Why Writing makes 17 More Days in a Cast Tolerable

I’m still in the second phase of healing after a near reconstruction of my left foot. Writing is a lifeline in this second phase where I’m at home recovering. (The first phase was waking up in the recovery room with blood clots and being shipped to the ER.) For the past few days, I have been able to shoot across my home on my knee scooter to fill up water bottles and get ice packs from the freezer. I have been able to use the I-Walk, which is a brand of knee cane, to maneuver the kitchen and cut carrots and onions for the slow cooker. I have even been able to chase down the cats, feed them, brush them, and give Li’l Miss Molly her meds. I have watched all five seasons of Bosch on Amazon Prime, and I have been able to get a few stories written here on Medium, even though no one on the site has read them! (All my reads are from my Facebook posts — thanks friends!) Writing has always helped me make it through the days. Here’s what’s been happening these days:

1. The clock next to the window clicks each second, just like the clock in my grandmother’s house that she placed right above her living room couch. That clicking sound brings the comfort of family, food, and the pleasures of TV — all those mundane moments sitting with my grandma as she watched Telemundo or Univision. I am wrapped in the past as I proceed through the day.
2. Media infiltrates through the computer and cellphone. Trump and fascism. Trump and oil drilling and fracking. Trump and his lies. So many lies.
3. The foot heals every day. Yesterday, I went without any pain meds and the foot is not swollen. The bones are bonding together, the skin fusing, the nerves realigning.
4. My mother may lose one of her cats. Jaguar stopped eating for two days, but after a visit to the vet and a shot, she is now nibbling at her food and even playing, a bit. (I wait to hear the sad news, but maybe, just maybe…)
5. There are many synonyms for eating: nibbling, noshing, chowing down, consuming, consumption. Consumption is a synonym for tuberculosis since the disease is one that nibbles, noshes, and chows down on a person’s body.
6. My grandmother didn’t realize how the love she wrapped around me would only bring her chocolates and pink carnations in a vase wrapped with a ribbon. Instead, she remembered how after I climbed on the roof one summer to read, the leaks began after January rains.
7. Trump is not the only issue in the media. Mothers have tired of their children, abandoned them, left, left them abandoned or dead. Many women have gone missing, only for their DNA to turn up in backyards, back alleys, backpacks. Many children are hungry, cold, and alone having been left abandoned in cages. Can it all be traced back to Trump or is Trump the incarnation of what we do to each other?
8. I am my body. But I am out of touch. We do not communicate so well. Every day, I, my-body-I, changes and decays. Every day, my body heals and grows straight. How does gravity pull the color out of my hair leaving only the gray?
9. The cats do not care about my body or what I look like. They just know that when I come around something good is going to happen. I will feed them, give them treats, brush their fur, scratch their bellies.
10. Cats equal forest. Cats equal leaves caught in the wind. Cats equal the various shades of green in a forest canopy. Cats equal the eucalyptus outside the window. Some bird keeps whirling a call. The cat equals the forest equals the wind equals the bird that calls forth tomorrow.