Patience has never been my strong suit. If I want something, I want it right away. Sitting still? Also quite nice at times, but on my terms. When I want it.
And then suddenly – one week already – you find yourself in the hospital. And your patience is sorely tried. First of all, it took four days after the accident before the operation could take place. But that’s just as well. After all, you know that not everything gets pushed aside because you have to break your ankle(s). So you can live with that.
But it’s more in all those little things; do you have to go to the toilet, for example. Are you normally used to jumping up and walking to the bathroom, now you have to wait for someone to answer the bell, tell you what’s going on, then they walk away again to get stitch and mat and shove it under your buttocks. You do what you have to do, press that bell again, and then just wait again for someone to come. And repeat.
Perhaps the hardest part is having to wait until you know where you stand. Had surgery on Friday, of course right before the weekend and oddly enough, surgeons sometimes have a day off. So you will have to be patient before someone comes to tell you what happened and what that means in practice. But also: how long you have to be patient before you can do everything you could before.
Patience also to find out whether that moment will ever come, because the exact course of recovery depends on so many factors that no doctor will ever be able to assess. So you have to be patient there too.
I try to look at it day by day because there is no point in going too far into the future. I know it’s going to take a long time, but I try to remember that eventually it will be all right.
And in the meantime, I am going to work very hard at training my patience. After all, patience is a virtue, isn’t it?
