There are Other Ways to Walk

— a 22-year-old’s notes on learning to walk again

I. Falling

December 2001

You dipped your left foot in a bowl of hot water.

Your mother said you were clinging to her while she made semo for dinner, and your foot got caught in the torrent of hot water on the floor as she tried to pick you up. You were a little over a year old and hadn’t yet felt the magnitude of pain, but your mother held you and took care of your burns. You held on to her because it was better to hold someone than not.

It’s no surprise that 20 years later when your right ankle fractured in four different ways, she would be the first person you called for.

November 2021

When your right foot hit the tree root, there was no pain, just the feel of your body hitting the ground and a sickening disconnection that you detected with the ever-slight movement of the foot. Your pain was still deciding whether it wanted to be a scream.

You didn't scream because you never really knew how to. Apart from the occasional expressions of shock and surprise, your body didn't know what it meant to scream with heart, lungs and stomach fighting to tear their way out of you, but you learnt. Not only when they lifted you off the ground but for infinite moments afterwards.

The bodies around you clamoured for ambulances, cannulas, and needles. As two clinic staff tried stabilising your ankle with a makeshift splint, you made a noise that sounded like laughter. It surprised you, and you wanted to snatch the laughter from the air and question how it came into being.

The hospital ride was long. You hallucinated, shivered, and cringed with shame.

II. Breaking

You only noticed the damage under the fluorescent lights of the hospital. Your right foot was a blood-bone mixture, and you shuddered when a doctor approached you with a suture kit — only if the broken bone split the skin would one require sutures.

In a sickening Nigerian way that somehow forgets how to communicate with the patient, they didn’t tell you what kind of fracture it was. You discovered it on your own after conducting a few Google searches and comparing your x-ray to similar images.

An Open Bimalleolar Fracture.

The words sounded strange. You thought back to when you fell, your ankle injury could’ve been your head, spine, or any other more important part of your body, and you may not have survived that fall. Regret settled over you like an old blanket. You’d almost forgotten its texture.

When they said you needed surgery to fix it, you were relieved — it was not irreparable.

In the hospital, they placed you in a ward with over thirty patients. On your left was a girl, barely 17, with an amputated left arm. It took her removing her hijab and speaking to you for you to notice this. When you found out she had bone cancer, you wondered where her bravery came from.

On your right was a Muslim woman who slipped in the bathroom. She’d just had a procedure the previous week, so metal rods stuck out of her left foot. The woman two beds from you was a diabetic whose left leg was missing. The lady opposite you, close to your age, suffered torn ligaments after falling down the stairs. She refused surgery.

Ten days after your accident, you were still waiting for your surgery. The doctors explained your wound wasn’t healing correctly because the surrounding skin was now macerated. Your bones were still broken, the stitches had come undone; the wound had gotten wider, and no one would prescribe you painkillers.

They wouldn't let you go home even though they wanted the wound to improve before the surgery. "It's preferable if you stay here in the event of an infection." All you wanted was to be free from the broken limbs and antiseptic air.

You missed the familiarity and comfort of home. How it confined you without making you feel like dying. How it held you but still allowed you to walk. Here, you were unravelling without a blanket to hide behind. You would draw attention to yourself if you cried. Your pain would be visible to everyone, and they would know that your insides were just as broken as your outsides. You were mad with sadness, but you couldn’t scream or cry as loudly as you wanted. You slept a lot — you always did after crying — and waking up always felt like being thrown back into fear, like your body couldn’t decide whether to feel better.

On day 30, they finally decided it was time for the surgery, not that the wound had healed. Not that it did for the next two months, but it was best to proceed before the bone started healing abnormally.

A day before your surgery, a woman took her last breath in your ward because the oxygen ran out. You thought tomorrow that could be you. A blood clot could decide to travel to your brain, heart, or lungs. In your case, it wasn't likely, but it could happen. Anything could happen. Your heart beat so loudly you thought everyone else could hear it.

When the woman’s daughter fled from the ward to scream at whatever doctor she could find, the panic in her voice found its way to your stomach. You clung to your broken leg like a heart because a stranger’s daughter was outside, sobbing at whoever would listen, ‘Please don’t let my mom die’. By the time they refilled the oxygen, death had already come for the woman’s soul. A shocking quiet descended over the ward.

Later that night, you thought about your father. Did he know he was going to die that day? Did he think about saying his goodbyes early? The delirious voice of the stranger’s daughter rang in your ears. It would kill you if your mother was in that situation. You thanked God for being on the hospital bed instead of her. You thanked God that your bones were broken instead of hers.

