The last three months have been a special kind of hell. A hell, I hope to never repeat again in the entirety of my life.
On August 15, my best friend, roommate, and puppy co-pawrent had a hip replacement because the military was hard on his body. After eight months of working with the VA and repeated fuck ups on their part—I have opinions on how we treat vets—he finally had the surgery. I cleared out two months of my schedule to be there through it all. Fuck were there some bad days and scares, but he is getting back to normal, and I’m finally catching up on all the sleep I lost.
Was a hip replacement the reason the last three months have been hard? No. Was it a contributing factor? Yes.
I’m going to ignore deaths, family emergencies, near death of a beloved dog, work, wonky relationships, difficult travels, and all those things—which are definite contributors because they made everything harder—but that’s life. I could have dealt with them all much better if I’d had my fucking hand. We’re going to go on a teensy tangent to set the stage, though. So, bear with me.
I am a writer. Shocking. I don’t actually enjoy anything about the writing process until it’s done. But akin to breathing, I must write, or I’ll die. I found out I won’t die, but I must write. It’s how I process stress, life, challenges, love, and everything in between. I carry pen and paper with me everywhere in case an idea or feeling needs to be written down. There is something about the act of writing that helps release whatever it is from my body. I prefer handwriting those things. When that’s not feasible, I write emails on my phone or computer. Voice memos are not the same. I need the physical act of writing.
I have always been active. Looking back, training to be a professional ballerina and cheerleading got me through growing up. I was extremely active in college and never stopped. In the last year, I have really started being active for old-RaeAnna’s mental acuity and current-RaeAnna’s mental state. But when my stress levels rise, so does the exercise. (Ha that rhymed.) I had a really stressful spring, and I dove into all the exercise I could take. I got happy. I got fit. I started running races during Pride Month. I was finally in a place where I felt happy in my body for the first time since I was at the height of my ballet abilities… only fourteen years ago. It’s fine. Also, I tend to swell a lot when I work out. (This will be important later.) (Done with the 239 word tangent now.)
I cope with stress by writing and exercising—or going to my friend’s house to play piano, but that requires more effort and two functional hands.
At the end of August, I broke my right hand. Breaking either hand would be unpleasant but breaking my dominant hand… heinous. It was the bone inside my hand of my pointer finger and some fun things with my knuckles. Do you know how much you use your dominant pointer finger? A whole shit ton. Just typing this, I’m using it constantly. Not to mention literally living. It is also the hand I have nerve damage in, so that’s fun. All the fun. Hands are important. Don’t be a dumbass, RaeAnna
Not only am I writer, I’m a lesbian. If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you, but oh the jokes.
The how isn’t even an interesting story. But I ended up with some deep cuts that had to heal before I could have a cast. I spent three weeks braced, changing the bandage every couple days. It was awful. I was in shit tons of pain and had nothing to really protect it from… falling, the six dogs, sleeping, existing. I couldn’t even drive because my car’s a goddamn stick shift. Those first three weeks, I was still very much alone in taking care of my six pack [of dogs] and Dylan and the house and everything in between. I ended up not taking on any work at all for a month and a half because I physically couldn’t. Dylan and I were trapped in the house together and pretty much went on a three week long binge of all our favorite shows and hoped we wouldn’t hate each other. Then again, we survived the pandemic, but we were mobile then. As a Type A doer and goer, not being able to do anything really took a fucking toll.
The amount of stress I was under to keep the immediate beings in my life together and fed—the bare minimum—with a broken dominant hand was awful. But then there were so many things happening with my friends and family that were stressful in their own right, and I could do nothing.
Hell.
I was trapped in my own personal hell.
I could not do anything to help the people I love. I could hardly do what I needed to get by. Washing my own hair? Really hard. Shaving? Not happening. Cooking? How about DoorDash. Work? I’m out of the office. Could I type? Kinda, very slowly, very painfully. It was easier to all but stop working, which is hard because I love my job. I love working. It’s fun for me and keeps my brain busy. It also helps relieve stress because then I’m doing something!
Being in a brace: not great.
Being in a cast: much worse.
Being in a brace, I could at least go for walks because I could adjust the bandage when I swelled. I’m too much of a fall risk to go running with a broken hand. I don’t know many limits, but I recognize that one. I could take it off to wash my hand. There was more movement, which is exactly the opposite of what I needed. But being able to let my hand out for a couple minutes every day helped with the anxiety and panic of being restricted, confined, limited.
