My triceps are getting very strong. I have all this time to re-learn my guitar scales since I won't be dancing anytime soon. People hold the door for me all the time. I have a very easy conversation starter. My toes peep through my cast so at least you can see the pretty color of pink they are painted. I have a walking boot instead of a plaster cast, so I can sleep and bathe and shave my legs without having to worry about my bum leg. I can still manage to do the ab workouts at my gym. I get to ride the motorized shopping cart in Trader Joe's. I have a valid excuse to do nothing with my afternoon except sit in Tryst with my legs up and read my latest novel.
I noticed, last time around on crutches, that by the time they were removed, I had developed an acute sense of the handicapped. Although I was myself handicapped to some degree and couldn't help anyone, I was alert to the needs around me because I was so alert to my own needs. The girl with the books piled in her arms, she needs someone to open the door...The woman with the wheelchair can't reach the elevator button...The man with crutches can't balance his crutch and his latte...Does no one SEE that I can't open this door by myself?...
I also, to a lesser, but more interesting, degree, began to be aware of hidden needs...The lonely one in our group who never spends time with anyone one-on-one because she's so easily forgettable and people neglect to invite her...the girl who blamed herself for her parent's nasty divorce...The self-assured, confidence of a hig achiever that hides an intense confusion about what she's achieving... In many ways, I began to see my injury--and my crutches--as a metaphor for all our daily struggles. Even when I am perfectly healthy and capable, there are internal handicaps that are just as daunting as that heavy door at the bottom of the church steps, the one that was so difficult to open with one foot and crutches: I'm quick to judge, slow to realize that I've judged. I'm often more concerned with how people see me than how I really am. I am lazy when I think no one will notice. Although I don't lie, my first inclination is always to fudge the truth a little, to make a better story. Maybe these are your handicaps. Maybe yours are completely different.
Thomas Aquinas said, "Be assured that if you knew all, you would pardon all."
We all have handicaps of some sort. Some of them, we can see.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Monday, June 04, 2007
Somebody get this woman a violin.
So I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt. And not because of alcohol (that's never happened) but because of an ear-splitting cold, complete with runny nose and cough. And! Crusty...pink...stingy...eyes. Pink eye. Add it to the list: torn contact/scratched cornea, broken foot, head cold, pink eye, all within three weekends, and all overlapping at some point.
So do you think I'm being tested or do you think I'm being punished for somethihng I did? Or do you think it's all a complete fluke and hey, it happens?
I'm going to go drink more tea.
So do you think I'm being tested or do you think I'm being punished for somethihng I did? Or do you think it's all a complete fluke and hey, it happens?
I'm going to go drink more tea.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Don't Break Your Foot in New Jersey
I broke my fifth metatarsal on December 31, 2001. On January 1, 2002, I had it x-rayed and set, and I spent that semester, until my Spring Break in Paris, in a cast cleverly painted with orange flames by my artistic roommate, Lori. It was a pain, but I managed, with the help of the roomies and the USC shuttle bus, the drivers of which knew me by name within a few weeks. I relaxed on the couch with my fire-engine red hair and my casted leg propped up on the armrest, typing on my laptop. I finagled a bookbag that rested on the small of my back so as not to throw me off balance. I got my shower time down to ten minutes: garbage bag, blue artist's tape, plastic bench to sit on in the tub, leg propped up on the side.
Walking with crutches is sort of like riding a bike. I suspect that once you've learned how to maneuver, you never really forget, so when you have to do it again, you pick it up easier, get stronger faster, and don't have to try as hard to figure out how to go up steps or carry your purse.
--
Saturday night. 11:15 PM. Lower East Side of Manhattan. Walking across a small street on our way to a milonga. Two sets of dance shoes in purse. Pothole.
The pain that I felt when I first felt myself falling from twisting my foot on the pothole I don't really remember. I remember not being able to feel my foot and not being able to really breathe. I remember grabbing Sasan's arm, sort of, and knowing that I couldn't put weight on my foot as he helped me to the curb. I sat on the planter under the streetlight and he took off my espadrilles, and I gasped for air. I looked down and saw the purple bump on my left foot, growing bigger and purpler with every minute. The more I sat, the more I could feel the pain, until I knew that this wasn't a bruise. 'Do you want me to call a cab and go to a hosptial?" "Yes," I said weakly.
