How To Recover From a Sprained Ankle and a Broken Heart In The Middle of a Pandemic
Self Portrait. Taken three weeks after my fall, the first time I was able to take a proper shower.
When I twisted my ankle back in May, I thought the actual twisting of the ankle would be the worst part of it all. Little did I know it would be what would happen after that would really screw me up. This also works when it comes to dealing with a broken heart.
Sure, the initial sprain/heart break occurs, you feel completely incapacitated. There is this shooting pain that courses through your body. Is it broken? Do I need to go to the hospital? Will a drug filled weekend fix the ailment? Or at the very least briefly make me forget I have an ailment? Am I going to feel this in the morning?
Yes, you will definitely feel it in the morning. And you’ll feel it the next morning. And the morning after that. And the morning after that. And yes, the morning after that. Yeah, the morning after that one, too. You’re going to feel it ALL.
There is a moment where you have to recalibrate your entire routine. Walking? Yeah, that’s nice. Not going to happen. A hospital visit during a pandemic? Ha, sure, okay. Also not going to happen so a make-shift wheelchair from your home office will have to do to maneuver through that cracker box of a studio you live in until you can put weight on that fucker.
The guy who broke your heart who just absolutely has to openly flirt with a grossest person online where you can constantly see their dumb fucking responses in your feed? Yeah, good luck dealing with that online and remaining sane, especially in the middle of a pandemic with nowhere to go write and drink to the point of getting sick. Deleting your social media to purge yourself from the misery of having to bear witness to that shit as to prevent yourself from going further into a downward spiral is your best bet, along with keeping him as far away from you as possible because the last thing you want is for him to know anything about your life.
Once the recalibration is complete, it’s a waiting game. You prop your ankle up, ice it, compress it, and use the $20 Target office chair to stay off it so at the very least you can make dinner and go to the bathroom without killing yourself. The chair becomes a life line but you’re still confined to a laying position so the ligaments can heal and the swelling and bruising can go down. And like a broken heart, ligaments heal very slowly.
When your heart is broken, you may find yourself in a laying position as you cry yourself to sleep and listen to PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me for the 50th time in a row. It’s also a lot of streaming trash television, bad rom-coms and shitty junk food to keep you from going off the deep end. How long this process lasts depends on how deep the love goes—this could span a week or you could be in this cycle for a few months. It’s terrible and believe me you’re going to look like garbage throughout this phase, and smell like shit.
Once the swelling goes down, it’s now time to test out the ankle to see what it feels like. More than likely, it’s still going to be tender to the touch, so be delicate. You might be able to put some weight on it or you may still be stuck hobbling around on one leg, but you need to start doing exercises to work out the ligaments so the healing process can begin. With a broken heart, you slowly start venturing back into the real world, interacting with people (as much as you can during a pandemic), and get back to a normal routine. Maybe you reactivate your social media if you feel strong enough, or you stay dark if you’re still frightened about what’s on the other side but you can’t be a hermit forever, even if there is a pandemic happening.
As the exercises progress, it’s now time to start making an attempt to walk. You use a walker at first to get yourself into position. As you start putting your ankle into different walking positions, you realize this is the shit that REALLY hurts. You have to relearn how to do the thing that you have been doing without thinking your entire life and hoo boy, does that suck ass! There’s a lot of shooting pain, sharp pain. fear you have torn something and will have to go back to square one. Did I mention this part really fucking sucks? Oh, it sucks so much. But there is no other way and you really need to ditch that cheap ass office chair if you’re ever going to take a hot selfie again.
For the broken heart, it’s time to unpack those feelings, and yeah, that’s painful. More painful than relearning how to walk. A thousand times more painful. You’ll want to re-sprain your ankle again to avoid feeling any sort of emotional pain. At least with a physical ailment, there is a rough timeline of when you’ll revert back to normal. There is no timeline for a broken heart.
Eventually the exercises work because before you know it, you’re walking with a cane. For the first time in weeks, you feel normal or as normal as you can feel in this stage of recovery. The weeks before where you found yourself crying because there was a fear you’d never be able to walk again feel like a lifetime ago. You see the progress that has been made and you wonder how you got through the pain and uncertainty of what was happening with your own body. You realize you were strong enough to get through that rough bit where you had to wait for your ankle to heal and rely on yourself to get to this point where you’re standing on both your feet, feeling the ground beneath you and a renowned independence you had missed so much before the accident.
Same with a broken heart. Eventually you feel okay to wander the world without having that special person inhabit your heart. There’s a feeling of independence, the feeling of not being weighed down by something that could never happen.
Before you know it, you’re walking normally again. The pain has ceased, but the memory of what has happened remains. Your ankle is weaker due to the fall so you vow to be careful the next time around and watch where you’re going to prevent another sprain. You’ll be extremely cautious, paying special attention to every crack in the sidewalk, any incline in the road, all curbs you encounter till eventually you get too comfortable and miss that piece of trash in the middle of the road.
The same applies to a broken heart.