Day 35: more verisimilitude

[truepenny]

There's a whole list of "worst" things about this broken ankle, ranging, depending on circumstances and mood, from boredom to my inability to sleep on my side, but I can tell you the most horrible thing.


The most horrible thing was mercifully transient, since it only lasted forty-eight hours or so, from the time I broke my ankle Sunday to the time I went into surgery Tuesday, but it's my most vivid memory and the one I most desperately want never to experience again, and that was the feeling, quite literally, of brokenness. It felt like my foot was no longer attached to my leg except in the most fragile, unstable, and tenuous of fashions, as if one wrong move would simply send the broken bone ripping through muscle and skin, as if it was possible to drop my foot the way, for instance, I (frequently) drop a book. When they tried to take my sneaker off in the ambulance, I freaked a little, partly because of the, hello, AGONIZING PAIN, but partly because it felt like my foot was going to come off with it. When I was learning to use the crutches, I naturally tried bending my knee to bring foot and ankle safely away from hard surfaces--and immediately had to straighten it again, not just because it hurt but because I could feel gravity pulling on my foot separately from its (essentially unnoticeable because so familiar) pull on my leg. I remember being frightened when the nurses started unwrapping my leg for surgery because it had come to feel to me like that splint was the only thing holding my ankle together at all.

And after surgery, when the anesthesia and the nerve block wore off and I was able to get up, the first thing I remember noticing was that that feeling was gone. It still hurt like hell, but it no longer felt like my foot was in danger of coming adrift from my leg.

I don't know how much of that feeling was imagination, a result of my knowledge of what had happened to my ankle and of what the surgery did to fix it, but it was subjectively 100% real. And it was horrible.


Keeping that in mind does help put all my "worst" things in perspective.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yick.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Not recommended.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I shiver in your general direction. (Sympathetically.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Not all imagination, I think. What sent me to the orthopedist earlier this year was the odd popping in my ankle joint when I did front kicks in karate, which carried with it a disturbing sensation that my foot wasn't attached quite as firmly as it should be. Lo and behold, torn ligament: one of the attachments was broken. So at least some of it was probably genuine sensory input warning you that things weren't fitting together right anymore.

Deeply unpleasant, yes. <shudder>

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

0.0

...yow.

[marycatelli]

Ouch!

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

For whatever it's worth, I had the same sensory experience with a broken ankle years ago, and it is excruciating.

I still periodically have flashbacks of the sensation for no reason -- as some people sometimes have the momentary sensation of falling when they're falling asleep, I will have the momentary sensation of feeling my foot be suddenly no longer attached properly to my leg. Jolts me right the hell awake, as you may imagine.

I hope sincerely that you do not retain the sensation as a sensory hallucination. Experiencing it at all is quite bad enough.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

AIEEE. What an awful thing for the sense-memory to pick. I hope I don't get that, and I'm sorry you did.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

The Hubby broke his ankle earlier this year. He wasn't happy until it was pinned either. Although he didn't have the words for it, other than "It Hurt", now I know why. Yeah, that would be a weird one to put into words.
Ankle took 5 weeks to go to walking cast - Three months to basically healed and pins removed. It will be another two months for the bones to fill up the pin holes. Then he will be almost as good as new. Some pins were left in place.

[michaeldthomas.livejournal.com]

Yuck. I'm so sorry.

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

I got a similar feeling the first time I sprained my ankle...not that it was falling off, but I could feeling things moving *wrong* in there...things were moving that *should not be moving*. It was very disconcerting, just a feeling of *wrongness.*

I've sprained my ankles a number of times since then, and the feeling doesn't recur that much. But after I sprained them enough, I got scared to walk for a while, feeling like every step could possibly lead to that pain again. (Not even that terrible a pain - I'm sure there's worse.) I eventually got over that by thinking about it a lot, and how it was like the danger of being mugged when I stepped outside: present, but so were many other possibilities, like going off to meet a friend, or finding flowers on my doorstep, or nothing memorable happening at all. And look at all the hundred million times I had taken a step in the past 30 or so years (whenever the heck I started walking - child development is not my forté) that I *hadn't* sprained my ankle. And by making myself walk more - I figured the more I experienced walking without bad occurrences the more I'd be programming myself that that was what was normal. And I can walk again now.

[libskrat]

Eeeeeesh. I would hug my nice unbroken bones if I could.

[shadefell.livejournal.com]

My mom said after her C-Sections she was worried all her guts were going to fall out if she moved wrong. She walked around clutching a pillow to her midsection for about a week each time.

Human bodies are so fragile.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I remember when Hal broke his leg -- tibia and fibula, clean through both -- I was at the hospital when they moved him from a gurney to a bed, or vice versa, I disremember which, and no one was supporting the broken leg below the break as they did it and so the lower part of his leg...flopped...below the break, as if there were no bone in it at all. It was horribly disturbing to see, so I can only guess how much more horribly disturbing it would be to feel. Anyway, it gives me a tiny glimpse of perhaps how you felt before surgery, and I'll be very happy if that's as close as I ever get to the experience. Ugh.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Ick.

I've never actually broken a bone, and this makes me want to...just...gah. I thought it was weird enough when I lose feeling in my hands. *makes note to self about not ever breaking anything*

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You do get used to it.

In fact, I am so used to this that I had forgotten about it. I routinely describe what happens when I can't walk as my leg falling off, and that's an exact and precise description, though it is to all external observation still attached. For potentially useful future writing purposes, I believe this is a nerve thing and not necessarily a broken bone thing -- I think you can break bones without feeling that, as I can feel that without having immediately broken a bone.

[gjules.livejournal.com]

It's neurological and absolutely real. Oliver Sacks has written a terrific about his experience of this very thing after injuring his leg in a mountain-climbing accident -- A Leg to Stand On.

[pameladean]

Bleargh. Forty-eight hours sounds like WAY too long for a person to be feeling that.

P.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Aieeeeeeeeee.

That is all.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

That's scary but also...would be weird and funky to use in a story....

[serialbabbler.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I didn't get that feeling when I broke my wrist (dislocated, required setting but not surgery) or my foot (didn't have insurance, it healed without medical intervention). I wonder if severity and location of the break has anything to do with it.