Pink Shoelaces

Leaves plastered to the pavement. Rainbow rings of oil in the gutter. Pigeons perched atop a billboard.

 All day I’ve been trying not to get frustrated with people, but when I get on the bus, the front seats are dominated by a healthy-looking couple who refuse to make room for me, or the ancient woman with the groceries, or the woman with the walker, or the man with the white cane. Every time one of these people get on, the couple glances up from their phones, then looks right back down. 

When I reach my stop, the woman with the groceries apologizes and tries to move her stuff out of my way, in the process whacking me in the head with her cane. She apologizes profusely but I just laugh. My frustration is just covering how anxious I feel about what kind of shape my heel will be in when they unwrap it. I feel a pinching panic when I think about it.

Upstairs, Jenny opens the door and very quietly says “Hello.” I ask if everything’s okay, and she says yes, again very softly, that she’s just tired. “Room two,” she murmurs. 

“Good. I’m tired of slumming it,” I whisper.

Bridget is at the computer, and before Jenny can get the saw fired up she asks, “You know how I told you how important St. Patrick’s Day is to me?”

“Um, yeah,” I say, vaguely remembering her saying something last week.

“I mean, for me and my boyfriend, it’s bigger than Christmas. Well my mother calls me the other day and says she’s getting a six hour surgery done and wants me to take her and stay with her the whole time. And guess what day it’s happening on?”

“Big deal you bring a four pack of Guinness and a bottle of Jameson to the hospital, no one will care,” I say. “I mean, is  it a catholic hospital?”

“I told her I couldn’t do it so she’s getting her friend to take her,” she says. 

I laugh. “Your own mother!”

“It’s Sr. Patrick’s Day,” she says.

Jenny fires up the saw. It takes a couple of passes to cut through the extra thick heel. I brace myself, assuming the blister has broken and that I’ll be exposed to a mess of blood and pus. But nothing has seeped into the cast, nor the batting. She finally pulls off the foam pad and shows it to me. It’s completely dry. 

“Holy shit,” I say. 

“It’s still intact. Looks like it got reabsorbed,” she says. She pulls off the foam pad on the wound. I can see that there is a tan spot of drainage on the pad.

“Scant tan,” she says. “But the wound looks all healed up.”

“It sure does,” says Bridget. 

“Let me see,” I say. There is a smooth, pink indentation where there was once a ragged, gaping wound. With some difficulty, I twist my ankle to inspect the heel. There is a red splotch where the blister was.

“I’m so happy!” says Jenny. “We’ve been waiting so long for this!” 

I run my hand over my smooth heel, and Jenny does something she’s never done before; she plucks a tiny piece of skin from the edge of the former wound.

“Now it looks even better.”

“Let me see,” says Doctor Thompson, coming in before Jenny can apply the Lidocaine. “Yep, this is healed.”

“The blister got reabsorbed,” says Jenny.

“I thought it would. It was pretty tight.”

“I was expecting the worst,” I say.

“How does that song go? Hope for the best and expect the worst?” the doctor says. 

Shelley pokes her head in, then slides in to take Bridget’s place at the computer. 

“Did you do something to your hair?” I ask. She points to her new bangs. “They look good,” I say, though to be honest I’m not sure I feel about them.

“Thanks. They itch,” she says. 

“Did your girls ever cut their own hair?” asks Jenny. 

“The younger one did. She had this huge bald patch. I had to try hard not to laugh.”

“My daughter only did once. She was so proud of herself. She was usually so good but she could be sneaky. She never scribbled on the walls like some kids do, but when we moved, in the back of her closet we found a whole mural of crayon drawings. I have to admit it looked pretty cool. ”

 She washes and wraps my foot and says, “I’m giving you extra padding on the heel again, just to be safe. After this you get two more weeks of casts, and then you should make an appointment to get fitted for shoes.” I tell her I ordered shes already and that they’ve been ready for months. “Well go pick them up and bring them here. We’ll fit them here when the last cast comes off.”

“They won’t just bring them here? They came during my appointment to take my measurements,” I grumble. The shoe place doesn’t have weekend hours so I’ll have to take yet another afternoon off of work, and take the light rail clear across town.  

While she works we complain about the new war with Iran. I think of all the hospitals that have been bombed anin the past few days. And here I’ve been anxious all day worrying about a blister on my heel.

She prepares the bucket of water and the stool and lays down the blue gauze, but she does it all in front of the chair instead of to the side. I almost say something but I don’t want to tell her how to do her job. The moment Thompson comes in she asks, “What is this? You know I like to work from the side.”

 “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I guess I was thinking of Taggert,” says Jenny. 

Once Janet has scrambled to put everything in its proper place, the doctor fusses for a long time with the height of my chair, then squats on the stool. She lays an extra sheet of gauze over her sneakers and says, “Need to protect my new pink shoelaces. I don’t usually care about such things but for some reason this time I do.” Are shoelaces particularly sensitive to moisture?

She finishes my penultimate cast, then tears off her paper gown. “Wait, what am I doing, I have one more cast to do,” she says. 

“Hey, doctor?” I say. She stops and turns. “Thank you.” 

“You’re welcome,” she says, then pushes out through the curtain. 

“Code gray in the lobby of the cancer center,” says the intercom.

I miss the bus by about a minute, and sit in the lobby to wait. I feel even more anxious than I did before. I’m so afraid the shoes won’t help, that I’ll end up right back here within a few weeks of having the cast off. The cast is a nuisance but I feel safer with it on, protected by its rigid shell. I know that once it’s off I’ll need to keep using the scooter for weeks, maybe months, not really allow myself to walk around, even though everything looks and feels fine. I need to keep playing the cripple for a while longer. Maybe by summer I can start taking more chances, but until then I need to be very, very cautious. 

I am so fucking tired of being cautious. 

When I get off the bus, the billboard is clear of pigeons and the rainbows in the gutters have dissipated. But the leaves are still glued to the wet sidewalks, and through the chain link fence beside my building, constellations of daffodils bend in the breeze.