Runaway

Today, I was back in the pool. I was feeling relatively cocky: my Dead Leg, apart from the odd patellar dislocation, has been behaving himself. I was walking lengths, up and down the pool, wearing pink and yellow flippers, when an idea for the annual anniversary poem popped into my head (a good thing, too, because it was yesterday. Ooops). A problem: I began to pay less attention to the flippers than to words. I stopped to do my turn at the far end of the pool, and the Dead Leg decided to go buoyant, and out to the side he went. Physical activity has always provided the impetus for a lot of my creative output. I used to compose music, write lyrics, and work on poems in my head as I ran. I could run miles, and come home tired enough to focus, and get things down on paper. No more. If I lose focus on the leg, he runs off, seeking asylum or distractions. I was afraid I'd I lost track of the poem, but it is still there, rumbling around in the back of my head.

Weightlifting

I had my second hydrotherapy session today. It feels wonderful to be in the (very) warm water, to feel pain and tension and the heavy burden that is the Dead Leg seep away for a little while. I feel very much at home in the water, and I have to resist the urge to drop down and scoot along the bottom of the pool. I used to tune out the world that way, stop being responsible and the oldest and worrying about where everyone else was. I have to pay attention at hydrotherapy, because I might miss something crucial, the one magical exercise that will mean I get to leave the Dead Leg floating here by himself forever.

When my session is over, I walk to the bottom of the stairs. As I climb up, I get heavier and heavier. I stagger under the weight of the Dead Leg. He is still here. I collect all of my pain,  too, as I walk up the steps, and the weight that comes from knowing this is as good as I'll get, this 45 minute stint in the pool before I have to collect being disabled as I collect my keys from the basket.

On Job Interviews: anxiety about disability

I had an interview yesterday for a job I would really *love* to have. I didn't think it was my best interview ever: I used to feel confident that I gave good interview, but no longer do. I am always wondering if people notice my Dead Leg as much as I do. I feel as though it is the first thing everyone else sees, and I assume they fixate on it. Logically, I am aware that this might not be the case, but emotionally? I don't buy it.

My physio gave me an assignment; I had to visualise the Dead Leg, and take a really good look at it, comparing the internal picture I have of it to the one I have of my more normal but still arthritic Good Leg. I see a gigantic spongy bruised-looking lump for a knee, a pencil-slender stalk for the calf/shin, and my foot looks like a big, flapping rubber mat, hitting the ground with a SPLAP! as I limp around inside of my head. No wonder I don't trust the Dead Leg; no wonder it doesn't feel functional, and looms so large on my emotional landscape.

I hope that the Dead Leg didn't take over during the interview; it is almost as though I have another personality, a really intrusive, loud one, that elbows its way to the front of me. Maybe if I can learn to love the Dead Leg, it will simmer down and quit trying to take over. Easier said than done, but I'll start today, and the first thing I'll do is plug in my electric blanket so that DL is warm.

The Dead Leg turns 5

Five years ago, I sat at a table in Bar Roma with family and friends. We were ostensibly celebrating my 40th birthday. They were waiting impatiently for the pizzas to arrive. I was wondering what the hell was going on with my leg, which felt like a block of ice under the table. I couldn't do anything to warm it. I could barely stand to put socks on. I would have worn nothing if I could have gotten away with it, and I am NOT an exhibitionist, AND it was January. I knew then that I was disabled, that something had gone horribly wrong, that broken bones in foot shouldn't be causing all of the other weird things (shiny skin, diminishing leg hair, waking up in the night with my leg on fire up to the knee). 3 weeks post-fracture, I knew something that no doctor or anyone else would feel comfortable telling me for another two and a half years: my tree-climbing days were over. No more cartwheels. No more walking silently and swiftly through woods. I didn't tell anyone; I didn't want to be told that I was negative, that everything would be fine. The Dead Leg knew, though, without me saying anything, and our uneasy relationship began. Everyone enjoyed the pizza.

