Classes at Davis started today. My first class is tomorrow. In-person. I’m feeling…chock-full of feelings.
But let’s go back to the beginning of this era: I was visiting home in late July, when I fractured my pelvis roller-skating, spent several days in the hospital, and subsequently had to delay my return to CA from August 20 to September 9. It was a pretty awful situation, and also my first time in an ambulance (yay?), owing mainly to the fact that I physically could not bend my legs and thus could not sit in a car. I had to be lifted into a stretcher, onto a bed, etc. I had to be lifted onto and off of the x-ray and other machines by two nurses, each holding a side of the blanket I was laying on. That first day, the pain was unthinkable. (They refused me the heavy painkillers I needed until the following day, convinced that my injury was “not that bad.”) When it became clear that I could not allow one leg to hang off of my bed without screaming in pain (and again, that kind of pain is something I have never felt before and hope never to feel again), they sort of had no choice but to admit me overnight.
Overnight turned into about three nights, over the course of which I painstakingly (really) went from being fully bedbound, using a bedpan, to being able to hop around awkwardly with a walker. I’ve never been happier to see a toilet than first time post-injury that I was able to get to the bathroom.
Shortly prior to my discharge, well-meaning (and they were, indeed, well-meaning, kinder than most other nurses I’ve had –– likely because a broken pelvis from skating is an abled-person-injury, one deemed temporary and one resulting from an understandable excess of young abled confidence) nurses suggested I spend a week in rehab. Not wanting to turn them into not-nice nurses, I attributed my absolute refusal to congregate care COVID anxieties (which was easy, since I’m also full of those) rather than medical trauma. I got to go home. Despite my Madness rendering me a “high-risk” patient, I was also, at last, given some oxy.
(Reader, I did not abuse the painkillers, but wanted very much to abuse the doctor responsible for my initial denial.)
After going home, my recovery –– and it’s so weird to talk about recovery here, yet I think this is the only time I’ve really experienced the full process of “recovery” from injury in a genuine way, unless we’re counting transmedical intervention –– was pretty rapid. Less than a month after being discharged from the hospital, with the help of painkillers and physical therapy, I graduated from hopping around with a walker, to limping with one, and finally to using a cane. I was able to walk short distances unaided by the time I had to leave for California, but managed okay at the airport using my cane. I still feel soreness and eventually pain when I walk long distances, but I’m back to doing Yoga with Adrienne and sitting cross-legged and doing all those things that felt normal Before but still feel novel to do again.
Perhaps the most frustrating holdover from the injury isn’t the soreness, but the way my legs swelled shortly after discharged, and, despite immense improvement, haven’t fully deflated. I don’t know when that will happen. I’m just grateful they’re not the way they were before –– doubled in size, feet swollen to the point that I could hardly walk, couldn’t bend my knee. I felt as if my skin was going to rip apart. Compression stockings, daily use of a stationery bike, elevation, and time helped. I’m continuing to exercise my pelvis, my slightly-swollen legs, etc. at the UC Davis gym, which I first visited the other day with my colleague and good friend, Angel! Between that and the jazz dance class (!!!) I signed up for this quarter, I’m really looking forward to new and renewed ways of moving.
Since returning to Davis, life has sped up pretty quickly. I’ve been busy between Stone of Madness and now swallow::tale press, the latter of which I founded this summer with my beloved comrade-in-transMadness, FEYXUAN. I’ve been writing and rewriting papers and abstracts for submission; I’ve been writing “creative” submissions, too. I’ve been reading a bunch (shamelessly plugging my goodreads and newsletter!) and working hard to at least somewhat keep up with my messages (to varying degrees of success). I also got a tattoo, which had had to be rescheduled twice (first due to the artist’s illness, the second due to my then-grotesque and totally-un-tattooable legs), shortly before returning. So much creativity has been happening in and on and around my bodymind. It glows.
By now, I feel settled back into my apartment. Earlier this week, I completed both my Cultural Studies orientation, during which I met the next cohort of CST first-years, and my TA orientation. I have Zoomed with the professor I am TAing for. I have already fielded panicked student questions on Canvas (and I don’t even start teaching until next week!). Last night, when I had a free moment, I packed my messenger bag for the first time in almost two years. I put notebooks inside, ones from undergrad that still had blank pages in them. (They’re like talismans. I’m going to write into them and try to feel the way studenthood felt back before everything shut down.) I put in some fresh post-it notes and stim toys and a pencil case. I checked to ensure the pins I have affixed to its front flap were on firmly, and I tried the bag on over my shoulder. I’m not sure if I expected it not to “fit,” that my body would somehow refuse it after so long. I stared into my laptop’s webcam, turning to each side. I felt like a student in a way I had not felt like a student in a very long time, the same way I felt walking flanked by two new CST friends from our TA orientation to the campus library.
All of it was so uncanny, particularly with the masks. Both normal and Very Very not-. It’s not-, trying and aching toward normalcy, begging uselessly for it. Every day on campus, I will have to submit my symptom survey. Every two weeks, to testing. Always I will have to submit to the lie that this is normal, that nothing is wrong, that all of us are safe. Some classes are already going online, and I anticipate more –– even all –– to do so in the future. This uncanny campus isn’t sustainable; deep down, everybody knows it. I don’t know what that will mean for the things I’m excited about (and I admit, I am excited to teach and learn in-person, much as I wish we were on Zoom), including the gym and jazz class. My first in-person seminar since Before Everything is tomorrow, and I guess I’m just…going with it. Trying to locate my genuine excitement where I can. Doing my best and seeing what happens, just like I have for the last couple months. Amidst great pain, that’s all we can really ask.
the cavarchives 