Left the house all alone today for the first time in, gosh, over a month, maybe longer. Usually I've been needing my true love to go with me either because I'm just too tired to drive or because I can't lift all the stuff I need to buy anymore -- sacks of bird seed, boxes of cat litter. It's very strange for me on a lot of levels to be this dependent on anyone. The one thing that keeps coming to mind is how when I worked at Whole Foods, one of the baseline requirements for employment was the ability to lift fifty pounds. I only quit that job a little over two years ago.
I tried to take pictures of where I went for you, but my camera had a little panic attack, couldn't decide whether it was on or off, and in the end only recorded this one very blurry image that only approaches visual intelligibility when cropped this small. Meanwhile, I was lurching about in a leg socket that's gotten so big I think I could fit a puppy in there next to my stump. (Don't worry; I won't try.) So it all took a very great deal of energy with little to show for the expenditure, at least online, at least today.
I once read that walking around on the average, correctly fitting, transfemoral prosthetic leg burns three times more calories than walking around on equivalently average, all original, organic body parts. I think the version of walking I do when my socket is this loose uses about six times as many calories, and I've only been eating between a half-cup and two cups of food per day since sometime in August, certainly far less than that last week. So it felt great to go out, to drive myself around, to breathe the frigid air and meander clumsily to please only my own internal timekeeper without worrying about wearing out or boring or imposing upon anyone else, but when I got home, I was completely done in and slept for hours.
And now I'm headed back to the couch for more of the same. Hope you had a lovely day, even if it was a Monday.
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