Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Putting my Foot Down

I’m no stranger to disability. I’ve been Bink’s mom for 25 years. I know lots of individuals with varied special needs, some of them my Yogabilities™ students. I count a few of these folks and their families among my dearest friends. That said, I’ve been experiencing a temporary kind of disability as I continue to heal from foot surgery, and it has been so eye opening.

Forty nine days an invalid, and not before this post-surgical stretch of days and nights, chunks of hours so similar their names became blurred, Janu-monday and Satuesday, not once before this did I ever take notice of the way the word invalid is a devious thing, a means to invalidate, as if the millions of couch sitters and chair wheelers and bed warmers and leg elevating folks everywhere are less than whole. As if those whose full status as owners of walking, driving, autonomous bodies that move well through the world makes them more valuable or relevant.

Mine has not been a long sentence by most means. Having just recently received the invitation to commence a slow reunion of foot and floor, with crutches sprouting from my tender armpits, my limbs are stiff and recalcitrant, and yet they still remember full mobility.

There is the variant pain in my titanium-enforced right foot, the weakness in the calf, the instability of a body not used to normal biped motion. There is knee pain in the left leg that faithfully supported me throughout and in the right leg that was forced to rest. There is general hip malaise, and my neck constricts despite the Yogic stretches and rolls. Hands ache for mysterious reasons. Still, driving, or even emerging from my home on two sturdy, unaided legs, is surely on the horizon. Not close, but I can see it out there.

My first tentative pushes of sole against solid ground have been uncomfortable, to say the least. I’ll take the pain, though, and thank it as a bridge to full recovery. My calendar has been oddly blank these past few months, but February feels like hope. I know in a few years time these homebound winter months will be my mere memory. What will remain: an aversion to that word — invalid— and a far larger room in my consciousness for those that stay in for reasons not of their choosing. There are those that are recovering and those that never will, those for whom in is all there is.

Thank you, God/Goddess/Source of all, for continually offering me ways to expand my awareness. May I use the lessons to make differences, however small, in a few lives along the way.

–Melinda Coppola

 

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