Just a crack

So of the things I want to share with you that happened last year, the most significant thing that happened to me was that I broke my ankle.

 That picture you are looking at is the x-ray of my ankle. I think I took this picture at one of my final visits so it was mostly healed at that point, but you can see where it was.  It's that straight line toward the bottom tip of the right leg bone.

It was a really tiny crack, but for a tiny crack it hurt like hell.  But the most irritating thing about that wasn't the pain, but the knowledge that after 34 years I could no longer say I've never had a broken bone.

Altogether, it took about 6 weeks to heal wearing one of those huge black boots.  That was 6 weeks of just lumbering around everywhere, barely making it across crosswalks before the lights changed.  I was so glad when I finally got to stop wearing it.

The one thing that I didn't anticipate was that my ankle was going to continue to hurt after it healed.  In fact, it hurt more than when I broke it.  For a couple of weeks I just let it hurt, taking pain reliever when the pain got real bad, and in general just limped around.  Then one day I just thought to myself that maybe the ankle is just weak and maybe what I need to do is to strengthen it up.  I didn't really know how to do that other than using it, so I started to go walking.

Quick back track - just prior to breaking my ankle, I had kinda started jogging.  I say kinda because 1) it was a combination of walking and jogging and 2) my jogging was slower than some people's fast walking.   Obviously that had to stop when I broke my ankle.

Back to healed ankle - after about two weeks of walking, my ankle began to feel better.  I no longer had to limp, and as I continued my walks I found that I started going faster.  I eventually began to incorporate small intervals of jogging.  It felt really good.

I could write a lot more about jogging and how I'm doing with it now, but I will save that for other blog posts.  I will leave you with this picture though.

Photo courtesey of Potomac River Running

Taken by Dustin Whitlow at Lucky Leprechaun 5K on March 16, 2013

 

A new beginning

It's been a while since I last wrote here.  The last entries were about the DC earthquake and Hurricane Irene - events that occurred in the summer of 2011.  That's one and a half years ago, although it feels like a lifetime ago.

So why did I stop blogging?  To be honest - I don't exactly remember.  Reading back on my entries I have a couple of theories: 1) I was in a really dark place but really didn't want to share that really dark place  2) Not a lot of  "significant" events were happening and I felt like life was too boring to blog about.

Next question: Why am I starting again?  I'm not too clear on that other than I feel like I need to be putting sometime out there.  What that something is - I don't know.  This is going to be more of a creative exercise now rather than a therapeutic one.  This means that I'm not going to even try to rehash every little thing that happened in the past year.  That's too much.  But I will probably share what is still relevant as well as talk about other things.  I think I'll leave this entry on this note, but I promise to be back soon.