After breaking my leg two years ago, I wrote a blog post chronicling the lessons I learned from hobbling around on crutches.  (Read the full post here.) They can be summarized as:

• Slow down.
• Be patient.
• Prioritize.
• Ask for help.
• Economy of motion.
• Be creative.

On crutches again after foot surgery, I have a couple more to add!

• Don’t worry, be happy! The pain meds don’t make me completely loopy, but they do seem to have turned off the anxious hamster that spins its wheel in my brain 24/7.  I am feeling mellow and not stressing about the myriad of tiny things that never seem to get done. I hope that I can hold onto this feeling once I’m off the meds!
• “Normal” is a moving target. I’ve put my boot camp membership on hold and am doing a modified exercise routine on the living room floor. I keep catching myself thinking about what I will do when I’m “back to normal.” It occurs to me that there is no magical fitness steady-state known as “normal.” Just as I will never be 17 or 39 or any other previous age again, I will never be the same as I was a week ago before the surgery. That isn’t to say I might not become as strong (or stronger) or run as fast (or faster), just that there is no perfect state to which I will return. My life, my body, indeed the entire world is in a state of constant flux and change in multiple dimensions. How can we pick out one moment and define it as “normal”? Whenver I catch myself, alone or with friends, pining for the way something used to be, I need to remember that while the wonderful aspects of that particular moment are gone, so are the downsides…which we tend to forget about when we are romanticizing the past.