One-footed emotional balance

While I'd missed the tour of the assisted living facility—its floor plan was great for seniors, but too much walking for the recently wounded—two of my sisters determined it was a good fit for my mother. If we moved her in by the end of the month, she could lock in a lower monthly rent. "The siblings"—all five of us, including my brother in Denmark—decided this was the route to go. We had just two weeks to get her moved. From that point on everything seemed to happen in fast motion.

This put considerable stress on my mother, who had only recently returned home to a condo that no doubt felt quite empty. We'd kept her busy in the weeks after my father's death in the spring; she saw a lot of family and friends at the lake this summer, especially during the week of my dad's memorial; and as the summer waned she'd had a nasty adrenaline surge to recover from as her daughter/caretaker lay screaming out in the rain, requiring an ambulance and then surgery. Now, recovering in the convenience of her one-floor living, that daughter was no replacement for my father's constant adoration.

One day she broke down crying. I'd seen my mother cry maybe three times in my life prior to my father's death; since then her tears came readily. She said, "I'm trying to be good about all this, because you all think I should move. But I need time. To..." She couldn't go on.

"To grieve Dad's loss," I offered. She nodded.

I told her I wished that we could give her that time. I remembered the advice from when my own husband died: don't make any major life changes while you're actively grieving. I'd stayed on the farm another twelve years. But my mother's memory decline had been relentless since my father's passing. Some of that might be temporary, due to grief, but the result was clear. She needed more support.

We were at a loss as to how to provide it. If she were in a wheelchair, we could bring someone in to bathe her and make a hot meal. If it were only that she couldn't drive, we could hire a driver. But how do you support someone whose daily life constantly confuses, whose medications overwhelm, whose diet is degrading, and who needs a sane sounding board for most every decision? We felt she needed the support services of assisted living, so I once again told her so.

"But I need to be here," she said tearfully. "Around his things. I can't take all this with me."

This woman had looked me straight in the eye before my first wedding and demanded that there be no tears. I now wanted to put down my head and sob right along with her, but choked it back. I laid my hand over hers and said, "I know. But we'll make sure you take enough."

Unable to put weight on my fractured ankle and still struggling with the walker and crutches, I could do so little for her. But on my last day there, before Dave came to pick me up and take me home, I sucked up the pain and accompanied her from room to room in her condo. We catalogued all the furniture, lamps, and artwork (there was a lot of that; my Dad was an artist) and, on a clipboard, divided items into three categories: things my mom hoped to bring with her, things she hoped would stay in the family, and things that could be sold at auction.

Once she got going she wanted to plow through the whole six-room, two-bath condo (yes, there were even multiple artworks in the bath). I worried that these emotional decisions would overtire her.

"Do you want to rest?" I'd ask.

"No, I'm fine. Do you need to rest?"

Frankly, I was exhausted after the first two rooms. Physically and emotionally. My ankle was throbbing; this was the longest it had been dangling down since the surgery. But I popped another pain pill and pushed on. Undertaking this task seemed to energize her, and I would not stand between her and its completion. By the time we reached the living room I sank to the floor and stretched my broken ankle out in front of me. And when it came time to move to the bedroom, rather than strain that overused ligament on the outside of my "good" hip to stand, I crawled on my hands and knees, pushing the clipboard along in front of me like a trained dog.

By the end of the day we had finished cataloguing the whole condo. The next day, when Dave picked me up, he dropped off the three colors of bright Post-Its I'd requested so my brother-in-law and nephew would have no trouble identifying the items that needed to be moved. The next day another sister arrived; using the list I provided she went through the condo and affixed labels to every single item.

I left knowing I had pushed myself to do what I could. The sibs were really pulling this together, with an extraordinary team effort that continued over the course of the final preparations that next week. E-mails flew between us. Everything was set. It would go like clockwork.

The day before my brother-in-law and nephew were slated to move the furniture, I called my mother, sensing she might need another pep talk. But she was already in a great mood, and asked how I was doing. After my report, she said, "And oh, have you heard my good news?" It had been so long since I heard such enthusiasm in her voice!

"No," I said. "What good news?"