Sasan carried me to the side of the road and the cab pulled up and drove us a few blocks to New York Downtown Hospital. The staff put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me down the hall to the ER. My foot was swollen and bruised, shaking from the strain of keeping it elevated. A man and a woman approached me, took my blood pressure, temperature, and got my statistics: name, birthdate, date of last menstrual period...the man tied an ice pack onto my foot, which felt instantly relieved. Both nurses talked to me at once, but slowly, as if in a leisurely conversation, and I couldn't see straight to answer both of them. "What medications are you on?" "Ortho tricyclen-lo" The elderly nurse offered me a tablet to write the name down. "It's birth control," I said, puzzled. "Oh, well, I don't need any of that, so that's why I don't know what it is."
They wheeled me into a room with a bed and turned me around. I gave them more information, signed a release, gave them my Aetna card. It took forever, and I sat there in the curtained room, crying, looking at my iced foot, holding Sasan's hand. "Maybe it's not broken! It's probably just twisted or something," he offered optimistically. I looked at my foot dully and shook my head. I've broken it before. I had a hunch it wasn't just bruised.
The wheeled me into the x-ray room. The man gestured to the table with a pillow at one end. "Should I sit up there?" "Yeah," he said, "Your head..." "My head goes there or my foot goes there?" "Your head." "On the pillow?" "Yeah." It seemed like a lot of effort just to find out which way to lay on the bed. He didn't wheel the chair over to the bad, so I got up and hopped on the bed. My foot--still raw and throbbing, still without painkillers, rested on the x-ray film. The technicion ripped the ice pack off; I cringed. For each x-ray, he moved my knee abruptly, causing me to gasp and cringe, clearly ina lot of pain. "I need you to put this side on the film" he said. "That side HURTSSSS" I gasped. He looked at me as if this had not occured to him. "Oh...sorry."
When that was done, he tried to put the ice pack back on, but didn't have any tape. So he wheeled me, sans ice, back to the waiting room. "Hey, this girl needs an ice pack, I didn't have any tape to re-tape this one back on." Nothing. I looked at Sasan. "Where's my ice pack?" "I have no idea..." He got up and asked the nurse, "Um, she needs an ice pack for her foot..they took it off..." The didn't exactly jump to attention, but they did hand him an ice pack, which he held onto my foot with two paper towels. I sobbed quietly in my wheelchair. At some pointthey gave me some percocet, but I don't remember when. The doctor approached. "You do have a fracture..." I sobbed more. Sasan droped his head and looked at the floor. I don't recall what other information she gave me, but it wasn't much. we had to ask what kind of fracture, what the next step was, who should I call in DC, what medication should I take, will it take long to heal, will I need a cast, should I keep it elevated...
She left to get some painkillers and I sat there crying in my wheelchair. I cried because it hurt and because a fractured metatarsal means no tango, no salsa, no swimming...for three months or hot, sticky, DC summer. Our weekend in New York was shot, we were going to be up all night figuring out hotels and cabs and prescriptions and busses and pharmacies. The doctor returned. "Mrs. Range!" she looked alarmed, "why are you crying?" I didn't answer, just looked at her, dumbfounded. I'll give you three guesses why I'm crying...
They wouldn't give me a percocet to go, although they did give me two and told me to take one or two every six hours. By this time it was 1 AM. Where is a 24 hour pharmacy? At 14th and 4th. But if we go there, we'll miss the bus to our hotel, which is in New Jersey. The man at the hospital desk called a cab, which came, but wasn't announced to us. He drove us to Port Authority, where we did get our bus. The bus driver was the same that had dropped us off that afternoon. His eyes widened: "What happened to you!" "She broke her foot..." He shook his head in utter sympathy.
The bus dropped us off, with all his condolences, at Hasbrouck Heights. We called the Hilton. "Could you please send a cab? One of us is on crutches." We waited, and waited, and waited, kept company by a wasted young man in a baseball cap who thought he should tell us all about where he was from and what he was doing in Jersey. I sat on the curb. Sasan looked at the pharmacy hours. We waited. We called the Hilton again. We waited. We called the Hilton again. Finally, a cab came, a big black car with a tall accented driver. Could we plase go to a pharmacy first and then to the Hilton? He seemed confused by our request, but obliged, looking up pharmaciies on his GPS. The CVS that was nearest to us was closed, opening at 10 AM on Sunday. He drove us to the Hilton. It was nearing 3 AM.
