Balancing the Scales

We're starting to settle into Operation Hurt Mama status in our house. It's getting hard to balance the time, the priorities and the needs of the family. @La_Gringa is working double shifts between work-work and picking up the slack for me. I keep saying, "This is not a sprint, it's a marathon," but it's hard not to want to have the same pace as before I tanked it. Face it, I'm as efficient as a stoner at a Grateful Dead concert.

Yesterday was hard, painful, exhausting. Thing 1 found me trying to get down the stairs in tears and asked me if I was dying of cancer. Thing 2 has had relentless nightmares this week. Again, trying to balance these scales for everyone is so unexpectedly difficult.

Normalcy is a blur. Returning to normalcy is my immediate goal.

I'm thrilled with the surgeon we picked. He's colorful, direct and well-known for his work with athletes. This week he drained my knee (about a cup of pretty fluid) and yesterday put in steroids, which are working great. We got a diagnosis: My ACL and both parts of meniscus are toast. My ACL will have to be completely replaced with that of a cadaver. I've got plenty of bone bruising, contusions, bleeding and strains. You need about 20% meniscus to function, we'll see how it goes after Dr. Thabit gets in and cleans up the garage sale floating around in my knee.

Somewhere in between talking about cadavers and recoveries and the reality of not being able to run long distance again, my surgeon told me I could never be fat. Lovely. He felt the pressure on my knee would be just too much and could cause problems if I didn't stay super fit. I don't plan on being fat, but I didn't like being told I *couldn't* ever get fat. I wanted to slap him and eat a Twinkie.

I figured I'd be a failure at bulimia, so I started using an iPhone app called "Lose it" for caloric/exercise management. I'm not going to try and lose weight, but I have no idea how my highly active body is going to respond to being sedentary. The program, if you have an iPhone, is just amazing, smart, intuitive and right at my pocket. It is going to be key for me over this long haul.