I lie down with ice packs on my back, my butt, my knee, my arm where I caught myself on the banister during the fall, and I take some Tylenol for the pain. I’m supposed to take the kids to their grandparents for the day, but my skin hurts when I walk, and my muscles cramp from the assault. I put on compression shorts under my summer dress, even though I know they will squeeze me, squeeze my dura and make my brain foggy with an upward push of fluid, but the compression helps contain the sensation of the growing bruises, so I make the trade-off. I sit on the train gently, balanced on my left leg and butt cheek, since the right one is so tender, and every jostle makes me wonder if this is it, if I’ve torn open the leak spot, if all my recovery has been for nothing.
The pain from the fall at first is almost welcome, because of how different it is from the kind of pain I’ve become so used to. It’s almost a relief to experience pain that’s not a headache, pain that has a different kind of immediacy and texture to it. And yet somehow, after a few hours, it starts to feel as though this pain from the fall has become the gateway pain to all the other pain in my body that has been holding itself at bay, waiting for the right time to manifest: I feel the ache of my arms, my ankles, my back, the nagging, worrying throb of a wisdom tooth beginning to emerge.
By the time we arrive at the grandparents’ house, when I check on my bruise I’m horrified to see it is already a massive red and purple welt covering my entire right butt cheek, and my jaw ache begins to morph from an annoying nagging sensation to an insistent stab. I lie down with ice packs on my butt and Orajel on my wisdom tooth, which has picked the absolute worst time to try to break free, and say to myself over and over, Please don’t let me be leaking again, please don’t let me be leaking again, a pathetic incantation that might as well be a leaker’s prayer.
I commiserate with the other leakers, posting about my fall, my hurting tooth, my worries that I might have undone my almost six months of progress. I tell Nina about my fall, about how my butt hurts, about how bad the bruise is, about how I can’t even tell if I have a leak headache because of how bad my tooth pain has suddenly become. As my bruises deepen and spread, it becomes impossible to lie on my back or my side, and I have to somehow sleep on my stomach while keeping both my butt and my head elevated, which seems as comical as it does impossible. The bruise darkens to a horrifying purple-black and I try to sleep with a heating pad on my butt as I lie in a constellation of pillows, googling things like ass bruise death and wisdom-tooth pain death and can falling down stairs give you a spinal CSF leak and can a person die from a really bad butt bruise.
A part of me keeps thinking Why, why did this have to happen, why did I have to ruin everything when I was so close to being out of the woods? Why am I back, stuck in bed again? Part of me keeps replaying the moment of the slip, the feeling of the wooden stair sliding from beneath the arch of my foot. Will this be the moment in time I will return to, hoping to undo by sheer repetition of thought, as the start of some new leak, or aggravation of the old one? But another part of me remembers what my piano teacher always said, about rest being an opportunity to prepare. You hurry, hurry, she’d told me. But there is time. Feel it. I have been hurrying, hurrying. This fall is forcing me to slow down, is giving me an opportunity to take the rest I need, to feel time instead of rushing past it.
If the defining feature of my nine months in bed with a spinal CSF leak was isolation and existential doubt, the focus of my nearly six months of recovery so far has been the strangeness of moving between the realms of the sick and the well. It’s not a linear progression, and even on the days when I have moments in which I can pass as being better, I’m not fully recovered, not yet. Every day I monitor my symptoms, scanning for clues that can tell me whether I’m healing or leaking again, whether I’m mending or tearing, whether I’ll have my life back or be back to being flat on my back in bed for life. What I’m learning as I recover is that recovering means forgetting, thinking I’m better than I really am, pushing myself to do more, tolerate more, force myself to forget I’m not healed so that I can force, in a sense, the inner work of healing. But falling down this flight of stairs reminds me I’m not ready to forget just yet. I should not be forgetting to acknowledge my need for carefulness, my need for rest. I should not be forgetting to honor the importance of small victories like sitting up all the way through a movie, or experiencing a few hours without a headache, or lasting an entire day without taking a nap. I still have more healing to do. I am