Now, the prospect of waking up the next morning without painkillers was unappealling. Sasan approached the concierge again. "Corey, my man, do you have any idea if there's another pharmacy near here open 24 hours?" There was! 6 miles away, he'd call a cab. We called the pharmacy, we called the cab, we waited. We waited. We waited. Sitting in the matte beige lobby at 3 AM, drugged up, sleepy, foot throbbing, sitting on the square, boring ottomans looking out the revolving doors into the blackness. Easy pop songs played over the speakers...2 am and she calls me cause I'm still awake...the revolving door thump thump thumps every time someone comes in. The cab approaches. Finally.
The driver was Persian, or his mother is Persian. He and Sasan exchanged pleasantries and he drove us past the previous CVS...two blocks. On our right hand side there's a RiteAid. It's open. Five blocks from our hotel is a 24 hour RiteAid.
The lady at the pharmacy slumped in her chair and raised her eyebrows, "On Sundays from 2 to 4 AM the computer doesn't work...so..." Sasan and I stare. "The computers don't work? We need some percocet...she just broke her foot...it's kind of important..." She sighs and says, "Well, I guess I could TRY the computers..." They worked. She filled the prescription. Ten bucks for Percocet, 2.50 for granola for the morning. $25 for the ride back to our hotel, five blocks.
At 6 AM I take two percocet and fall dead asleep, foot elevated on two of the Hilton's fluffy pillows, sheets wrapped around my body leaving my foot exposed. I would wake up thinking, "Where am I....Why does my foot hurt...Wait...Why is my foot broken?..." and fall back into a fitful sleep.
Don't break your foot in New Jersey.
Walking with crutches is sort of like riding a bike. I suspect that once you've learned how to maneuver, you never really forget, so when you have to do it again, you pick it up easier, get stronger faster, and don't have to try as hard to figure out how to go up steps or carry your purse.
--
Saturday night. 11:15 PM. Lower East Side of Manhattan. Walking across a small street on our way to a milonga. Two sets of dance shoes in purse. Pothole.
The pain that I felt when I first felt myself falling from twisting my foot on the pothole I don't really remember. I remember not being able to feel my foot and not being able to really breathe. I remember grabbing Sasan's arm, sort of, and knowing that I couldn't put weight on my foot as he helped me to the curb. I sat on the planter under the streetlight and he took off my espadrilles, and I gasped for air. I looked down and saw the purple bump on my left foot, growing bigger and purpler with every minute. The more I sat, the more I could feel the pain, until I knew that this wasn't a bruise. 'Do you want me to call a cab and go to a hosptial?" "Yes," I said weakly.
Sasan carried me to the side of the road and the cab pulled up and drove us a few blocks to New York Downtown Hospital. The staff put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me down the hall to the ER. My foot was swollen and bruised, shaking from the strain of keeping it elevated. A man and a woman approached me, took my blood pressure, temperature, and got my statistics: name, birthdate, date of last menstrual period...the man tied an ice pack onto my foot, which felt instantly relieved. Both nurses talked to me at once, but slowly, as if in a leisurely conversation, and I couldn't see straight to answer both of them. "What medications are you on?" "Ortho tricyclen-lo" The elderly nurse offered me a tablet to write the name down. "It's birth control," I said, puzzled. "Oh, well, I don't need any of that, so that's why I don't know what it is."
They wheeled me into a room with a bed and turned me around. I gave them more information, signed a release, gave them my Aetna card. It took forever, and I sat there in the curtained room, crying, looking at my iced foot, holding Sasan's hand. "Maybe it's not broken! It's probably just twisted or something," he offered optimistically. I looked at my foot dully and shook my head. I've broken it before. I had a hunch it wasn't just bruised.
The wheeled me into the x-ray room. The man gestured to the table with a pillow at one end. "Should I sit up there?" "Yeah," he said, "Your head..." "My head goes there or my foot goes there?" "Your head." "On the pillow?" "Yeah." It seemed like a lot of effort just to find out which way to lay on the bed. He didn't wheel the chair over to the bad, so I got up and hopped on the bed. My foot--still raw and throbbing, still without painkillers, rested on the x-ray film. The technicion ripped the ice pack off; I cringed. For each x-ray, he moved my knee abruptly, causing me to gasp and cringe, clearly ina lot of pain. "I need you to put this side on the film" he said. "That side HURTSSSS" I gasped. He looked at me as if this had not occured to him. "Oh...sorry."
