This is my life...

I've avoided updating my blog because I haven't had much in the realms of happy news to report. But hey, if news channels waited for "good" news to air, we'd be stuck watching reruns of Law & Order 24/7 and never getting a daily dose of that silver fox Anderson Cooper that we all (i.e. me) seem to need to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

So here goes. My update:

I got the swine flu. It sucked. It was especially ironic that just the morning before I came down with it, I was musing over the fact that it had been a decade since I'd had the flu. I still went to school to take a final. I had a fever and was shaking while I took it. Before you judge me for infecting everyone, any of you guys paying for your own school would have done exactly the same thing. To add to my list of reasons I hate Wal-Mart, I managed to get in a fender-bender in the Wal-Mart parking lot. I guess there's all sorts of things you should do when you get in an accident...get their insurance information, not admit guilt...I basically did none of these things. Luckily for me, I hit the nicest old couple in this country. When they called to tell me the bill would be over $1000, and I proceeded to cry (in between classes), the husband told me to "just not worry about it" and there was too much good in life to get bogged down by something so trivial. The next day they told me that they told the insurance that they didn't know who hit them and just had me pay the $200 deductible. They said I just had way too much life ahead of me and they didn't want this little thing hanging over my head. I left bran muffins on their doorstep a few days later with a thank you note for being so lovely and the day after that, when I got home from work and class, there was a thank you note that they had dropped off, thanking me for the delicious muffins. These people singlehandedly restored my faith in the general goodness of man. They'd have to be absolute saints to thank me for those muffins.

Rock climbing has been my vehicle for dealing with stress these last several months. With full time grad school and work and attending two wards on Sundays (I attend my singles' ward and a spanish branch and have callings in both), life has been really insane. THe kind of insane that I like, but nonetheless, insane. Rock climbing is what kept me balanced and brought me great joy. That is, until I managed to land wrong when I jumped down from reaching the top of a bouldering route. It began swelling immediately and I couldn't move it or put any weight on it. I iced it and could only lie there until I didn't feel like either vomiting or passing out (which took about 45 minutes). I then drove myself home. The next day I woke up and couldn't put any weight on it. So I went to the doctor and, as fate would have it, I fractured my fibula and had either a bad 2nd degree sprain or a 3rd. In other words, my life was sucking pretty bad at this point.This picture was taken not even 24 hours after the accident. A couple days later, my foot was this gorgeous purple and blue. It also swelled up much larger. I felt like elephant man. I kept wanting to exclaim: "I am not an animal! I am a human being!" (skip to 2:30)

So the doctor stuck me in this equalizer boot that I was going to have to wear until the possibility for me to bear children had passed. My life felt over.

However, after about 2 weeks in the boot and no follow-up doctor visits (screw that, I thought), I decided that my fibula was no longer fractured and my ankle no longer messed up. I stopped wearing the boot. I went to the gym to try and lose some of the 10 lbs I managed to gain in the two weeks of inactivity and subsisting entirely off of Dreyer's peppermint ice cream. I even did some rock climbing. Life was good.

That is until the doctor's office called and said they found more stuff on the x-ray and that I needed to see a podiatrist asap. So I went to a podiatrist who told me that I could either wear the boot for a few more weeks, then wear a brace for three months and do intensive physical therapy--or I could have surgery and a lifetime of issues. The choice was mine to make.

To my discredit, it took 45 minutes of Dr. McKay lecturing me and another 5 hours of weighing out the pros and cons of both sides in my mind before I actually decided to put the boot back on.

After the doctor's lecture, he then proceeded to try and set me up with a former patient.

No joke.