Still Laughing

I was in tears from the pain by the time I got done with therapy, used the commode, and got myself back into bed yesterday.  I cried again when my husband massaged my tightening ankles and the backs of my lower calves trying to help save me from losing flexibility and sensation in my ankle joints, because the skin nerves are so hyper-sensitive that while the muscles and tendons desperately need to be worked over, the skin above them feels like it's being split open and peeled off with every massaging stroke.  After I had calmed down and recovered from the massage a little bit, I cried one more time, sitting in my bed watching my ankles flex and draw out some shapely muscles in my calves and thighs, because I can still remember sitting in a hospital bed six months ago when my legs couldn't do that, when I strained and strained to pull my toes back and got nothing more than a spastic wiggle from a single toe.  I remembered how flaccid and repulsive my unresponsive legs appeared to me back then, and wept over how muscular and toned they are by comparison now.  Still plenty more muscle building to do, they don't exactly look normal yet, but so much better than they were, and for that improvement, that seemed almost unreachable back then, I cried for joy.

I still find things to laugh at, though.  There's always humor lurking if you're looking for it.  Yesterday's levity came from a bottle of hand sanitizer.  At home our bottle likes to enthusiastically splat several inches further out than the expectant hand is prepared for, and the bottle my therapist grabbed for me at the end of our session yesterday is apparently no different.  While I held one palm out to her and grasped my cup of half-full water (not half-empty) in my other hand, she went to squirt me with some gel and it came flying out of the bottle, dropping several blobs on my clothes, and a nice big plopping splash of it in my water.  We both had a good laugh, and she judiciously offered to get me a new cup of water.  So there I was in a blue dress, frantically trying to wipe up slimy wet messy splats off the front of it, and I couldn't help thinking, just like poor Ms. Lewinsky!  But with much less disgust, and a lot more laughing.