Current mood:	mellow
Current music:	Dixie Chicks, "Mississippi"

Waist-High in the World
One of my favorite writers, Nancy Mairs, writes a lot about being wheel-chair bound due to her debilitating MS (http://www.maskink.com/mairs/). I stole the title of this post from one of her books because today, I find myself tooling about my house in a wheel-chair, having fractured my left leg Thursday. Yeah, the view is different from down here. It is indeed amazing what able-bodied people take for granted.

The accident happened while I was trying to get my son off to school. I slipped on a piece of paper and fell three or four steps -- a relatively minor fall, but it evidently caused one of those "feak" breaks where I managed to hit the leg-bones in just the right spot. I snapped both the tibia and fibula. And yeah, it hurt. Neither my 2004 kidney stone nor my 2002 childbirth pains were adequate preparation. I did a lot of screaming before I managed to get to the phone and dial 911. The scariest part of the whole thing was being alone in the house with my autistic six-year-old -- who, of course, was freaked out and didn't understand why mommy was suddenly screaming and crying and having to crawl along the floor.

The paramedics were incredibly fast. They were in my house within 15 minutes of my call. That wait was probably the longest fifteen minutes of my life, though. After that, things were fairly routine. My husband arrived. He got the kid off to school while I rode in an ambulance to the ER at the University of Michigan. Then it was a long, tiring, round of drugs, x-rays, more drugs, endless repeat explanations of what had happened to various doctors, nurses, techs ... well, you get the idea. I stayed one night in the hospital and was released the next evening to hobble around my house with a wheel-chair and crutches. Wednesday I see the doctor again to schedule surgery. The break is in a cast right now, but evidently they'll need to use pins and such to put my leg back together.

So there goes all my planned holiday shopping and baking. Sigh. On the upside, I will probably get more time to read and write out of the deal. Since the conclusion of this year's NaNoWriMo, I now have two romance novel drafts in the hopper. Draft A (from 2007) is now over 100,000 words long and is really beginning to shape up. I'm seriously in love with those characters. Novel B (the new one) currently ends with a giant deus ex machina, but also has some good sex scenes (if I say so myself). I can work with that.

Anyway, if you want to know the minutia of my days at home, I have started to Twitter again about some of the stuff I'm doing. I suppose that daily stuff is mildly more interesting now due to the increased difficulty factor.

http://twitter.com/urban_unicorn