"I'm not moving after all! I'm staying right here, in my condo. I just finished throwing away all the tags Nancy put on the furniture."

I reeled as if I'd just been sucked inside a cyclone; she'd knocked me completely off-kilter. There had been no e-mail chatter about a change of plans among the sibs. And all our work, gone! "How? Why?" My recent surgery had sapped my powers of speech; I was now monosyllabic.

"Someone called me and said I didn't have to go. And I never wanted to move anyway."

All I could think to do was hang up quickly and tell her I'd be back in touch. Then I quite madly started calling my sisters to find out what was going on. I left messages everywhere then simply had to wait it out. My mind and gut churned in turmoil.

One of my sisters called back in an hour. She followed up with my mother and got back to me—apparently, to the abnormal short-term memory loss that instigated her doctor's initial diagnosis of dementia, we could now add the symptoms of creative memory and wishful thinking. It had never occurred to me to suspect anything of the sort; as evidenced in her comment before my wedding, my mother had always been frightfully direct. While I ran and hid, my sister was able to face my mother down and straighten her out.

Her husband and son did indeed move my mother's furniture the next day, completely winging it—and they did an amazing job.

And I learned that "winging it" was not at all in my post-surgery emotional lexicon. Moving about on one leg was not just a matter of physical balance; I'd been thrown for my own loop. I needed rest, away from my mother, in my own home and with my husband, to restore a desperately needed emotional balance, as well.

Perspective at the great 55

Oprah, at 55:

Bill Gates, at 55:

Martina Navratilova, at 55:

Golum (age unspecified):

Kathryn Craft, age 55:

What do these stellar 55-year-olds have in common?

Those of us who want to preserve our youth must stay in the game. Train our eyes on the prize. Keep moving, even when it hurts. Get out among other people. Follow our bliss. To that end, I'm pictured above, still gamely trying to convince myself I could pull off my fall writing retreat at the lake, despite my ankle fracture, just because I could perch on these stools long enough to chop up ingredients for chicken salad.

I always schedule my fall writing retreat for women on the first weekend after Labor Day—my birthday weekend. Part of this is because the lake has grown quiet but the weather's still good. But it's also pre-emptive: my birthday is the one day of the year that I fear major disappointment.

Maybe it's because, growing up, I'd usually get back-to-school clothes and school supplies for my birthday. (As did my other siblings. On my birthday.) Maybe in another way my mother raised my expectations too high—she'd make me anything I wanted for dinner and dessert, and my answer was always the same: standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, and a dark chocolate cake with seven-minute frosting.

But then came the year in college when we had my birthday at the lake and she bought me a Sara Lee pound cake. In light of her compete lack of elbow grease, I thought, She doesn't love me any more.

I think I've been running from my birthday ever since. During my first husband's slow decline into the bottle, each of my birthday gifts was more extravagant than the last, even though I suspected—and eventually knew—he couldn't afford them. Dave, always paying attention as to how not to disappoint me, over-corrected: he usually takes me out to dinner and gives me a card. In order not to feel left out, I only sometimes give him a gift on his birthday. For two mid-lifers typically steeped in gratitude and joie de vive, we've turned into a couple of non-celebraters.

So I've been happier, in recent years, entertaining a group of women writers at my summer home, doing what I love to do in the place I love the most. This year, though, as the following portrait by my son Jackson shows, my fracture took front and center. No retreat. No husband, either—the day before my birthday, Dave dropped me off at my mother's and drove the additional hour home. I didn't see him again until a few days later. When he brought me a card.

My birthday wasn't a complete bust. One sister, newly arrived from Boston to take my mother to visit an assisted living place the next day, picked up a nice dinner and bought a yummy mocha cake. Another sister, who went along on the assisted living trip, stopped by a drug store to buy me a tee-shirt and some cushy grips for my walker.

But my favorite part was when Dave arrived later that week with a package from my best friend. I'd always cracked up when she'd tell me how pathetic her husband was when he didn't feel well: he'd sulk on the couch in a sweatshirt, its hood up like some sort of signal that said, I don't feel good. Comfort me. We'd laughed about it many times over the years.

