Joey and I were heading out this afternoon, it’s brisk and cool and a bit icy in spots down here in Texas right now (WEIRD!), and as I shoved my hands deeper in to the pockets of my down vest that I usually never wear, I said, “It feels like…it’s like a compound fracture. You know, the kind where you have, like, bone sticking out of your leg.”

He just raised his eyebrows at me like, OK…I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about but sure…compound fracture.

“No, I mean how I’m feeling right now.”  Obviously, right?

I’m trying to put words on it.  I’ve been unnaturally quiet for about the last four or five days; I just don’t want to talk about It.  I don’t want to talk about any of it.  I just want to push through the holidays, survive our baby’s due date, and get January over with.  So I turn my cell phone off and don’t reply to emails and keep to myself.

It’s working OK.

We made it through Christmas and we managed to have a mostly enjoyable day.

My former due date is looming, though.  And I feel like I could shatter at any minute, and I just have to keep it together.  I’ve cried enough over the last six months, haven’t I?  I’m so over it.

But back to the compound fracture business.  (Yes, yes, I’m circling this plane so I can land it, y’all.)

I feel sequentially broken right now; it’s gross and disgusting and deep, sticking out of my skin and disfiguring.  And the only way to get my nasty compound fracture to heal is to go through more pain to get it set.  Maybe even more intense pain, but I SURE HOPE NOT, INTERNET.  Once it’s set, eventually I’ll have to do physical therapy and whatever.  That will hurt and stretch, but it will be healing, even though it sounds awful.  And eventually, it’ll be whole again.  But never the way it was, and never without a dull ache when the barometric pressure changes, to remind me of what once was.

I’m in the morphine for pain stage right now.  Maybe in a few weeks I’ll be ready to try walking on it.  But oh….not yet.  It still hurts too much.