Respect the Stairs, with time warps.

Stairs! That's it. RantWoman a few days ago had a text message exchange  about "Respect the stairs."

RantWoman has been cheerleading for a Friend who fractured her hip getting ONTO her bicycle.  Friend has been posting all over Facebook and is doing really well, but the stairs time warp is from before she went home after surgery. Friend and her husband live up about 20 stairs on a second floor. Friend needed to be able to get up the stairs in order to go home from the hospital. This took practice for an extra day with a physical therapist before Friend landed on her couch with attention from cats and devoted husband. Friend has now been down and back up her stairs several days in a row. It is only RantWoman still a little bit in a stairs time warp.

The stairs story is also of the "you think you have it bad, let me tell you about my...:" genre of social interaction. RantWoman has experienced an overabundance of such ministry from other people at moments of great personal pain. Just sayin', MAYBE forgiving but definitely not forgetting. OH WELL.

Frankly, this  communication zone can be either really annoying if one's own problems are distressing enough thank you very much or an opportunity for a less distressed perspective. RantWoman in any case is deeply grateful for Friend's grace in bearing with the story.

RantWoman remembers stairs being just agony right after she broke her leg in fifth grade. The fifth grade classroom was on the third floor. There was no elevator. Fifth grade on Darvon was not any less boring that fifth grade without Darvon. And fifth grade band with not one but TWO percussionists who had legs in casts for the winter concert also challenged RantWoman's general level of pluck.  In any case, when RantWoman's Friend was talking about going home from the hospital, RantWoman definitely recommended Respect the stairs.

The broken leg came from brand new Christmas ice skates. RantWoman skipped out to the rink after school. It was January, plenty cold so the ice mostly was in great condition. There was an ugly torn-up patch of ice in one corner of the rink. RantWoman did not see it in time to avoid it. RantWoman realized she was going to fall but did not want just to land hard on her behind. Instead she executed some kind of a maneuver that MAYBE highly trained skaters with very strong leg muscles pull off without incident.

Not RantWoman.

RantWoman has no idea what happened. RantWoman only remembers not being able to stand and half crawling, half dragging herself around the rink to the benches outside the ice house. RantWoman sat for a long time, tried to stand, finally asked someone to call RantDad. RantDad could sometimes freak out about the requirements of parenting, but he did really well that time: "If you can't put weight on it we are going to the hospital."

The Rant Family lived in CO, in a town where as some people put it college students tended to major in skiing winter quarter. Almost every year there was at least one kid in school with a broken leg. That night in the ER, there was already a kid with a broken leg ahead of RantWoman as x-rays came back and RantWoman had to wait for a cast. Kid ahead of RantWoman in line had a rough time of it. RantWoman remembers little good or bad about her own casting. After she got a cast that came all the way up past her knee, the cast got really warm, not a terrible thing on a cold winter night.

RantDad bundled RantWoman into the car and painkillers also entered the picture. At home it was determined that RantWoman could sleep on a rollaway bed in the dining room for a few weeks. This was fewer hops to the bathroom than RantWoman's upstairs bedroom. Plus, painkillers wear off overnight and after a few days of agony first thing in the morning, RantWoman and RantMom figured out that a glass of milk or OJ and the first painkiller of the day could happen before RantWoman tried to drag her leg out of bed without causing excruciating pain at the fracture site.

Again, RantWoman is very glad that friend with fractured hip is doing really, really well. RantWoman peculiarly is also having some symptoms in the zone of her old break and cast; RantWoman is trying to decide whether the symptoms might somehow have anything to do with the long ago break. RantWoman is trying to decide this but so far she has neither Googled obsessively about the question or consulted a human with an actual medical degree. Why would that be any fun?