She knew exactly what I needed for my birthday. After her gift arrived, I had a whole new "55" look to sport:

Readers, help Dave and I out here! How do you like to celebrate your birthday?

One floor—or three? Ask once, or thrice?

In my last post I said that Dave was driving me "home."

That wasn't quite true.

I wanted to go home. I really did. Living with my mother (and her dementia, and her grief over the loss of my father) at the lake all summer, while juggling a heavy workload, had stretched my patience (and, apparently, my ankle) to the snapping point. She needed more support than any of us had realized, and fearing her inability to live alone upon her return home, my siblings and I decided it was time to move her into assisted living.

This is not an easy conversation to have with a parent, nor one best initiated by phone, so the task fell to me. Explaining our need to move her was tough, considering that my mother would probably place such a confrontational heart-to-heart somewhere lower than toenail removal on her bucket list. Plus, she didn't want to go. I'd said, "The only other option is if one of us took you in, but frankly, I don't think you like any of your children enough to survive that." She said, "No, I don't." (Score one for Mom for lobbing back some equally confrontational truth.) These conversations wrung me out—over and over and over, since she could never remember the rationale—and sapped what pre-fracture energy I had.

Now that I was just a week post-surgery and in significant physical pain, I had no energy to spare. More than anything I wanted to hang out with my husband. Relax. Soak up a positive vibe in an atmosphere that felt a tad more sane and a lot less tense.

But to do that, I'd also have to choose vertical living that in no way supported my current, non-weight-bearing needs.

We hadn't wanted another vertical home. For 27 years I'd lived in a farmhouse in which we utilized each of the four floors. But you only have to fall down the steep twisting stairs once, and hit the stone wall at the bottom, to own the truth that this isn't the safest choice for an aging body.

So when Dave and I identified the borough of Doylestown as the place where we could enjoy the walkable, small town life we now desired, we sought there the age-in-place comfort of single floor living. But in this town of old Victorians and newer town homes, the only one-floor options were 1) ranch homes that came with mowing (after mowing four acres at the farm all those years we were quite done with that), or 2) 55+ communities well outside the bounds of that small town walkability. We caved on the issue of one floor living in favor of the lifestyle that living in the borough would provide, and determined to make good use of the town home association's gym to keep arthritis at bay so our knees could handle all those stairs.

Of course knees didn't end up being the first problem. Who knew that less than two years later, my fractured ankle would assert a critical need for a one-floor layout?

And guess who could offer me that?

My mother.

I was thankful for the opportunity to rest up at her condo before tackling our Doylestown stairs. But her memory impairment (or the grief, or both?) made it so that she could not anticipate any of my needs.

I had to ask for everything. One. Item. At. A. Time.

Despite the fact that I simplified my meals, and ate the same thing every day to ease her grocery shopping burden, this is how many requests I needed to make for breakfast alone:

"I'll just have one of my yogurts, please."

"That's all?" she says.

"I'll eat up some of that granola, too, if you want."

"No, not the Triscuits, that granola you bought. The one you didn't like."

"You put it over the fridge."

"I know because I watched you."

"No, that's the one you like. Never mind, I just didn't want the other to go to waste."

(She does not "never mind.")

"No, the one in the taller box with the red writing. The Kashi. Thanks."

[sound of granola hitting bowl]

"Oh, I'm sorry, Mom, I can't eat a whole bowl. I just wanted to sprinkle a little on top of the yogurt. Like I did yesterday. Thanks."

"Could I have some juice too, please, so I can take my pills?"

"Now I need my pills. I'm so sorry, they're in by the bed. And while you're there can you grab the extra pillows so I can prop up my leg?"

"Thanks for the pills. And whenever you can get to it, I could use those pillows. I'm sorry you need to make an extra trip."

"Kathryn, for crying out loud. I'm sorry, too, but there's nothing to be done about it."

She plops down the pillows on the couch where I sit and goes to the kitchen table to eat her own breakfast and read the paper. I've clearly harassed her enough.

Meanwhile, I watch news. It depresses the hell out of me. She is not watching it, she's reading the paper, but this frugal woman who followed me from room to room all summer, flipping off lights at the camp that I'd have to flip back on moments later but with my hands full, blares TV news during all her waking hours. The sound keeps her company.

