Saturday, February 21, 2009

It was five weeks ago today that I fell from the ladder.  I don’t mean for it to feel like an anniversary or anything but I can see how the five-week mark is messing with my head today.  It seems like five weeks has been enough. 

Doesn’t it seem long enough?  Doesn’t it seem like I should have a little more energy, or need to sleep a little less, or be a little more “Anne”-like?  How is it that I am NOT going stir-crazy?  Everyone keeps saying, “Are you bored out of your mind?  Are you dying to get up and get going??” 

The simple (and surprising) answer is, “No.”  The basic act of getting up ten times in one day to go to the bathroom is about all the physical activity I can handle right now.  I get exhausted just having a two-minute conversation on the phone.  And yet there is a part of me that is feeling guilty that I am not ready to do more.  Don’t you always hear that the best thing someone can do is to get up and get going again? 

On Friday, I went to my Mom’s to take a shower, got my haircut, and had a very low-key visit (on our couch) with a dear friend of ours from Alaska. It didn’t seem like I had done anything major—I took two-hour naps in between each of those activities.  But I could tell that just taking the shower was about as much as I (or my ankle) could handle for that day. 

By the end of the day, my ankle felt weird and was very swollen.  Part of me felt very guilty that I had pushed my body too hard.  But the other part of me thought, “You have got to be kidding me!  I can’t even do that without my body freaking out??”  Yes—I guess that is the case.  My body is telling me that I still need to rest.  And I have a feeling that in another five weeks, I will still need a lot of rest.

So yea—It has been a long time. Elise told us that she sometimes wishes that she could get in a time machine and go back to the morning that I fell.  She says that she would go back to tell me NOT to get up on the ladder.  Annika says that she just wants all of it to just “go away.”

But it happened.  And for now we have to be thankful that we have each other, that my body is healing, that we are keeping infection at bay, that we are loved, that we are alive, and that we have a God that is looking out for us all the time (even when it seems a little slow).  Once again, I feel incredibly blessed that—although today is bugging me a bit—I am ready to allow myself the time to heal.  I do not feel like I am climbing the walls, I am not bored—God has allowed me to accept this as my reality and trust in His wisdom. 

God is in control, so I am just going to CHILL.