Doom, Gloom, the End of a Project Looms

My M Res project is almost in its final form, and I am having trouble finishing it. I would think, if I were not me and was looking at me, or still me and floating around having some sort of out-of-body experience, that this  'critical component' would be the easy bit. The *hard* bit, theoretically, would be actually doing the creative writing component. Not so. Getting really stuck in to the analysis bit, in which I have to compare my own work to that of a lot of famous, competent, writerly types, is more difficult. Finding the mental energy and focus to do it is made more difficult by pain, fever, and all of the annoying antics a Dead Leg can get up to, but the real issue is lack of confidence.

Two Conferences Down, Three to Go

On Friday, I presented a paper at Write Now, a conference I helped to organize and did the publicity for (Tweeting, blogging, wheedling, home-paging). Today I was supposed to have presented a poster about my current research project. I say 'supposed to,' because I gave up on the conference at lunch-time.

I felt I had fulfilled my brief. I was asked to make a poster that was accessible, that minimized jargon, that could be understood by anyone who looked at it. The prof who worked with all of us (more than 100 grad students from across the university) for two days last month, encouraging and challenging us, felt I had done just that.  He told me he loved it, and loved the fact that it was visual, that it was emotive, and that I made explicit links between what I do as a clinician with what I do was a writer. I put two references on it. I didn't put my primary supervisor's name on it (the project is mine, not his, and he wouldn't have wanted me to do that). I tried to make the poster about what I do. And I tried to feel less nervous when I got to the conference this morning and saw how few people had left their posters the way they were when we 'completed' them. References everywhere, masses of text, prof's names, long titles-- in short, everything we'd been told to remove-- on most of the posters.

Today, I had nowhere to sit, despite having been promised that there would be accommodations made so that I could participate fully. I had to go up and down stairs. I had to stand, and stand, and stand until I couldn't stand it any more. And when I came back from perching desperately on a radiator for a few minutes so that I could get the Dead Leg to SHUT UP ALREADY with demanding codeine and Versatis patches and some bed-rest, I found 3 students I didn't know from Chemical Engineering looking at the poster. I got ready to meet yet *more* people I felt too sore and tired to meet. I heard one of them say, as they all pointed and laughed at the poster, "Any time you see a loop on a diagram, you know you are looking at a pile of pointless shite...only a retard would have hung this shit up. Unbelievable." I found out that I was not just a cripp, but a 'retard' as well. I asked them to come back later to make fun of it, so that the judge (who had just arrived, clipboard in hand) could ask me about it. One of them pointed at my stick, laughing again as he walked off. I don't know which posters won. I took mine home hours ago.

I am hoping that the next 3 events in my socio-academic calendar are more accommodating and less humiliating.

All I Can Say

GAH. Yuk. Barf. Hurl. Vomit.  I feel sick. Shaky hands. Shakier legs, especially the Dead Leg. 3 people I have never met, who really don't want to meet or see me or acknowledge that I exist, will make a decision this afternoon that feels as though it will change my whole life. Even to my own ears, that sounds a bit melodramatic. No DLA, no Motability car. No DLA, no Blue Badge. No Blue Badge, no bus pass. No Blue Badge, no renewal of my Disabled rail card. One little freedom-killing thing follows on from another. Walking stick it was, crutches it is, crutches it may be. And to top it all off, my face has erupted in pimples. Great. Now I'm a pubescent-looking 44 year old who walks like a pirate.

Neon Orange, Putrescent Green

I am sorting through a *ginormous* pile of papers (171 pages and counting) relating to my DLA Appeal and my Tribunal hearing on Thursday. The documents from the DLA office are all printed on a vaguely grey, dirty-looking paper that seems to absorb whatever pen I use on it to make notes. The paper is dingy. I feel dingy doing this, grubbing for money to buy freedom with. My highlighter pens are the only bright things around me, and they are blindingly bright: should I go for Insane Orange or Viral Green? And can I really remember all of the stuff I need to ask about/emphasize? AND will the Dead Leg stay quiescent enough for me to think straight?