A half hour later she comes into the room. She takes in my yogurt, its sprinkle of granola, my juice, my pills. "You haven't eaten anything," she notes.

"Um, could I please have a spoon?"

"You are so polite," she snaps.

My mother needed support while awaiting her move. She needed help with medication and bills. I needed help washing my hair.

Neither of us treasured our dependency.

But for twelve more days, we were stuck with each other.

(Know anyone interested in single-floor living in Macungie, PA? My mother's condo is for sale.)

Newly handicapped on Rt. 81-S

Nine days post-surgery, Dave drove me home. For the seven-hour trip from our summer home in Northern New York State to Southeastern Pennsylvania, I sat with my left leg stretched across the backseat of my mother's Camry with my broken ankle propped up on a pillow. The night before I'd taken a muscle relaxant—one tiny pill—to help me sleep, and I still could barely stay awake. This was probably a good thing. I would need all the strength I could muster for our mid-trip bathroom break.

We stopped at the Whitney Point rest area, located between New York exits 9 and 8 on Rt. 81 south. We've always loved this location. As you can see from the photo above, it overlooks the gorgeous valley that runs west of Rt. 81 from just south of Syracuse almost all the way to Binghamton. My little cockapoo Max had always given it two paws up (or at least, one rear leg). Relief would not come as easily for me.

At first everything looked great. The rest area had been redesigned in recent years, allowing cars to pull much closer to the front doors. According the the architects' website:

To rectify the inadequacies a new building was built to include the necessary components to provide for present and future needs. The new and upgraded facility includes increased parking for cars and trucks along with improved services for elderly and disabled persons. In addition, the facility contains multiple public restrooms, which are handicap accessible. Other amenities include seating areas and vending machines as well as public telephones and tourist information displays.

We were able to park right in front, beside a labeled handicap spot. At this point I was still painfully and effortfully hopping along with my walker—I didn't think a public place would be the best place for my first experimentation with crutches since an eighth grade ankle sprain. A ligament on the outside of my right hip was feeling the strain, as for more than a week now I'd relied on that one leg for everything. While my arms were generally strong from working out—thank goodness!—my wrists were not used to bearing my weight. I was heartened that it looked to be just a car length or two to get to the door. I could do this.

The interior of the building was spacious. A real beauty from tiled floor to wooden vaulted ceilings. One of my best friends is an architect, and I have a healthy respect for all aspects of design. But I also believe in the old maxim, "Beauty is as beauty does," and this was never truer for me than during my recent induction into the world of the temporarily handicapped.

The ladies room is just beyond the frame of this photo, at the near right side. By the time I made it halfway from the entrance doors to it, I was ready to collapse. I needed to stop and rest.

Despite a design so spacious it could have held enough pews for a small church service, I could find nowhere to do so.

Let me point out the only seating: see that wooden corner in the foreground corner of the photo? That was the one and only bench—I'd have to hop twice as far to get to it. What was the point? Turning back held no special allure, because I needed to use the restroom. I felt stranded. Shaking and sweating from the effort, I had no choice but to carry on.

I turned the corner and through the doorway, relieved that my trek was almost over.

It was not.

I now faced a long open hallway—one longer, it seemed, than my trip from the car door to the entrance. Clack. Clack. My efforts with the walker became dangerously uneven as fatigue set it. "Rest area"—what black humor. There was nothing restful about it. I presume this design had to be ADA compliant, but it did not take into account a full range of human needs. I finally reached the end of the hall and made another turn into an anteroom with a baby changing table. One more turn...and I face a long corridor of toilet stalls, the very last of which was the handicap stall large enough to accommodate both me and my walker.

I almost cried. My 80-year-old, 115-lb. mother, who was already done, said, "I waited for you." That was incredibly sweet, but there wasn't a blessed thing she could do to help me. I needed Lou Ferrigno to sling me over his shoulder and carry me.

An older woman with a cane stood at one of the sinks washing her hands. She turned to me and said, "I know. Welcome to my world."