When that was done, he tried to put the ice pack back on, but didn't have any tape. So he wheeled me, sans ice, back to the waiting room. "Hey, this girl needs an ice pack, I didn't have any tape to re-tape this one back on." Nothing. I looked at Sasan. "Where's my ice pack?" "I have no idea..." He got up and asked the nurse, "Um, she needs an ice pack for her foot..they took it off..." The didn't exactly jump to attention, but they did hand him an ice pack, which he held onto my foot with two paper towels. I sobbed quietly in my wheelchair. At some pointthey gave me some percocet, but I don't remember when. The doctor approached. "You do have a fracture..." I sobbed more. Sasan droped his head and looked at the floor. I don't recall what other information she gave me, but it wasn't much. we had to ask what kind of fracture, what the next step was, who should I call in DC, what medication should I take, will it take long to heal, will I need a cast, should I keep it elevated...
She left to get some painkillers and I sat there crying in my wheelchair. I cried because it hurt and because a fractured metatarsal means no tango, no salsa, no swimming...for three months or hot, sticky, DC summer. Our weekend in New York was shot, we were going to be up all night figuring out hotels and cabs and prescriptions and busses and pharmacies. The doctor returned. "Mrs. Range!" she looked alarmed, "why are you crying?" I didn't answer, just looked at her, dumbfounded. I'll give you three guesses why I'm crying...
They wouldn't give me a percocet to go, although they did give me two and told me to take one or two every six hours. By this time it was 1 AM. Where is a 24 hour pharmacy? At 14th and 4th. But if we go there, we'll miss the bus to our hotel, which is in New Jersey. The man at the hospital desk called a cab, which came, but wasn't announced to us. He drove us to Port Authority, where we did get our bus. The bus driver was the same that had dropped us off that afternoon. His eyes widened: "What happened to you!" "She broke her foot..." He shook his head in utter sympathy.
The bus dropped us off, with all his condolences, at Hasbrouck Heights. We called the Hilton. "Could you please send a cab? One of us is on crutches." We waited, and waited, and waited, kept company by a wasted young man in a baseball cap who thought he should tell us all about where he was from and what he was doing in Jersey. I sat on the curb. Sasan looked at the pharmacy hours. We waited. We called the Hilton again. We waited. We called the Hilton again. Finally, a cab came, a big black car with a tall accented driver. Could we plase go to a pharmacy first and then to the Hilton? He seemed confused by our request, but obliged, looking up pharmaciies on his GPS. The CVS that was nearest to us was closed, opening at 10 AM on Sunday. He drove us to the Hilton. It was nearing 3 AM.
Now, the prospect of waking up the next morning without painkillers was unappealling. Sasan approached the concierge again. "Corey, my man, do you have any idea if there's another pharmacy near here open 24 hours?" There was! 6 miles away, he'd call a cab. We called the pharmacy, we called the cab, we waited. We waited. We waited. Sitting in the matte beige lobby at 3 AM, drugged up, sleepy, foot throbbing, sitting on the square, boring ottomans looking out the revolving doors into the blackness. Easy pop songs played over the speakers...2 am and she calls me cause I'm still awake...the revolving door thump thump thumps every time someone comes in. The cab approaches. Finally.
The driver was Persian, or his mother is Persian. He and Sasan exchanged pleasantries and he drove us past the previous CVS...two blocks. On our right hand side there's a RiteAid. It's open. Five blocks from our hotel is a 24 hour RiteAid.
The lady at the pharmacy slumped in her chair and raised her eyebrows, "On Sundays from 2 to 4 AM the computer doesn't work...so..." Sasan and I stare. "The computers don't work? We need some percocet...she just broke her foot...it's kind of important..." She sighs and says, "Well, I guess I could TRY the computers..." They worked. She filled the prescription. Ten bucks for Percocet, 2.50 for granola for the morning. $25 for the ride back to our hotel, five blocks.
