Broken

So many things seem broken.

So many things are broken.

I feel broken. My commitment to Wayne as a friend feels broken. My perseverance and steadfast dedication to facilitating, fostering, and feeding a relationship between Morgan and Wayne has been broken.  My willingness to include Wayne in future family activities, even if or when I have a new partner, has a fracture in it now that may never heal.

Seven days ago, none of this was true.

Six days ago, Wayne fell and hurt his right ankle, and it was not realized by me until I was dropping Morgan off at her dad's apartment on Friday afternoon for their weekly sleepover.
After Wayne didn't answer Morgan's repeated (and annoying) doorbell "alerts" and I finished sending the text message that I was typing, I used my key to open his apartment door only to see him struggling to stay upright, in severe pain, using a cane with his one working arm as a second point of contact with the floor as he wasn't able to put weight on his right foot. My high-functioning, wanna-be-ER-doc, skills kicked in. I rush to help him, and with his arm over my shoulder, we attempt to get him back to his bedroom, but he can't keep his right foot from hitting the floor, so I quickly squat down, wrap my arms around his waist, and lift him while walking him back into his bedroom.
I started having an anxiety attack and felt myself starting to dissociate. He was adamant that I should take him to the doctor, but I seriously could not take-in the millions of feelings, thoughts, reactions, concerns, flashbacks... the lower right quadrant of my lip and chin started to go numb, which is my body's (unfortunate) white flag. And then I notice Morgan quietly standing in the corner of his bedroom, tears in her eyes, lips quivering, but so desperately trying to not cry, show concern, or distract my attention from caring for Wayne which has been (unfortunately) the most emergent task over the past five years when he is in need of something. Both Morgan and I have been on the back burners for five-and-one-half years! Ugh! And not okay!
I pull Morgan towards me, calm her, get her settled-down as much as I can in a very short amount of time, because I now know that my body had already surrendered and I needed to get me out of there too. I set Morgan in front of the TV: our most frequent, reliable, and not-as-damaging-as-what's-happening-in-the-next-room babysitter over the past 5.5 years.
I close the bedroom door, and say, "If you can get yourself to the pub to land yourself in this condition, you can get yourself to the doctor.  I can't do this," as I begin to have another panic attack and can't catch my breath which scares me which makes it even worse... again: ugh.

I take Morgan home, talk over my thoughts and options with a kind friend, and decide to beat the stress out of my body by working out and running on my treadmill rather than what has become my "norm" when my body throws-up-its-hands (the norm: taking an excessively long, steaming hot shower while I lean against one of the walls, while the water pours over my back and neck, snuggling my arms in between me and the now warm shower wall, hugging myself, and just crying. Crying hard. Not always making sound, sometimes not able to take-in a breath because it seems that there is so much that needs to come out, but rather frequent drops of silent tears from a heart that aches).

I feel broken. I've started living, loving, and laughing again in a way that feels so normal and Julie-esque (sp?)... but there's an overwhelming pain that still exists in me, a trauma experienced which can never be forgotten, and triggers that cannot be prevented or predicted. And it all appears to be just below the surface. Tucked away just enough to fool you into thinking that you have moved beyond that pain, that you are "really doing well", that you can tackle a new "stressor" (be it a good or bad stressor, like Halloween & Trick-or-Treating, or Morgan's first Picture Day at School, the loss of a tooth & therefore coordinating with the Tooth Fairy), ...
I've dealt with all of this, while raising a fairly well-adjusted, bright, caring daughter, without a partner. My partner was the "affected" one. I haven't had anyone to come home to, to get a hug from, to talk through and process the day with, to laugh with and tease each other, to make small & seemingly meaningless decisions with, or huge, instrumental, high-impact decisions with. There's a loneliness that I'm unsure of how to "handle"...

I cleared my head on Friday by pounding out the stress, frustration, and angst in me on the treadmill and expelled the anxiety, stress, and fear from my body, like the toxins they are, through sweat!

So, I cared for him over the weekend: iced his ankle, tended to the multiple wounds on his right limbs, ACE bandaged his ankle... on Monday, it was much worse. My body went into full-on denial mode and was waving all of the white cloth items it could find. I pushed through and took him to an urgent care and they X-Rayed his leg and it turned out to be broken. I couldn't catch my breath the entire time he was in the clinic, so the doctor called me and told me that it was fractured, not just sprained like we thought, and she will send him via ambulance to a hospital. I, of course, chose Harborview, and he was prepped for surgery upon arrival.

The idea of what our life could look like continues to shift, shatter, morph, melt, settle, but right now it feels broken.