Five Years Ago Today....

Five years ago today was a beautiful, and strangely warm February day in PA, which gave me a strange desire to go jogging. 

I don't really jog, but that's how enticing the weather was.

Dancing is more my thing, and as was typical of me while I lived in the dorms, I danced in the bathroom as I got ready, and down the hall (because no one was looking). But somehow I did an axle and never landed it...and broke my ankle in three places. 

I certainly knew I had broken it, by the undeniable sound, and the feeling of course, but strangely enough my first reaction was not "How could I have done that?" or "Why is this happening, God?" but, a strange "Well this is interesting, I wonder how this will turn out."

   Well, first was the emergency room, of course. The doctor from there called my parents, and when they answered the phone apparently said in a telemarketing voice,"What would you do if your daughter broke her ankle?" Upon which they promptly hung up on him.

Luckily he called back saying, "Don't hang up! Don't hang up!" And told them what was going on, and that I would have surgery in a couple of days. That evening I told my Mom not to bother with the 10 hour drive, because I was fine and my amazingly organized roommate had all of my rides to the doctor's lined up with friends. I spent that night attended by three of my dear friends, as a single song replayed on my itunes all night, and I whimpered continually about how I could think of nothing but Calculus, and that my toes were going to pop (I'm really not sure how they did it, but they are truly wonderful ladies).

My Mom arrived two days later...and due to crazy amounts of swelling, fracture blisters, and hospital wait time, she left more than three weeks later when I finally got the surgery on the last day of spring break.

Since I hadn't been able to use Spring Break as recovery time from the surgery, I had used it studying very intensely for the second semester Organic Chemistry, Calculus II and a bit for Microbiology and Environmental Ethics. I was sure the chemistry was firmly in my brain.
So, two days after my surgery (because the professor insisted I couldn't put it off any longer), I took the organic chemistry mid-term, and was completely convinced that I and my Vicodin laden brain had performed magnificently. The day after that I took the Calculus II midterm and was not quite as confident.


I ended up with a 49 in Chemistry and a 67 in Calculus.
Don't trust yourself when you are on drugs.

 After the rough start to the semester, however, those next few months were some of the most exciting and jam packed months ever. Looking back at pictures I'm not sure how I had time for all I ended up doing.

 

We had lots of fun in Organic Chemistry lab of course, with hours and hours of me on a stool (or occasionally hopping around on one leg while the professor was turning a blind eye) and recording everything my more able lab partner had carried over for us (occasionally falling asleep because of the medications).

 

We also had sing alongs and naming contests for the colors as we recorded them in our lab notebooks.

 

We got so into chemistry that semester we even had a rousing game of ElementO on a Friday night.

Not only did I bond with my biology classmates as we endured Organic Chemsitry, but my time with my friends increased an enormous amount...mainly because I could no longer carry my own tray in the dining hall. So, since I had to eat with my friends, I also ended up joining most of their activities and study sessions. I got to know all of them so much better, and can you guess who my most frequent tray carrier was? Hmm?

My friends enjoyed calling me crutchey, and borrowing my crutches to take pictures like this which appears to be a memorial photograph for a deceased tiny tim.

 And since we all love dancing, I joined the group to some of the swing dancing and salsa dancing, which means those events were photo documented very well from the side lines. And because our group got so close during that semester we even started going star watching together, and discussing life's grand questions. They would carry me out to the field when the ground was damp so my crutches wouldn't slip.

 The dorm room was too small for crutches to be very useful, so my opposite leg got very strong from hopping around the room...and occasionally down the hall...or further.

The summer after that semester we created a big reading list, and wrote to each other (real letters) occasionally about life and the books...but my one tray carrying friend wrote to me six times that summer....kind of a lot...but I wasn't going to jump to any conclusions. Not even when fall semester arrived.

That is until he called my Dad....

Three years of dating (two by correspondence), and a year and a half of marriage later, that ankle breaking business didn't turn out so bad.

(Somewhere in the midst of all of that correspondence, I got all of this titanium removed).