I had to move on; my supporting hip was cramping. I made it down to the handicap stall and took a seat, as much to rest at this point as anything else. When I finally thought I could stand, I reveled in the joyous presence of sturdy handholds to help me get up—that right hip ligament had about had it, and I still had ahead of me a long return journey.

I went to the nearest sink to wash my hands. There were no towels or dryers in sight. My mother pointed them out—to get to them, in a separate section, I'd have to backtrack.

To hell with that. In addition to the extra effort, other women had wet the floor with water from their hands while getting to the dryers. It didn't look at all safe for one who had to rely on hopping, or using a walking aid. An aid whose use, of course, required dry hands.

So I wiped my wet hands all over my pants and began the long trek back to the car, looking to all the world as if I hadn't made my destination after all.

Kathryn, meet your new ankle

Employing a complicated car exchange, my husband Dave and two sons had planned to converge at the lake on Labor Day for one reason: to arrive with one extra driver so we could get my mother and her car home before my fall Writing Partner retreat for women the following weekend. Now, my ankle broken and the retreat canceled, we would all be heading home.

First, however, I had to get my staples removed. I'd seen the x-rays of my foot, and knew about the fibula plate and the fact that I was now quantifiably all screwed up, but it wasn't until eight days later that I'd see what kind of incisions had been made.

I looked forward to the big reveal. As a former modern dancer, my feet had been the subject of much scrutiny. So when the nurse pulled away the layers of surgical wrappings and exposed all that had been hidden, my first thought was:

What the hell is that?

I'm sure some of my female readers will relate to the first thing I noticed: leg hair. I had never before put this particular aspect of my personal growth to the test, so it was interesting to see what it looked like. The skin beneath was yellow from the Betadine wash they'd used to sanitize my skin, pre-surgery.

As for my foot? The color and shape were simply all wrong.

I had a small incision on the inside of my ankle and a much longer one on the left, where the plate went in.

Dave was a real trooper with my cell phone: "Can I snap a few more photos before you take the staples out? My wife is going to blog about this." I include this next shot because I think it speaks best to the Frankenstein-esque nature of my experience: it looked to me as if someone had removed my foot and tacked on someone else's. Someone...purple.

The beauty of the fall colors I sported notwithstanding, the outside of my ankle was as tender as a rotting plum. To that the nurse applied her staple remover.

The staples they used look something like this before they're crimped:

After they're crimped, the sides of the staple pull together beneath your skin. To remove them, the nurse used an instrument that looked like this:

One part of it slips under the loop at the top of the staple, and side pieces press down on the wire in a way that raises each side, effectively releasing the staple's hold on the skin. On the inside of my ankle this was relatively painless. Where the skin was so mushy on the outside, though, each removal delivered a sharp pinch that resulted in some oozing. I'd had so little sleep in the past week that my tolerance for additional pain was nonexistent. The nurse kindly gave me time to recover between staples. After, she applied ster-strips to the incision, first swabbing each ankle with more Betadine to help them stick. She covered all with a Jones bandage, a tube stocking wrapped with gauze and then Ace bandages, that would stay in place for the next four weeks.

Dr. Perrier agreed that I wouldn't heal well if I couldn't sleep. In addition to instructions to continue follow-up care with an orthopedic surgeon back home, I left with two prescriptions: a refill for my Percocet, and one for a nighttime muscle relaxant.

That night, for the first time, I got a couple precious multiple-hour blocks of sleep.

The next day, we went home.

One trial was over, and another just beginning.

Checking in: Who am I?

I'm currently seeking representation for a novel in which a professional dancer with body image issues must re-imagine her life after a devastating blow to her career is followed by a mysterious accident that leaves her unable to move. At one point, in the hospital, my protagonist concludes,

The harsh truth: without movement, I didn’t know who I was.

I thought about this, holed up as I was with a fractured ankle in a camp that still echoed with vibrant memory. The running footsteps of my youth (my mother: "You better have washed the pine needles off your feet!") and slamming screen doors (my grandmother, now: "Quick girls, the bats!") had been replaced with an eerie stillness. Although this place had made me feel more "me" than any other setting I'd known in my life, my new immobility allowed the dissociation my character spoke of to set in. Floating free from my writing and editing in a sea of pain medication, as out on the lake other Labor Day kayakers and swimmers reveled in summer's last rays, I felt like driftwood of an unspecified nature.