At 6 AM I take two percocet and fall dead asleep, foot elevated on two of the Hilton's fluffy pillows, sheets wrapped around my body leaving my foot exposed. I would wake up thinking, "Where am I....Why does my foot hurt...Wait...Why is my foot broken?..." and fall back into a fitful sleep.
Don't break your foot in New Jersey.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Books.
The Five Most Recent Books I’ve Read
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (sort of.)
Passage to India, E.M. Forster
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
Cuban Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana, Isadora Tattlin
Five Books I Could Read Over and Over
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
The Harafish, Naguib Mahfouz
Five Books That Blew My Mind and Would Be On My Syllabus If I Were a Teacher
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Five Authors With Whom I Would Like to Have Drinks
Rudyard Kipling
Naguib Mahfouz
Azar Nafisi
G. K. Chesterton
CS Lewis
Five Books That Make Me Want to Have Kids Just For The Books
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark, Jill Tomlinson. Actually, ALL of the books in this series are fantastic.
The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
Five Books the Rest of the World Loved and I Sort of Hated
Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Five Books I Just Could Not Finish, No Matter What
Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Emma, Jane Austen (I think I'll give this one another go, though.)
The Brothers Karamazov, Fydor Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Five Books That I Am In Awe Of and Are Pretty Much Perfect Pieces of Writing
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
Five Books That Made Me Weep Buckets
Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Five Books Set in Africa That I Love
The #1 Ladies Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith
Out of Africa, Isak Dineson
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, TE Lawrence (well, it's sort of Africa)
...I think that's all I've read that's set in Africa, although in my defense, I've read TWO of the #1 Ladies Detective series, so that's something.
Five Things That Turn Me Off of a Book, However Unfair
The feeling that it would Not Be That Hard to Turn This Into a Movie and What's Up With the Lame Dialogue?
Science fiction
A big sticker on the front that says it is now a major motion picture
Chick lit
Slippery pages
Five Things I am a Sucker For in a Book
Plotlines that span generations
Magical realism
Conniving protagonists
Fashionable women
Exotic locales
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (sort of.)
Passage to India, E.M. Forster
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
Cuban Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana, Isadora Tattlin
Five Books I Could Read Over and Over
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
The Harafish, Naguib Mahfouz
Five Books That Blew My Mind and Would Be On My Syllabus If I Were a Teacher
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Five Authors With Whom I Would Like to Have Drinks
Rudyard Kipling
Naguib Mahfouz
Azar Nafisi
G. K. Chesterton
CS Lewis
Five Books That Make Me Want to Have Kids Just For The Books
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark, Jill Tomlinson. Actually, ALL of the books in this series are fantastic.
The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
Five Books the Rest of the World Loved and I Sort of Hated
Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Five Books I Just Could Not Finish, No Matter What
Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Emma, Jane Austen (I think I'll give this one another go, though.)
The Brothers Karamazov, Fydor Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Five Books That I Am In Awe Of and Are Pretty Much Perfect Pieces of Writing
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
Five Books That Made Me Weep Buckets
Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Five Books Set in Africa That I Love
The #1 Ladies Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith
Out of Africa, Isak Dineson
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, TE Lawrence (well, it's sort of Africa)
...I think that's all I've read that's set in Africa, although in my defense, I've read TWO of the #1 Ladies Detective series, so that's something.
Five Things That Turn Me Off of a Book, However Unfair
The feeling that it would Not Be That Hard to Turn This Into a Movie and What's Up With the Lame Dialogue?
Science fiction
A big sticker on the front that says it is now a major motion picture
Chick lit
Slippery pages
Five Things I am a Sucker For in a Book
Plotlines that span generations
Magical realism
Conniving protagonists
Fashionable women
Exotic locales
Friday, April 20, 2007
Maybe it's to show off your fancy cell phone.
InStyle.com says this is one of this season's Hot Trends: 
That, my friends, is a clear purse. Chanel. $895.
I would just like to point out that I don't have to spend $895 to show the world that the inside of my purse may or may not contain a combination of: lip balm, pens, old grocery lists, last week's receipts, as assortment of plastic utensils, tampons, mascara, credit cards, picture IDs, a cell phone, a blackberry, keys, hand sanitizer, Neosporin, Lipton tea bags, hair bands, yesterday's earrings, candy wrappers, $1.43 worth of spare change, and, occasionally, my dance shoes.
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