Legs are legs. By the end of the summer hiking season they're wiry and strong. On curvier sorts, they're lythe and beautiful. And they are conveyance up mountains, across countries, through cities, to meetings, from chance encounters, through throngs and markets and fields, they are the contact point with the earth enroute to life. Maybe they attract attention with cool scabs, but otherwise my legs are as intrusive as breathing: present, powerful for their size, and generally an unconscious tool of life.
Or they were.
On September 19th, I walked up a four story building in the morning and then again in the afternoon. Between, I walked up and down the stairs outside the library--the stairs where I tried to fly--three or four times.
What I wonder is whether I was more impressed by walking that far and climbing that much or by the absurdity of such pissant efforts being significant.
But it's the first time I'd been able to do that in a very long time.
Backtrack.
It starts around the ankles because the feet never drain; each has a swollen sack of fluid like a gel insert, but floating on the top, distending the tan lines from my sandals, giggling and disorienting every step--ever try to walk with waterballoons in your shoes? At night, I wrap them as tight as I can with ace bandages, but the bandages mainly make my toes swell and worsen the sores burned in by the camphor and peppermint in medical grade Tiger Balm.
But the ankles, they get insidious. Sometimes, in the morning, after sleeping with my legs on a stack of pillows on top of a duffel bag, my ankles would drain to almost normal size. Even so, the ankles filled up first.
You don't feel it, any more than you feel blood circulating, but suddenly your ankles are stiff and thick as though they had just been worked extraordinarily hard except that you've done nothing beyond wake up and shower. And instead of being stiff from an abundance of lactic acid, they are flooded with lymph and swollen stuck in their own juices.
It slowly creeps up from the ankles. It's not painful, just a realization that my legs, too, have giggling waterballoon sleeves that will neither drain nor pop, that just swell and stiffen and stretch the skin taut and pink and make me wonder what it takes to get stretch marks--what do people do to themselves if the roadkill hog skin on my legs isn't rippling into scar tissue? And it bottlenecks at the ankles, stretching socks to bruising tightness, blowing the straps on my Chacos to the full extension (really), stretching the leather on my Danskos to gaping.
Stateside, I bought women's shoes whenever possible because my feet had so little volume. Whoda thunk I'd stretch a pair of Danskos until the leather uppers are stretched to ripping?
Nothing insidious or subtle about the knees as they swell stiff and puff into strangely bulging and dimpled things I remember from my grandmother's eighty-plus legs (although she had me beat in the varicose department). Doughy dimples on the back side are almost cute in a grotesque way--babies have such dimples. When I lay on my back and elevate my legs for an hour or so while some of the fluid drains, the infantilization is hard to ignore: it's my afternoon leg-up time, and all that's missing is someone to bring milk and cookies and the accompanying sense of wellbeing.
At work, I sit with my feet on a desk. In this culture, it's about the equivalent of sitting bare-assed on someone's Thanksgiving dinner place-setting, but I have only to point at the fleshy masses bulging out and around my shoes to explain why it's important for me to keep my feet up.
Tests and tests and tests pass: a doctor eventually recommends a university hospital in a town half a day's drive away. Meantime, I'm left with "protein losing enteropathy," and good luck with it.
I gave up on water. Juice. Soup. Salt. One soda. One coffee.
One day, I barked my shins--a common occurrence when your legs are as nimble and graceful as giant carnival prizes--hard enough to crack the skin open. No blood came out. Just a flow of clear fluid. Enough to run down my legs and soak my shoes. It was such a relief I kept the scabs open by scrubbing them with napkins a few times per day. And with such a volume of outflow--my shoes and socks would be soaked within an hour of standing upright--there wasn't much danger of infection.
At a pharmacist's recommendation, I started taking huge doses of protein: half a dozen eggs with whole milk in the morning and evening with supplemental protein shakes noon and night. I concentrated my diet on protein: easy to do for someone who's sick of rice when rice is as prevalent in Thai food as corn byproducts are in America.
My food pyramid inverted strangely. A colleague helped me calculate my nutritional requirements: someone my size and weight needs 1800 calories per day. To lose the amount of weight I had lost since arriving in country, I'd been operating on a daily debt of 1500 calories. My mega-protein diet consisted of approximately 2000 calories of protein, 1500 of fat, and under 1000 carbs, depending on the day's munchies. It was enough to stabilize. Barely. Provided "stable" also "level but teetering badly."
But the big thing is the legs.
Stable means the legs start to work again.