I have always been sensitive to the way change, especially when unanticipated, can challenge your very sense of who you are. A move to a new state in sixth grade, the loss of a beloved cousin while I was in college, my fertility struggle, my first husband's suicide—in the parlance of story structure these are inciting incidents: unexpected forces that tip a character out of her everyday world and that forge within her a desire to create a new reality.

Why a new reality? If you had a good life, why not just wait things out until I could get it back again? After Ron's suicide, at a meeting of Parents Without Partners, a man asked me just that. "Why are you working so hard at this?" he said, after I'd mentioned the therapy I'd sought. "He did this to you. It's not your fault!" He literally shook with anger, as if my choice to heal implied he might be culpable in his own divorce.

My rationale then was the same as it was fourteen years later, after my ankle fracture: why voluntarily return to a world in which such frightening circumstance was possible? While change is capricious and inevitable, I'd rather hedge my bets and reach for a life with different challenges rather than take another spin through the hell I'd already been through. Otherwise I'd feel as doomed as Sisyphus, rolling that rock back up the hill, over and over.

As a result I'm a rather voracious healer. I do not sit well with a disrupted sense of self; I can't muster the hope that time will knit my soul back together as tidily as it will the bones in my ankle. I'm more proactive than that. But a seeker needs motion. How could I rebuild my sense of self as a lively mid-lifer while stumping through the camp with a walker, each step taking such a toll? I'd hoped that "Kathryn Craft + walker" was a good three or four decades down the road.

The universe offered a grace of timing: by Friday night my sons, ages 22 and 24, already scheduled to spend Labor Day weekend at the lake, were on their way.

Their bed-head appearance late Saturday morning made it seem like the stork himself had dropped them off during the wee hours. At once I knew how much I needed their beautiful familiarity; I was more off-balance than even I had realized.

This was the first summer I'd been at the lake without my dad, whose spirit was evident everywhere but whose physical presence was sorely missed. I'd spent all summer with my mother, with whom I'd always had a trying relationship, but who needed me now that her short-term memory was fluttering to a halt. I'd fractured myself: at the same time struggling to catch up with my own interrupted work, I'd wrapped my life once again around her needs. Her dementia's constant assault on my sense of what was real and true knocked me as far off-balance as Hurricane Irene had, and now I had only one leg with which to right myself.

But in watching Marty glide over the water beside Dave in a vessel my Uncle Bob had bequeathed him, or listening to Jackson and his girlfriend enact the tireless debate on which is the best way to build a fire, the camp sprang to a most familiar life.

When my dad's sister left the lake this year—at 92 the only remaining Graham of that generation—she gave me a check for $50 with the instruction to purchase something for the camp in memory of my father. To that end my mother and I had purchased the Jack Graham Memorial Barbecue Grill to replace its dangerously rusted predecessor, at which my Dad had distractedly lorded over many an overcooked hamburger. On Labor Day I couldn't see, from my perch in the camp, my sons out at the grill. But knowing they were out there with chocolate bars, the old marshmallow forks ("Mom—here's a perfect marshmallow for you, golden brown!"), and my favorite—the graham crackers—I reclaimed a core aspect of self.

I am Kathryn, of the Grahams, and through me, tradition lives on.

Letting go is hard to do

Decades ago my sister was hit by a car while walking past the exit of a downtown parking garage. The impact threw her into the street, where a crowd immediately gathered. Had she survived? Her first words: "I need to get to the subway station or I'll be late for work."

I know this syndrome, born of shock and denial. Even while waiting out the standoff that would result in my first husband's suicide, I kept thinking: as soon as I get home, I'll file the newspaper article that had been due that day. Our plans are important. They organize our lives and make us feel safe; we know what to expect.

So when I broke my ankle two weeks before the fall Writing Partner retreat I was to host at our summer home, my immediate inclination was to forge on. For a variety of reasons I'd had to work hard to do it but I'd finally pulled together an awesome group of women. And after planning my father's memorial service, living all summer with my mother who suffers from dementia, and working 12-15 hour days to catch up with the most editing work I've ever had in a year—adding to that now, the ankle injury—I really needed to retreat, in every sense of the word.

