Ain’t so hot after all!

How I came to be in a cast is what I need to lay out first. But I’ll try to keep it brief. In my good old days (yeah, don’t we all have them?!), I used to be a decent bad­minton player. My dad did most of the coach­ing when we were younger and on hind­sight, if I had changed coaches, I would have prob­a­bly done bet­ter :-p.

On an aside, I always admire how many of our sports­peo­ple are coached by their fathers and rel­a­tives. My one advise, from some expe­ri­ences is to avoid try­ing to “learn” things (like sports or how to drive) from peo­ple close to you – like fathers, moth­ers, sis­ters, broth­ers and espe­cially spouses.

Any­way, back to my bad­minton glory days. They were short lived.

Off and on, I’d play when­ever I got a chance. And then pretty much lost touch over the years. And then we moved to a com­plex in Ban­ga­lore, which had not one but two courts. I was of course super excited till we real­ized that it was not easy to actu­ally get time to play on them. In fact, after around 4 months here (and try­ing even at odd hours like 10 pm in the night) we still haven’t had a chance to set foot on it. (In another aside, we got squash rack­ets instead.)

But back to my bad­minton story. So basi­cally, the fact was that I was hor­ri­bly out of prac­tice. Just a week before a planned exotic Euro­pean hol­i­day, I decided to do the noble thing and play in a cor­po­rate tour­na­ment. Hor­ror of hor­rors, they accepted my nom­i­na­tion – there were all of two women. And then it got worse – I was nom­i­nated to play sin­gles. I objected, came up with a few good excuses, which no one bought. And then my first match was against the reign­ing champion.

So there I was – a com­plete wreck. But I gave it my best shot. No one can deny that. At least no one who hap­pened to be watch­ing the court I was play­ing on. I couldn’t go down at a zero score, so I tried to smash. I even man­aged. How­ever, in the process I also landed on the floor, with a twisted foot.

At least that’s what I thought. I did heard a snap­ping sound when I fell and I thought it was my shoe caught against some­thing. My foot started swelling almost imme­di­ately. We ice-packed it and some­one enquired if I still wanted to con­tinue. That must have been a joke.

I had to grudg­ingly give the game away. But a day later, with my foot still swollen, decided to drag myself to a doctor.

After sev­eral scans and tests, his ver­dict was final – a tear of some impor­tant sound­ing junc­tion. And some­where I heard the word “achilles”. The joint which con­nects the back of the foot to the bot­tom had basi­cally snapped. Which is why I could hardly move. The ver­dict got worse. Surgery was the only way to fix it and it would take at least a month in a cast and another month to recover.

So that’s the whole story of how I man­aged to land up in a hot pink cast. “I am sure you like pink,” pro­nounced the doc­tor, putting on the very uncom­fort­able fibre glass cast around my leg upto my thigh after the surgery. Now I kind of guessed why he said I was going to hate him after he’d fin­ished. Because not only is it the most uncom­fort­able thing to ensconce my leg, it is also inflex­i­ble. And pink. And no, I don’t wear pink.

There’s part 2 of the cast story, which I never real­ized. I mean I’ve seen peo­ple using crutches once in a while, but I’ve never given a sec­ond thought to how uncom­fort­able they are? I also real­ized that I now can­not do even the most sim­ple of tasks – like carry my cup of tea wher­ever I want to in the morn­ing. Dang!

Life in crutches has quite a few restrictions.

For exam­ple, once I serve myself lunch, I can’t carry my plate on my own – some­one has to carry it for me. Or if I pour myself water in a glass, I can’t carry it anywhere.

I can’t clean the bath­room floor. So with grow­ing dis­may I watch large white spots develop every­where. I’m try­ing to shelve the thought by say­ing to myself, “just a few more days before I get back my clean floor”!

Bal­anc­ing on crutches is quite an art. And then walk­ing around. After a while, the arm pits feel rather offended to say the very least to carry all of the body’s weight. I’ve even man­aged to top­ple over a few times.

I can’t just go to any restau­rant. I also real­ized that most places in our city are not hand­i­cap acces­si­ble. There are either large unwieldy steps, mostly by design, which makes it dif­fi­cult for me to hop over.

Tasks like clean­ing, dust­ing, cook­ing, putting clothes into the wash­ing machine etc. are quite chal­leng­ing if not very difficult.

I am not even going to start talk­ing about the “itch­ing”. But I will say that in my frus­tra­tion, I tried to reach a spot with the help of a chop-stick, one half of which is now per­ma­nently now stuck some­where inside the cast. I try not to think about it.

The bet­ter half has turned “bit­ter” over the last month. I can actu­ally see it (and it’s not a pleas­ant sight I should add). I’ve never been dri­ven around. Always got­ten into the car and dri­ven off wher­ever I needed to with­out being thank­ful to some­one for doing the chauf­feur­ing job. It’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent now. There’s the afore­men­tioned half who makes sure I know every time that he doesn’t appre­ci­ate dri­ving around (and the clues are not subtle!).

Or cycle. Or go any­where on my own. Gosh, never thought that would happen.

On the pos­i­tive, I have learnt how to work around and man­age to get some tasks done on my own. Peo­ple are also gen­er­ally nicer around me. Some even offer help!

But I can’t even imag­ine how life must be for those who can’t ever get rid of them. Here’s the blog of some­one who lives with crutches, and I was filled with amaze­ment read­ing her every­day expe­ri­ences. We take so many things for granted. Also, been read­ing up about how to make life on crutches eas­ier.

The sling bag is the most handy to carry things around. The meals and tea I still haven’t fig­ured out yet. The bet­ter half says I’m get­ting smoother walk­ing around with the crutches, and by the time I get really good, it will be time to get off them.

It’s the day I’m count­ing down to!

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