“I really think you have a fracture.”
I stare incredulously at Stefan. He has just helped me from the toilet painfully back into the wheelchair and is now standing in the empty bathtub across from me. We don’t have a proper wheelchair accessible bathroom in our rental apartment, so there’s very little room for him to maneuver around me and chair in our little ensuite.
He’s also holding our eldest pup, Lola, in his arms. She had wandered in earlier in her typically befuddled way and the sight of them both makes the whole situation seem even more absurd and surreal.
This kind of wheelchair-to-toilet-and-back transfer I can usually do quickly and independently without a second thought. Now, for whatever reason, I can’t put any weight at all on my left leg without absolutely excruciating pain.
I’m still breathing hard and trying to get the residual pain aftershocks under control.
“It can’t be a fracture,” I reply stubbornly. “When would I have fractured it?”
That was the night of Wednesday, March 20th.
By the following morning, we are at Urgent Care in Sheldon Chumir, my leg has been x-rayed and the doctor is showing me a femur (thigh bone) fracture so clear and precise that it could have come out of a medical textbook.
Folks with Osteogenesis Imperfecta tend to have the majority of their fractures pre-puberty and then they taper off abruptly in adulthood. Of the forty or so fractures I’ve had over the course of my lifetime, I estimate only three or four of those happened as an adult.
While I have broken this femur several times before, it hasn’t happened since I was a teenager. I also haven’t had a fracture with a significant recovery time since I was hit by a car at a crosswalk twenty years ago and needed bed rest for a month and a half to heal a cracked hip bone.
Laying in Urgent Care, I felt a bizarre mixture of the familiarity of a situation that I’d been through many times, while at the same time realizing that I was going to be learning how to recover in a much older body and an environment very different than what I’d dealt with before.
To give you a better sense of how much time has passed, the last time I broke a femur:
90s boy band “New Kids on the Block” were all the rage.
The very first browser for the World Wide Web had only just been invented—not that the web would even enter the public consciousness for another five years.
“Driving Miss Daisy” had won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Needless to say, it’s been awhile.
The 24hrs that followed were amongst the hardest that I‘ve ever been through and I’m going to not write about them at this time in the hopes that with enough distance they’ll blur into something sufficiently indistinct. I’ve found over the years that this is the healthiest way for me to process traumatic experiences—rather than ruminating and replaying the events over and over, I find that it’s far better to take the attitude of “this happened, I got through it and now I can let it go.”
The one memory that I do want to hold on to is being loaded in the ambulance outside the apartment on Thursday night. It had been snowing for days and, as I lay staring upwards from my back, the big snowflakes drifted gently downwards all around me. Standing beside the stretcher, Stefan grinned at me and said it felt like Narnia. I had to agree—just so extraordinarily beautiful.
I was admitted to hospital in the early hours of Friday morning and this is where I will remain until my care needs are less intense. Currently I can’t sit up at all and we’re fighting a daily battle to keep my pain level under control. I’ve been told that the first ten days after the fracture are the absolute worst because of the inflammation and spasms around the fracture site. It also doesn’t help that the femur is a big bone with a ton of nerves, making it one of the most painful to break. I’m holding on to the flickering hope that in another week I’ll be in less pain—not healed by any means, but at least not having my world revolve around when I can take my next painkiller.
One question I’ve been asked a few times now is whether—given all the givens—I will still be going ahead with my exhibit in the summer.
The answer to that is a resounding YES.
For one thing, I feel like there are enough paintings complete to fill out the exhibit in a meaningful way (you can read more about my strategies around this in another recent post, Exhibit Triage).
More than that though, as serious as this fracture and its recovery will be, the nature of my disability is having brittle bones that do fracture. As much as I might not enjoy the current detour, I’m also not about to let my entire life and all my aspirations grind to a complete halt because of it. My disability is a part of me and highlighting the reality of that experience is a key component of the exhibit as well.
The above unfinished painting, “In the ER”, is something I was working on earlier in March and is based on a completely different trip to the hospital back in 2021. That emergency event wasn’t even bone related, but I felt it was a way to depict the medical and caregiving side of our experience of being an interabled couple.
In any case, there won’t be any new painting updates until I can sit up again, but I’ll keep folks in the loop as much as I can.
Sending lots of support, love and healing to you, Athena! This sounds like such a doozy. Your fortitude with your art even through your pain and healing journey is beyond inspiring. Thank you for sharing and letting us into your world. 💙
I am so, SO sorry. I hope the magic mix of pain meds can be found asap so you can focus on healing and not just white-knuckle it from hour to hour! ❤️