Being in a cast, I could not go for walks anymore. First of all, the idea of working out and sweating in the cast I’d be living in for over a month. No thank you. I had a brother who had a habit of breaking bones as a kid, so I knew the funk. Avoided that with everything I had. The bigger issue… I live in Houston. Though your Instagram is full of fall vibes, it’s still in the humid 90s here. Under cool weather circumstances, I swell when exercising. In hot weather, I really swell. Swelling in a cast is really fucking painful.
Once the cast went on, I was immediately filled with panic and anxiety.
My life has been tough, even during the good parts. Trauma, rape, abuse, neglect, and just about everything in between has been a part of my story at one point in time or another. Even during the good periods, I still get triggered. So I write about it, and I’m okay. I have worked my ass off to heal. I have made a career out of sharing my stories. So when times are tough, I turn to writing and working out more. Because I know what I need, I know how to cope and manage, I know how to be a good human to myself so I can be a good human to everyone.
Even when I had no control over my life, I have had control over my body. Outside of lifting really heavy things and extreme sports, there isn’t much I can’t or haven’t been able to do. I’m in my 30s and have never not been able to do the splits. I’ve always been able to count on my body to do what I need it to do without many limitations. (I have torn my ACL, broken toes, pulled/torn muscles and ligaments, popped things in and out of their sockets, but the ballerina in me knows how to push through with that super-duper healthy mentality.) Losing my fucking right hand…. It took away the two things I have always been able to do to cope with stress: move and write.
I didn’t lose my hand’s functionality during a good period. I lost my hand and ability to cope with stress during one of the most stressful periods I’ve been dealt in about a decade. I was trapped in my head and in my house, which historically have not been safe places for me to be trapped.
The following story should not be replicated, but I’m a grown up and I can make my own bad decisions and then be open about it on the internet where even my closest friends will be finding out about it. Cause you can’t be mad at me now…. Love you, I’m fine, k, thanks, bye. Anyways.
The first night I had the cast on, to put it kindly, I lost my shit. It was tight. “That’s normal,” they say. I couldn’t hold a fork. I couldn’t do anything but barely wiggle my fingers. The difference between brace and cast was huge—mentally even bigger. I started having an anxiety attack that evening, which rolled into a panic attack, which rolled into an anxiety attack, and so the cycle went until about seven in the morning. When I grabbed a pair of scissors.
Why did I do this? Well, a good portion of this was because I had never felt so limited. I needed my freedom. Immediately. It unlocked a few memories from childhood. And when I say unlocked, I knew they were there and had talked about them with two of my best friends, they know and that’s it. I don’t think I had realized the extent of how fucking abusive those stories were until I was trapped in that cast that night. What happened was not normal parenting. And the fact is, I’m not going to write about a lot of those things publicly until my parents are dead. I will let them live with their dignity. But it made the panic and anxiety attacks worse because PTSD loves to show up to the party at the worst time with a flash mob. The other reason: it wasn’t just in my head. I couldn’t feel my hand; my fingers were turning blue. All rationality had left my brain hours ago. So, I grabbed the scissors. I hacked it off. By the end, my left hand looked like I’d gone up against Muhammad Ali and won (duh). Fiberglass is a bitch, I have lesbian nails, so there was a lot of tearing and hacking and angry crying as I stabbed at this thing that felt like it was taking my life away. It was desperate and not cute and alone on the couch in the living room. Even the dogs were put away. I was raw and breaking. Being around anyone, even the dogs, would have broke me wide open. I knew, from experience, if I caved into that depth of pain, I wasn’t in a place where I would be able to pick myself up again for a good long time. And I didn’t have the luxury to break; everything and everyone was depending on me to keep going.
The moment the cast came off, I started regaining feeling in my hand. It was an immediate ‘I’m okay.’ It wasn’t a problem anymore. The anxiety and panic disappeared immediately. Braced my hand. Took a nap. Eventually, I talked myself into allowing another cast because I might not be great at taking care of myself, I do know the importance of saving my hand. It was a looser cast that didn’t go as far up my forearm. It was still really hard, but it was easier to manage. Mentally and physically.
When I broke my hand and saw the next two to three months ahead, I thought I knew what it would be like. I was a dancer who’d been through many restrictive and even debilitating injuries to my feet, knees, hips, elbow. So, losing the ability to move, exercise, exist in my body fully wasn’t new. I thought I knew what it was like to have something I loved and need taken away from me. But I’ve always had writing, since I picked up a pen at two years old. I had no idea what it was like to not be able to write. Even this piece, something that once would have taken me an hour or two to write, is taking me three days because my hand gets tired.