I assured everyone, even from my hospital bed, that the retreat would move ahead as planned. I had two whole weeks to get better. I could do this, I thought.

That was before I realized just how far I would have to retreat.

My first inkling was how exhausting it was for the fiercely independent woman I'd become to ask for every little thing I needed: That a pillow relocated to another room be delivered. My pills, please. More water. Food? My whole life my mom had been dutiful in the nursing department, and she still was, but she couldn't remember where to find anything; I constantly had to fight through my medicated brain-numbness to find the words I needed to help her locate what she needed. Often more than once. Then again.

And let's just say that to depend upon a walker, using only one leg, was akin to walking on your legs your whole life and then being told to instead walk on your hands. Muscles rebelled.

Although I ferried between only two locations—the bed at night, and the couch on the porch by day—at every meal my mother would set me a place at the table, sometimes even starting her meal before saying, "Oh, you're going to eat over there tonight?" As if I was inconveniencing her by my sudden decision. And here I was supposed to be taking care of her. Dave was a big help, but caring for me in such a way was new to him, too. Rather than patronize me, he erred on the side of waiting to be told what to do.

Even as guilt and impotence drained me, lack of sleep screwed with my head. Part of me felt I had to stand guard all night lest Dave—who has no trouble sleeping despite his jumpy leg syndrome—strike out at my ankle. Yet I wouldn't ask him to sleep elsewhere. What if I needed him? I sandbagged a barrier between us with an extra pillow but couldn't fall asleep. And when I finally would I'd jerk awake with continued flashbacks—the slip, the sudden fall. The snap of the first bone, the crunching of the others. The rain, the shivering. In the middle of the night, with nothing to distract me from my hot ankle pain and stranded between pain pill dosages, I'd lie there softly crying for as much as an hour and a half.

My days, once a multi-tasker's mishmash (blogging, social networking, writing on my own book-length projects, editing for others, booking future speaking gigs) were now simply mash: clomping to the bathroom, sponge bathing, getting to the couch, eating, resting, and trying to find new ways to get up from the couch. Every single thing required creative problem solving that sleep deprivation left me poorly equipped to tackle, from washing my face (I put a stool beside the sink to kneel on, effectively creating for myself another leg) to tentative forays into food prep (I could chop veggies if someone washed and dried them, brought me a knife and a cutting board, then came to retrieve them).

It was clear I couldn't provide the type of bed and breakfast retreat experience my ladies signed on for. So I could contact them Dave rigged up this system so I could sit at my computer: a bench-like coffee table shoved beneath my desktop table, with a pillow on it that I could slide my foot along as he pushed in my chair. I went online to negotiate with my retreaters. I'd go ahead with the retreat and return some of their money, I said, if they'd agree to an alternative, commune-like experience where all pitched in.

Turning on the computer meant hitting the wall of hundreds of e-mails missed during the three days I was in the hospital. I opened a few, wondered how the hell I'd ever handled dealing with so much mail, then shut it off. Ten minutes sitting up had my ankle throbbing; I needed to lie down and elevate it. Above my heart; above my passions.

My awesome retreaters quickly agreed to the new terms. But as the days wore on, I was still only capable of staying up until 8 pm, the time when our evening readings would usually begin. My sleep was so fractured I couldn't make it through the day without a nap, either. I felt incapable of leading anything. And for the first time in many years, I needed rest more than I needed to write.

Uncle. I had let go in stages, but I finally faced my limitations: this retreat would not be anything like the experience I wanted for my guests, and further, it would fail to feed my own writing soul, now held captive and inaccessible in some parallel universe. I canceled the retreat, and while I was at it, all but one of my fall speaking engagements.

I had to face my new reality: not only was I no longer the multi-tasking modern writer, I couldn't figure out how I'd ever even lived that life.

For now, I was a simply a woman trying to figure out how to survive, and how to ask for help doing so.

I love that saying, "Life is what happens while we're busy making plans." Have you ever tried to hold onto a plan despite an extreme change in circumstance? I'd love to hear your story.