Break a leg!
I have done a little bit of amateur dramatics in my pre-parenting days. I can’t claim to be blessed with huge amounts of talent for it, and the adrenaline rush is like nothing else, but I’m very proud of the few productions I was able to be a part of. I’ve played a WW1 soldier, a pantomime jester, a harassed prison warden, a flustered parliamentary secretary, a small boy (a stretch, I know; blame the director, although she was limited for options and pregnant with our firstborn…) and Horton the Elephant. A random bit of trivia I used to spout out to anyone who wished me to ‘break a leg’ was that it’s a commonly misunderstood phrase that refers to breaking the ‘leg’ which was the winch used to wind the stage curtain open and closed; the suggestion being that the curtains would be opened and closed so many times for the applause that the winch would break. However, I’ve found out in doing the 30 seconds of research to back this up for this blog that I’ve been spouting nonsense for years! It’s literally just because AmDram types (or Lovies, darling) are just a superstitious bunch.
It’s been a good few years since I’ve ‘treaded the boards’ in a production but what I have done, back in January, was go trampolining. And while I didn’t quite break my leg, I did fracture my knee cap. A patella sleeve avulsion was the name of the injury on my sick note. An injury most commonly found in children of 8-12 years old!
The silly thing is that I didn’t even know I’d injured myself at the time. I took Piglet to a trampoline park on a Saturday morning to spend some decent one-on-one time with him. It was one of those trampoline complexes with a ninja assault course, dozens of trampolines, a football pitch, a big drop onto a giant inflatable crash mat and some basketball hoops over trampolines. I jumped with him a bit when he was on the trampolines but let him do the ninja assault courses on his own. Come the end of the session, all was fine and we made our way back home.
My knee started to get a bit sore that evening but nothing more than a dull ache. It was then worse the next morning and then proceeded to stiffen and hurt more over the coming days. By the middle of the week I was struggling to walk and had borrowed a set of crutches off a neighbour who happened to have some knocking about. Unfortunately on the Thursday evening, I slipped on something random left on the floor and put my foot down hard to rebalance myself. The pain was instant and from that point onwards I could tell it was going to be something a bit more serious.
The next day was my 40th birthday and I’d booked it off work to enjoy a nice lazy day to myself. Unfortunately I was mostly confined to the sofa or the bed by this point and by late afternoon I’d realised it was time to take myself off to A&E. And so at 7pm I arrived back to the hospital I’d been born in exactly 40 years to the day earlier. Not quite the celebration I had in mind. Sadly a Friday night with a non-urgent injury isn’t the quickest time to get seen. My step-brother very kindly drove out to join me for the last few hours and eventually drove me home around 3 in the morning after I’d had an x-Ray and seen the consultant. The diagnosis at the time was just soft tissue damage but I got a call from a doctor who’d done a second review on Sunday night who confirmed that I had a fracture that had been missed on the first viewing.
I was signed off work for two weeks which initially felt a little extreme for a knee injury given that I do a desk-based job and can work from home. However, in hindsight, I’d underestimated how much I’d struggle with the recovery and that first week was spent almost entirely bed bound. Being allergic to paracetamol, I was confined to just Nurofen and that meant riding out a 12 hour period overnight before starting the next day’s allowance. The knee basically seemed to seize up when I didn’t use it and hurt when I tried to move around. I was a pretty miserable grump for those weeks. And of course my poor wife was having to look after three kids and an invalided husband, pretty much completely having to sacrifice setting up her new business at least during anything other than the small hours of the morning.
At the end of the first two weeks I was just about able to start working although I still struggled to be at a desk for a full day and was completely useless in the evenings. After 3 weeks, I was moving around on the crutches much more easily and able to take some weight on the injured leg. My son had a concert up in Birmingham and having debated long and hard whether to go or not (it would have been pretty much the first time I’d left the house since the injury other than trips to hospital) decided it might not be too difficult. My hope was that we’d drive to the venue, sit in a stadium for a few hours and then drive straight home; minimal exertion. I’d underestimated, however, how much walking there would be to and from the car parks (even with a shuttle bus) and how stubborn I am when faced with a long queue to get back on the shuttle bus and given the option to walk back to the car on a clear night and a rare chance to walk with my wife just the two of us. Halfway back to the car it seemed clear I’d bitten off a bit more than I could chew and I had to stop multiple times to rest my hands on the crutches and the leg that was on the ground.
The upshot of my stubbornness was that not only was my knee sore the next day but my achilles tendon did not appreciate the sudden exertion given I’d basically been completely sedentary for a decent chunk of a month. It got so sore that I went back to not being able to take any weight on it at all. Quite frustrating to go back to being so immobile after the first signs of getting a level of freedom back again. It took a good week to be able to go back to shuffling around on two feet again and then I over did it again once I could sort of walk again by taking my son to school.
It’s only really now, two months since I first did the damage, that I really feel like I’m back to being myself. I still limp if I do much walking and it tightens up when I stay still for long. But I got to spend a decent amount of time at the weekend with the kids doing minor jobs like mowing the lawn and tidying the garden without paying for it with pain levels on the Monday morning.
The pain has been a bit of an eye opener for me. Both the physiotherapist and chiropractor I have seen over the course of the recovery have perhaps (and politely) been surprised by the level of discomfort I’ve described given the injuries. It seems like I have a fairly low pain threshold which is something I’ve really known before. I think I also possibly succumbed too easily to accepting that I was injured and needed to be bed bound. There’s no doubt that I was in a decent amount of pain that first week but I was also very tired from a wonderful but exhausting Christmas and New Year’s and think I possibly accepted the option to just rest up on being signed off and having a legitimate reason to just go back to bed. If I’d have pushed myself to just try and keep a level of mobility and purpose I think my mind would have been in a better place and that would have made me more resilient to the discomfort and quicker to recover.
Obviously it’s been hard to do much at all over the last couple of months but I do miss the adrenaline and excitement of the AmDram performances of a few years back. I was very proud of some of the plays in particular and proud to have so utterly committed to something. To have taken a risk and seen it pay off. I feel like we’re survival mode a little bit at the moment and I hope to find some reasons to do something more than just get through the week or avoid one of the kids having a emotional meltdown on being too tired or expectations mismanaged. My job has changed a little bit in the last few months and I’m excited about the potential and opportunities this could bring. But I’ve also always been someone who needs a sense of purpose and excitement outside of my work as well and that’s a little less clear at the moment.
On a more positive note, the short window of spring weather at the weekend, before the temperature dropped right back down at the beginning of the week, was a hugely exciting window to what warm weather could be like in our new house. We ate lunch outside on our, as yet basically unused, new garden furniture and spent some time making the garden feel homely. There seems to be a calmness that comes with being outside. It’s a near instant change for a family that can quickly get cranky or grumpy when stuck inside. The kids loved the freedom of being outside, both playing on street with friends and just messing around in our garden. Dragon must have done about a hundred laps of the garden on her bike over the day and Griffin was very upset when he realised we were eventually back in the house for the evening.
The next step is surely to get my bike fixed and get exploring the local area, something we seem to have had really limited opportunity to do despite now being here for 6 months. Bring on the summer!
Toodlepips x