The only positive the cast gave me that I didn’t have in the brace: driving my car. The cast was sturdy enough I could shift without pain. I could see my friends. Do some things. It didn’t solve my problem, but it did help just enough to keep me sane.
My friends showed up. As much as I let them. My best friends, Kelsey and Alex, found out two days later. The rest of my best friends found out a week later. Everyone else was kept in the dark until I posted on social media a month after the cast had been on. In times of crisis, I tend to retreat inward. I’m private and introverted, though social media and my writing tells a different story; you’re only getting what I want you to know. This is open and vulnerable but still curated. Even those closest to me, I struggle with vulnerability. At best, I think I’m forgettable, that my life and problems are a burden or uninteresting, so I tend to under share when there’s a lack of direct questions. Everyone was so gracious and offered to help in any and every way. They gave me understanding and told me they couldn’t even begin to get what I was going through as a writer. Lesbian jokes were made to lighten the mood. Even new friends had an expression of knowing this was hard for me in a way it wouldn’t be for most people since writing is more than just my job.
I started having panic attacks every day on my bathroom floor. No one knew. Dylan only found out when he surprised me by climbing the stairs for the first time after surgery and to find me in the bathroom. In that moment, he knew how much I’d been holding it together for him and the dogs, while I was crumbling. He knows what it takes for me to get to that point. I was alone while being surrounded by people who, as much as they could and wanted to help, couldn’t give me what I needed.
My junior year of high school, I started getting a stress rash. It was horrible. Junior year, in a generation and a school dedicated to creating resumes for the Ivy’s, was hard. Overscheduled, overworked, we were a class of high functioning, sleep deprived young adults. Alone, it could have triggered a stress rash, but I had the fun sprinkles and cherry on top of that overwhelming sundae, consisting of getting raped on the daily, a highly abusive mother, a younger brother I tried to protect, and working 20 to 30 hours a week. That stress rash would come and go until I left everyone and everything behind to go to college and start over. It hasn’t had much of a resurgence since then. But oh fuck did it come back a few days after the cast. I was in agony and started doing what I did in high school even though it was in the humid 90s: wearing bulky sweaters and layers to keep me from scratching my fucking skin off. Things I didn’t know in high school that I know now that help get rid of the rash but have also kept it away for well over a decade:
1) Benadryl, if it doesn’t help the itching, it will put me to sleep until the itching goes away. I also had the time to sleep, which I did not in high school.
2) It hasn’t been around much because I can write now. I live in a home where my words are my own until I decide to share them. I was never able to write anything real in high school or before because my mother would find it and make me pay.
3) This pain and restriction, it wasn’t forever. Though it felt like it.
I made it a month in the cast. That was long enough. Should it have stayed on longer? Yes. Could I take it any longer? No. It was healed enough the cast could come off. Recovery could begin. Life and work could slowly start to resume.
I am usually very realistic to a fault. I was not. I was delusional to a fault. I thought, once the cast came off, everything would be back to normal. Hahaha, wrong. So wrong. I lost so much strength. It’s still incredibly delicate and painful. The skin where the cuts were is still fresh and sensitive. It’s ridiculous, and I hate it. I don’t like feeling weak or incapable.
Instead of dwelling on what I can’t do: writing as much as I used to, opening things, yoga, handstands, cracking my knuckles, dexterity, handwriting, etc. I’m concentrating on the fact, I can write and I can move again.
I’m doing what I need to be okay mentally while still being kind to my hand as it is. I wear a compression glove a lot to help support it. When I’m not actively using my hand, I wear a stiffer brace to let it relax safely. I’ve started focusing my energy on getting back into working again and moving my body. I can’t yet do the things I really loved doing before, like yoga or trail running (I fall sometimes. I’m clumsy, okay). But I’m trying new things. I’ve taken up racquet sports to build my hand strength. I’ve started lifting because I’ve been meaning to and now it’s one of the things I can mostly do. I’ve gotten into swimming again for the first time in two decades. No playing mermaids here, I’m doing laps.
The road to getting my hand back to what it was will take a while. There’s also a chance there will be a new normal. Either way, I’m okay. And looking back over the last three months, it was hell. I was not okay. I’m leaving out so much shit that I went through because it’s none of your business, and I’m also not writing a book here. But it’s also the first time my life has been that horrible and I haven’t woken up in the morning thinking “God-fucking-damnit.” Life was bad, but I didn’t want to die. And for me, the life I’ve lived, that is huge.