Cornbread

I got a letter a few days ago with a date for my next piece of reconstructive surgery. After the success of rebuilding my left foot, my surgeon is enthused by the idea of repeating the exercise on my right. Surgery is a bit like giving birth - absolutely bloody awful at the time, with weeks and weeks of awful after that (particularly if you gave birth by c-section - any of those Too Posh To Push critics need to think seriously about what life is like for an average woman with daily chores, heaving herself around with a new baby and 15 stitches across her abdomen. You have no idea what it is like to cough while that massive great big slit is healing, nor how impossible lifting up even a paper bag can be, let alone a new baby).  Anyway. As with newborns as time goes by the memories of what was frankly tortuous about the initial experience recedes as the benefits multiply. In the case of foot injuries and major reconstructive surgery, it is frankly incredible how I have managed to obliterate from memory the months and months of painful physiotherapy. I can barely even remember the first weeks when I could not even raise my foot from the knee. Since that time I have done two charity runs, I walk an average of 10 miles a day, I run around like any chore-laden woman, I run for trains and buses, I run for meetings I am late to; I scamper up and down stairs, I shoot off on my bike, and barely 2 and a half years ago I could do almost none of these things. The impact on my life has been so huge, that it is perhaps unsurprising I should have minimised the experience of pain, the immobilising effect of a foot in plaster up to my knee. But my letter has come through, and I sit and look at it while sipping tea, and decide that perhaps it isn't buried so deeply after all. In short, I can't face it. I am not quite ready to go back there. I don't yet have sufficient emotional energy to get back into the zone of bum shuffling down the stairs, fluff gathering on a pair of outsized black sweatpants, the only things I can get on over my plaster; of carrying my essentials (mobile phone, tissues, lip salve) in a bum bag so that I don't have to drag myself everywhere to find them when I need them. Of only going to my bedroom at night, and only leaving it in the morning, because otherwise moving between them is 20 stairs too far for me. Of staggering on my crutches and barely making it two houses beyond my own. I am not ready for it. I am still celebrating what I can do. I can't quite give it back up yet, even for what will only be 4 or 5 months. Anyone who has ever had a limb in plaster will tell you that 4 months off the road is a lifetime to your injured body and stressed out soul. On top of which, the surgery is scheduled around the 2nd anniversary of the death of my sister. I have already written much about this, but one thing I have not mentioned, is the horror of hospitals that that whole gut wrenching tragedy left me with. I can barely walk into one without shuddering. Spend a week in one, during the same period in which I sat next to my sister and watched her slip away from me, finally, irrevocably? And replay helplessly in my head the numb appallingness of my visit to the bereavement office; the running around from floor to floor to secure a confirmation of death; a check to find out the opening time of the hospital mortuary; the horrible visit to the registry office with the paperwork and my parents, bowed over with shock, to have a death certificate issued; and then back to the hospital to hand in the certificate to secure the release of my sister's body? No. I can't go back in there yet. The NHS being what it is, none of this is a factor. All they record is, that I have refused surgery when offered, and if I do it again, I'll lose my referral and slide right back down to the bottom of the Snakes and Ladders board. Well that's my bad. I'll have the surgery in December and use the Christmas break to recover. In the meantime, I've whipped up cinnamon sugar cornbread. I make cornbread with vegetable stews usually, and it disappears in seconds, used to mop up the leftover juices. This one, with a thick topping of cinnamon sugar, should in theory be sliced up with butter slathered on it warm, and possibly jam. But it smells so fantastic and what better household smell is there in the world than warm cinnamon (as well the huge supermarkets know, which is why it smacks your face when you walk into one, right by the bread section), that it is snarfed down seconds after coming out of the oven.  It's comforting stuff. I must remember to bake it again, when I am back from hospital, my right leg incarcerated this time, going back to the starting point of this blog: kneeling on a chair, crutches perched by the stove, mixing flour, butter and sugar, healing my soul, while my foot heals itself.