Little Jumps, big leaps

How not to get fat and weak with a broken leg?

• Crutch half as far as you'd normally walk.
• Fingerboard.

That's pretty much it. I'm knackered most of the time from crutching and healing but somehow my life is working out just fine and I'm as happy as I've been since before I broke it. It's not because I'm being super-positive. There are some moments I just want to throw my crutches on the floor, stamp my right foot (well, hop) and cry. And indeed I do, more often than I'd care to let anyone see.

But just recently some little changes have been happening in my recovery that have put me on top of the world. First of all, I can feel myself putting more and more weight on my leg when I crutch. I stand on two feet without crutches now- which is SO much easier in so many ways. OK, so it's not 50/50 and I'm marooned, but it's a start. My triceps are more efficient and crutching is slightly easier*.

When I think about the day it happened too much, I'm able to really look at how far I've come. At how, incredibly after only two weeks after physio exercises, I'm now maybe 2 degrees off straightening my knee, not 15. There's a long way to go, but these changes happened at a time when I really, REALLY needed to see some improvement.

I've also been to a few lectures. Now, I'm not the most enthusiastic in a lecture. Don't get me wrong, I do care about my degree- but I don't ever really fancy a nice lecture. But I'm absolutely loving the normality. Going to the lectures gives me a buzz, it's a real shame it'll wear off in a couple of weeks! I suppose I'm cherry picking lectures too, on the basis that dragging myself up the hill to university 5 days a week is still too much for my triceps and/or leg.

This week's been a week of training. Shoulders were fairly insistent. Who am I to refuse them, the poor dears?

*Ah, crutching. It's fair to say that I've never hated an inanimate object as much as I hate those crutches. I hate them with a passion. Perhaps it's because they've come to symbolise everything I hate about having a broken leg. A loss of freedom, a tiring method of moving around, and the sodding untangling of arms every time I want to put them down. None of these suit someone as impatient as me. Mostly, it's because they're not as good as walking.

Chapter Five: Going it Alone

Today has been the hardest day since breaking my leg. You see, I can divide my recovery so far into four parts:

The floor of the climbing centre,
The hospital,
Alistair's parents' house in Ilkley and
Leeds with Alistair

Things have been hard, of course, at different points in those four stages. But I've never been alone. I've always been able to hold Ali's, or someone I love's, hand at the start and end of each day. And though I'm very lucky to have Alistair, I'm perhaps unlucky in the sense that in the four years we've been "going out" with each other, we've never yet had a chance to live together. We're both students working towards that end.
And what's so very hard about stage 5 is that at some point, Ali had to return to Sheffield to carry on with his own life, and I had to learn to reclaim my independence. It won't be the first time I've learned this- I suppose it was the same when I left home for the first time. But this time feels a good deal scarier.

So while people I know have said I've been brave, and done well- I haven't really. I haven't had to cope on my own and although I have friends, I will- for the first time since I broke my leg- have to completely run my own life. Now is when being brave starts.
And I think that doing that with a broken leg is probably the hardest thing I've ever found myself up against. I still feel so vulnerable, without complete physical health. And so isolated from the real world.

I know that in theory I could get on a train and see Alistair tonight. But we both know that in practice I can't. Because unless I wait until I'm fully mobile, which could be a while, it's not going to get easier to start on my own no matter how long I leave it.

It's not just not having Ali around to help that will be hard. I'll miss the opportunities having a car around gave me to get out of the house during the week to places that I just can't get to on crutches. I'll miss the swimming too. And of course, I'll miss living with the person I've wanted to live with for years now anyway.

I hope I can do it.

Physio

I saw a physio this week. She was brilliant- she said "So you fell off climbing, I gather you're a climber. So your goal is to get back climbing then?"

Yes! It is! Yay. She then took an extremely detailed set of notes about the injury before giving me some exercises to to to improve flexibility. By the end of the session my knee could be straightened to only 7° bent- at the start it had been 15°.