It was a shock to wake up with my legs back--real legs, like I used to have, without the waterballoon casing. It'd been a while since I'd looked at them--or myself--in the mirror. Actually looked.
Here were these stringy little twiggy things, the legs of which I was once so proud. Scarred, yes, but not the scrapes and scratches of summertime hiking. Scarred with the sores and pustules, with big angry lines from the drain slits I'd irritated open, and otherwise pale and pasty--but no stretch marks, somehow--I kept thinking about walking-corpse prisoners rescued from tropical incarcerations.
If I reached around the widest part of either ankle, the fingers on my right hand would almost touch. If I reached around the narrow part just up my shin, the shorter fingers on my left hand overlapped almost a full knuckle.
At any other time, it would've been embarrassing. I had to plot an extra three minutes into my commute from office to class because it involved 22 stairs, and descending a staircase involved clutching the rail with one hand while lowering the right foot, establishing contact, and then lowering the left. Call it meditative: there is no thinking or doing anything else. And when I tried, I went flying down the staircase.
Call that the end of things: the third accident, no more, I survived, now I can get back to trying to live. And it's easy with the newfound significance of focus: there is no walking and talking, walking and chewing gum, walking across town while reading (was that only a year ago?). Walking is the careful selection of a landing pad, placement of the shoe, a slow transfer of weight, and then a repetition.
I decided I would be better off in Reiki land than doing my morning walking meditation, given that I now MUST be fully conscious of each step. And with that consciousness comes the pleasure of stepping at all, of moving through the world, of being present in the world, here in Thailand.
Eggs have a funny role, something beyond the daily dozen. I will swear by the Korean Farms eggs that Tesco imports after a flat survived intact after skidding across the road in the front basket of my bike. I do not think about the chickens who might be laying the eggs—if humans receive treatment as bad as is reported, I just can't consider the poor chickens—but then I discovered a produce market where local eggs cost about half as much. And maybe the local conditions are no better than those in Korea, but at least the money's staying local, right?
Along with straw mushrooms, wood ear mushrooms, galangal, beautiful tomatoes and garlic chives, I bought a small bag of eggs: about a dozen brown eggs in a liter-sized bag with a rubberband sealing off a bubble of air.
And I am enjoying the sensation of having navigated the market and once again feeling somewhat competent, somewhat alive, taking pleasure at being the only farang in the place and not just buying apples and grapes, when I get T-boned.
A Yamaha Mio came screaming through traffic, weaving from the far side of the road, and nailed my right footpeg, which ripped off the crankcase before the impact diffused on my right calf. I felt the leg crush and resolved to be shipped home where physical therapy might get me walking again one day, but there was a religious moment and I hit the ground with the leg intact. And that's all I can really say.
I don't think I need to further elaborate in this venue: y'all's been through enough of my misery.
And then a vacation, which began with regular foot-up time, many hours a day, and ended with day-long explorations, stumping around with a half-assed shuffle that felt glorious. To be able to spend almost all of a day upright, walking, present in the world, engaged with life, in Thailand!
After months of supplementary protein and vitamins, living the most sedentary life I ever have, I am strong enough to teach seven back-to-back classes. My limbs are still covered with a web of protruding veins, but now there are stringy bits of muscle perceptible on the tendons. I no longer pound my daily dozen eggs, and I no longer have edemas. Many of the scars, what my boss called the Thailand Tattoos: a half-moon on my pelvis from sliding face-first across a road, the moons rubbed into my shoulder, skid marks on my elbows and legs, but there are still the divots where skin without functioning nerves outline the tread of a front tire, the cylinder head of a Honda motor, and those scars, left behind by the divine force that mended my leg, weep. I'll be sitting, standing, walking, any time, any temperature, and I feel a drip running down my leg. I'm getting used to it, but it's bizarre to stop and see clear fluid seeping out of a shiny, purple scar and condensing into a drip and sometimes a stream. Still, how glorious to feel
Rejoice! I'm back to square one in so many senses, but here I am. I am here, right back where I started. But I've already made the trip to hell and back, and I know I don't want to do it again. I might not be singlehandedly supporting a small-scale chicken farmer, but I know how to do it. I carry antibiotic ointment and rubbing alcohol in every bag I own. I know how and where to get a massage, and that I must warn the masseur in advance, which I know how to do in Thai: “big pain, right here. Motorcycle. Understand?” To universal laughs: farangs and motorcycles, ha!
The twiggy wonders themselves.
Believe it or not, the photo below is of me after rebounding almost ten kilos. Next trick will be putting on another 30.
