“Please Be My Leg,” I Said to Him

So what about my new “positive outlook”?

“My left foot just went numb and has stopped moving at about 50%.”

This is what I told my husband last week, after just 2 days of teaching dance all day with a lot of dear friends nearby,

Was it just dancing a lot more than I have been, so I hadn’t pushed it to that level?

(Or the fact that you have to get up and down from the floor all day long because Kindergardners need help with their shoelaces. Was it the shoe laces?)

Is it the bolt in my SI joint that gets to come out once the bones have fused (sometime this winter), and walking through pain is causing the nerve in my leg to pinch again?

“Please be my leg,” I said to him on the phone, knowing that surgery was so easy and everything to do with my lower back is not. (Lumbar spine being the cause for the previous 2 other instances of my foot going numb and losing movement.)

Each time this happens, movement will come and go some, but it never fully “feels back to normal” no matter the injections or rest or steroids.

Does that mean that this time it won’t resolve on its own? No. But it does mean that certain activities come with REAL risk for me. Lifelong risk. Yes… To an “unfair” level, even if life is never fair.

If nerves aren’t saved in time, you lose that ability. That’s a scary-ass risk to live with, and a scary one to be faced with so frequently, and even though some risks we can control (I often work with older kids, for example, at this point in my career, because I thrive with littles in my heart but my body can’t keep up any more)… sometimes we just can’t control the timing of what “life” asks of us. Like every highly realistic dance movie… We just have to Step Up.

So what about my new “positive outlook” to try to trick my brain into perserveance?

Am I being negative now by documenting what’s been going on, and the complexities of risks that some of us face and some can’t understand?

One week of life can mean months of pain, but one week of life can also mean tremendous spiritual joy. Which cost or balance is worth it?

…OR am I just documenting life and life itself is not easy right now… and that very fact makes us (myself, as well) uncomfortable?

This ‘idea’ the world has of Recovery- this mythical place we go to with Netflix and snacks and friends stopping by and so on- is something we forget is only provided to those with the incomes to have any of those things… And with the local support systems to take the strain off in some way. That’s not every life.

Life just isn’t always that simple and neither are bodies. If they were, far less of us would be suffering.

Simple psychology offers simple solutions. It takes the real empaths of the world to be able to see the grey between the black and white, and recognize that the view from our mountain isn’t the view from everyone else’s, all the time. (This applies to sick people too. We can be narcissistic *sshats, a lot of the time, lol)

I wrote “lol” without shame… Can you see that I’m worried I’m coming on too strong?

But someone will need this. Someone will want this. Because being stupified by the over-simplification of physical suggestions is one that Sick People have been scratching their heads at for a long time.

Being sick for a very long time makes you realize how many thoughts are told AT you in the world from those who’ve never stopped to ask a question of any one in that situation first.

Why?

I don’t know but…

It’s a pretty good question.

Part Three. More Tomorrow.

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