I've got my motivation to train back, and I'm thoroughly enjoying finger boarding. I've also tried swimming. As someone who normally hates indoor swimming as it's just not exciting enough for my attention span, I've found it awesome. It's very liberating to feel only a fraction of my body weight (my head and shoulders were above the water level thus I did still feel some weight, assuming an average human density of approximately that of water). I found that I can walk in the swimming pool which is great fun.

I'm slowly learning to walk putting about 10% of my body weight onto the foot. It's very different to crutching on only one foot- and of course, with my ankle being held at a fixed ankle taking a step is slightly contrived.

I'm missing climbing though, can't wait to get back!

Six Weeks

I saw a specialist for the six week (and two days) mark yesterday. This was well timed as I'd allowed myself to get pretty fed up. I was missing climbing, and fed up with having a sore leg, and generally losing motivation.

But the specialist seemed happy with the X-rays and said that hopefully walking with crutches for balance should commence in another 6 weeks. For now I'm allowed to slowly begin partial weight bearing, which has made balancing slightly easier. I'm still getting blisters on my hands because although I made some nice foamy handles for my crutches, the foam has slowly died to the point where it is now paper-thin. I have ordered some rowing grips. Hopefully these will be as 'oarsome' as their brand name... ;-)

It was actually going to the Depot that cheered me up and got me feeling motivated again. Most of my friends are there and six weeks seems a long time to be away. Though slightly intimated to be in a climbing centre at first (mostly because I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb, and people kept rudely falling off climbs as though it were completely normal to do so) I didn't get as envious as I thought I would.

It did, however, prove impossible not to do any training at all. A few pull ups were done, and some aptly named dead hangs (I wished I was by the end of the set...) and I felt pretty good :-)

I guess I need to get myself to the climbing centre more then.

I discovered I can feel the screw heads in my ankle. It is my new favourite thing to show to squeamish people. I want to know though, are they slotted or phillips?

I reckon Phillips

Acceptance

When I wrote to my tutor at the beginning of the academic year, I said and thought two completely different things. In my email to the university tutor, I wrote about how having a broken leg and taking strong painkillers would make it harder to study and would inevitably have an effect.

However, in my head I thought that it would be the same studying at home as if I went to university and that keeping up would be no problem.

But I'm starting to realise that it's just not possible to get as much work done as I would have done otherwise. I spend all my time trying to do physics, but I just can't keep up. I think that the university will make allowances for this with deadline extensions and so on, but I certainly hadn't been making allowances for it.

As a result I'm completely exhausted and demotivated this week, after trying to study nearly every day.

For some reason I had accepted that my climbing will take a hit, and hadn't felt the need to feel guilty about it- perhaps because it's a physical thing, like breaking a leg.

But I guess that they really big, ground-shifting things in one area of life have a tendency to shift the areas around them, too.

Touching Base

As the number of lectures I am behind slowly but surely piled up, the need to at least meet up with my project supervisor at university became increasingly pressing.

So I went to university. This, like everything in the last few weeks was much more of an undertaking than I'd imagined. I saw my project supervisor briefly, saw my personal tutor equally briefly, collected some notes and crossed the university campus twice. The whole thing took nearly three hours. And I'd got a lift to uni and back.

The biggest problem was that it took nearly 20 minutes to cover the distance which is equivalent to the distance between two lectures (most of which are back-to-back). And this was when the corridors were empty. I realised that I'm going to have to carry on having my own little personal university and bedroom lab, and that going to university will have to be pretty selective until I can put a lot more weight (than the current amount- none) on my leg.

Blah.

There was more training today though. And here's what I thought of the Metolius Contact:

Going Home

Today I spread my wings and left Ilkley for Hyde Park.

I'm more than a little nervous. In fact I'm very nervous. It's one thing to stay at your boyfriend's parents nice comfortable warm house with lots of space for crutches.

It's another to stay in a 'space-efficient' third-floor flat with, it transpires, no heating. Or insulation.

But, I can reach everything in most rooms from the centre of the room. Yes!

(I can also turn off the light from bed with my crutches) Photo taken by Alistair