point on. I tried getting into the tub, which only made me want to kill myself and everyone around me. I felt like I was falling up - so massively ungrounded was I. The only person I could tolerate was my husband who needed to simultaneously push against me and prop me up (with serious muscle power) seemingly endlessly. I would regularly vomit - pain didn't even register at a certain point, this was my body's way of managing it.

Between contractions I mentally bargained with God. I begged for increased duration between episodes. M's heart beat kept slowing and the midwives were increasingly concerned. They gave me oxygen, they urged me to push. I could barely register their instructions. I was stunned by pain. Eventually (though this happens only in 2% of midwife-assisted childbirths) they told me they would have to give me an episiotomy. Without any pain medication. I was so far gone, I didn't even care.

My 6-hour labour, while very fast by all accounts, was the longest, by hours, that any woman in my family has ever encountered. At this point, I was in hour 5.

By hour 5 and some, one (of my 3) midwives called the paramedics. I won't tell you of the shocking things my mother and husband were instructed to do to encourage contractions.

The midwife put her hands inside my body (both of them) to pull out M, at which time they discovered what they'd expected. She had the cord wrapped tightly around her neck 4 times. Nonetheless, due to my midwife's skill and foresight, M was healthy. She scored high on the Apgar test almost immediately.

The paramedics burst into my bedroom as all of this was happening. I don't remember it.

As soon as she was born, M started to cry. My husband and mother, the midwives, were all incredibly relieved to hear her. I felt utterly overwhelmed, half-dead. I screamed at them to get her out of the room. I heard M squeak from the other side of our condo (where we lived at the time). I just wanted her to be quiet. To leave me alone.

They almost had to transfer me to the hospital to sew up my bits (and because they were worried about hemorrhaging). I had 27 stitches - I told you this was not for the faint of heart. It took them an hour to suture. For that, you may be happy to know, they gave me medication. Happily, they did an awesome job and I was entirely healed in 2 weeks (a miracle). Far easier births can result in reproductive and other problems that persist for years... Interesting side note: Part of the problem, in terms of delivering M, was that I had done so many "perineum strengthening" yoga moves and kegels during my pregnancy, that my pelvic floor was an inflexible rock. So I guess you can be too fit. I shook from shock for an hour.

This was all before the hospital experience that followed 2 days later.

By the time my kid was home again, a week after her birth, I was so afraid of everything I could barely function. The only impact, as I can tell, that oxytocin had on me, was to make me freakishly hysterical about the germs that might touch (and kill) my child - who, frankly, I couldn't bear to be around, anyway. For a year, I wouldn't allow meat into my house. (Somehow I felt that meat would transfer germs to M's food and poison her.) I couldn't sleep for worrying about her dying. But as I watched over her, in my delusional fatigue, I only wanted to find the peace I imagined death would bring. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't suicidal. Suicide was the luxury of non-parents. Parents were simply strung into an existence of terror and sleep-deprivation, of loss and being trapped.

It was a truly terrible time during which I should have been medicated. It lasted for 3 years.

So as I watched woman after woman sagely giving birth in tubs during The Business of Being Born, I couldn't help but feel really fucking cheated. That's what I'd signed up for. I knew it would be impossibly difficult. I was cool with that. I felt I owed it to my child, to my body, to feminism, to nature. I was on board.

I didn't rush to the hospital to be induced then numbed then induced more then numbed more, only to have an eventual C section. I dimmed the lights, people. I eschewed medical intervention.

I don't kid myself. Had I been in a hospital I'd have been candidate no. 1 for a C section. After it was all over (and to this day) I like to tell people, were pregnancy to happen to me again, which it won't, I'd be knocked out and woken when it was over.

And yet, fundamentally, I believe in the alchemical miracle of natural birth. How could I knowingly deny myself or my child the one-time opportunity to live that primacy, to be there unobstructedly at the first, tremendous moment of extra-uterine life?

Except that didn't happen. I went through all that shit and I came out the other side hormonally unprepared, loathsome of parenting and more fearful than I'd ever been. It changed me for the worse in so many ways. It robbed me of myself as it changed me. I did not look in my newborn's eyes with love. I felt panic tinged with resentment.

To this day, even as my tweenie child is a compelling, charming, hilarious and loving soul, I don't know how to make sense of it. I suppose I should just buck up and be grateful that it all worked out alright. And when I'm not watching movies about the miracle of natural birth, that's generally how I roll.

Don't Do It

There's an argument to be made, given my compulsiveness, that I do not "relax" unless some stronger force compels me. It's a kind of beating me at my own game philosophy. Emphasis on the word "beating".

For example, my idea of a sick day is to (between hacking away and feeling like death) do laundry and organize my papers and cut out a pattern. I know I should be lying down, watching Netflix, but I can't budge the thought that I'm wasting time.

It's incredibly strange, therefore, to be lying here doing utterly nothing (except the occasional time-sensitive work item and reading blogs and talking on the phone, which in my world is nothing).

Here are the things I feel I should be doing today:

• Putting away the overflowing basket of clean laundry. It is taunting me with its messiness.
• Making cookies. I'm really wanting cookies.
• Doing some yoga - even if it's mega-restorative/therapeutic for the foot yoga only, it's necessary action.
• Cleaning up M's room, which is like Satan's rumpus pad of hoarded tchotchkes and crap.
• Tracing the pants pattern for V1166.
• Cutting out the fabric for V1166 and another one of V8634.
• Making some more Xmas present circle scarves. I've got 3 of these lined up.

Here's what I'm actually doing:

• Lying in bed blogging and reading blogs. (Why is it US Thanksgiving? - all my bloggers are eating instead of blogging!)
• Wishing Scott would finish his teleconference upstairs so he could help me get to the washroom. No dignity peeps.
  
• Wondering what I'm going to eat next.
• Considering how I haven't had a shower since Wed. and it's disgusting. I suppose I could take a bath but I loathe baths. I feel taking a bath is like soaking in your own dirt. Which is better than being dry and grimy, how exactly? Fact is, I have no interest in figuring out how I will get into and out of the bathtub.
  

In truth though, it is rather relaxing.

Update: I took a modified shower which involved a make-shift step stool (an old toys bucket of M's) and Scott holding the shower head. Talk about undignified. Oy. On the plus side, I'm clean. But the shower is a veritable death trap when you've got an injury - it's all hard, pointy, wet surfaces. On the way out I fell over onto the ankle - exceeding briefly - but it was SO painful. Icing it again and lying on the couch. You know, I woke up (after 13 hours) at 11 am this morning. It's 2:15 and I can barely keep my eyes open. Oh, and I'm totally beyond hungry. And not just for fun food. I can't see how inactivity and consumption are a good combo. The only thing I can come up with is that I must be expending more energy hopping (and crawling) around than I think I am.