I'm at home in the hospital bed off my face on pain medication constantly. The pain from one thing is indistinguishable from another.
Every day I get ready for the nurse coming to change the pin site dressings to hopefully keep the infection at bay.
Every day I take three lots of two times penicillin tablets for breakfast.
Every day, half hour before the nurse comes in, I go two Endone 10Mg and two Paracetamol Osteo because I know when she has to touch my leg it's going to send me off the deep end in a pain spiral. I wish they didn't have to do it, but I know they have to do it.
The routine of this creeps into my reality. It's Christmas and I could not give a single fuck about that. I just want my life back. I want Scottyto have his life back.
Stupidly, I have a new puppy. Stupidly I say, but how could I know this was going to happen to me when I ordered her?
I always wanted an Italian Greyhound and when my baby Bella died during the pandemic I started researching breeders and found a really nice old lady out in Mildura who was going to let me have a little girl, the only one in the litter because she liked me and I wrote her a heartbreaking letter about my situation and she felt sorry for me.
This was pre-accident mind you. What would she think when I rocked up in a wheelchair, leg stuck out in front me with a fucking frame holding it altogether. I didn't care, I was getting that puppy. That puppy was going to make me feel better and I needed something or someone to heap my love onto, to change the topic from pain to love and puppy breath.
And so Bonnie joined our little menagerie, one old male Maltese cross Shitzu fluff ball called Baxter and a rescue cat from the yard that Scotty rescued and fell head over heels for when she fell pregnant, her name is Oreo. Like the biscuit.
Bonnie is mental, pure unhinged crazy and I love her to bits. She lays sleeping with me most of the time and it is pure bliss. She completely and utterly steals my heart like only a puppy can do and I will take a bullet for her, hell I'd chop my foot off now and feed it to her if she was hungry and only I could make it to the band-saw in the shed for the amputation. Sick, right? I am demented.
It's impossible to train a puppy when you are immobilised and try as I might I can't find an eleventh hour puppy school or mobile dog walker in all of the lands due to the fucking pandemic so I do the best I can. I get in my wheelchair and take her outside, I get fake grass and make pee pads for her but it's hopeless. Puppies take a lot of mobility to chase around and imbue with a sense of where to pee and where not to pee and clearly I just can't do it. Scotty is angry with me. He thinks I am a fool and it was too early since Bella passed and what the fucking hell was I thinking after the accident? He knows I need her but still, he's angry. He is also, right. I hate that more than anything.
The routine for my leg and foot goes like this:
Day a) nurse changes pin sites
Day b) nurse changes vac dressing and measures the wound
Day c) nurse changes pin sites
My handwritten trauma diary tells me that this goes on 17 December until at least 20 January 2021 every single day. Christmas comes and goes, New Years comes and goes. Scotty doesn't go to work, he is there for me every single day.
I don't really remember much but I do remember that those (b) days suck, as the wound is probably 15cm when they start and the vac dressing is literally glued down over the wounds, so every time one is removed it is like lifting the flesh up and pulling away from the wound. It hurts. Hurts like hell. Endone isn't cutting it anymore and I wish I was dead half the time, the rest of the time I have started to wonder if I should have cut my foot off back when it happened. Would I have been better off?
I start counting things. I count everything. From the holes in the ceiling in the hospital on every visit to the LEDs that keep me awake at night on the standby lights of every device I can see. I count the days, or Siri tells me actually, since the accident and I start wondering about how many days it will take before I can walk again. I'm not thinking about riding motorcycles again much anymore. It feels too much like it might not happen. I count dots, I count the times a cloth is wrapped around a pin site and get annoyed when they aren't even. I count how many squeezes of betadine ointment goes into each strip. I count how many strips are left. I count everything.
I also develop a very keen sense of heightened awareness. I can hear things like a superhuman. I know when a dog goes past the house, I know exactly where Scottyis from the sounds his shoes make on the different textures on the floors around the house. It's weird how my other senses have increased by a crazy amount due to my immobility. I have become a freak in a bed.
Slowly, day after day of days a) and days b) the clock tics and the wound gradually starts to close up, it goes from 5cm wide to 1cm wide and the nurses are so positive and excited, I start to get excited, until they leave and then I slump back into the bed and think about how stupid I was 48 days ago.
I feel like I might be losing my mind, often. The thin veil of reality I have is the four walls around me in this horrible single hospital bed even though it is in my home.
I can only take a piss in a bottle that is beside my bed and then I can't wait for Scottyor a nurse to come and take it away so I can't smell my own piss. Everything is heightened. I'm constantly high as a kite and nothing much matters. I don't even really care that the wound is closing. I still have to have this goddamned vacuum dressing on and it keeps me awake at night. When everyone else is sleeping I'm laying on my back counting stupid things like that's the only thing that matters.
I'm certain that I have sunk into a deep depression. I am medicated beyond reason but nothing can take away that feeling that this is all my own fault and I am an idiot. I kinda, no, totally hate myself. I need to book myself in to speak to my neurology psychiatrist, stat.
Little did I know at that time, that it was going to get much worse than this.
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