III. Drilling

Surgery was a visceral experience.

There was the tingling from the spinal anaesthesia, then the sensation of pressure, drills, screws—metal things making their metal sounds. The surgeons reminded you of carpenters at work. Now and then, you felt the squeeze of the blood pressure monitor, gentle enough to bring you to reality and remind you of your aliveness. Hammer. Screws. Drills. You’re still alive.

Then after, your pain metamorphosed. It made you want to reach within yourself and strangle your nerves or massage them, whichever would make the pain disappear. Its suffocation coaxed the scream out of you. Gently at first, but once it came, you wouldn't stop. Even after the injection to relieve you, you woke up into the night, writhing, and stuffed a sob down your throat so you wouldn’t wake the other patients.

Everything felt different after the surgery — calls you were too tired to pick up, a possible analgesic dependency and searing heat. You couldn’t pray, eat, or sleep. It was a type of dying.

You learned the difference between somatic and visceral pain. You once woke up with a rambling sensation under your skin. It wasn't bone or skin pain. It was a drilling – that’s the word you found for it. As if an invisible someone had crept into your room and inserted a drill into your flesh, or maybe it was your body’s way of recalling the surgery. Still, you felt lucky to find this word. Not many people had words to describe their pain.

You found it unholy to show your discomfort in a room of amputees, cancer patients, and diabetics. All you did was break a leg. Every time you wanted to burst out crying, you scolded yourself — it was just a broken leg. Your hospital room was an ocean, and everyone was drowning. For some, help was on the way, while others would die fighting to breathe.

On your birthday, you developed a fever because your body struggled to accommodate the blood transfusion you received the day before. You didn't feel the slightest excitement as you gazed at the birthday cake your friend delivered. You tasted the frosting, passed the cake to the other patients, forced dinner through your throat and took countless medications. That was as good as 21 got.

When your doctor notified you they missed something during your surgery and would have to fix it, you felt your stomach tighten. It wasn’t a bimalleolar fracture, he explained. It was a trimalleolar fracture that also affected your talus and ankle joints. The x-ray missed it, but the CT scan caught it. It happens a lot.

It was another two weeks before they declared you prepared for the procedure. You rinsed and repeated the first process.

After that, listlessness overwhelmed you. You could not move in every sense of the word. Every time you tried to sit, your spine sent a shooting pain to your head. They called it a spinal headache. When the physiotherapist came by on Monday morning, you still couldn’t move. He prescribed ‘anything with caffeine’. You opted for some Coke, and it took four days to work its magic on your back.

By Christmas, you were significantly better, but you couldn't bear to watch other people enjoy themselves while you waited for a wound to heal. Your world was crumbling, but for the rest of the world, it was Christmas. You convinced yourself that the mere fact that your family was present gave you ample cause for joy. Still, it would break you even more if you had to spend the New Year there.

As if by some miracle, they discharged you two days before the New Year.

If there’s anything you learn after two months in the hospital, it's that broken bones need time to mend. So when you left on one leg, screws and two crutches, you prayed to find balance without falling.

IV. Waiting

Getting home was like breathing fresh air again, but finding traces of the hospital air had come along with you. Something was different, and you could taste it as much as you could feel it in your bones.

Every day in January had the same routine. You would wake up and find your way to the kitchen, blood rushing into your leg, trying to balance. The first time you tried to cook noodles yourself, you were a mess of sweat and discomfort. But you did it, balancing on one leg. You became a gymnast with ten imaginary gold medals.

You’d burst out in tears in the middle of a movie, fall asleep, wake up, remember everything, and cry again. On one such day, you called a friend, and he told you to keep going. ‘You can’t stop,’ he said. He told you to try something new, to rewrite your brain.

After that conversation, you started to learn a new language, taught yourself how to paint and completed two online courses. You found a semblance of peace turning a new language over in your mouth, found images for the movement your body wanted you to perform, and colours for words you couldn’t describe.

When you fracture the bone that holds you up, you don’t think it would take long to put itself back together. You learn different ways to grieve. You grieve what you think you lost. The sunsets that disappeared because you were stuck on a bed, hiding. When someone on the radio asks if you ever stop grieving, you shake your head no. You ache in the past and in advance.

You think of your father’s death and how mourning him did not feel like something you did for him but for your mother, your siblings and the sense of normalcy you all lost. You did not grieve your father anymore; you grieved what his loss took away from you.

You learn the newness that comes with pain, how it feels like the shadow hiding on the bridge, waiting for you to leave under it. Then it hits you, occasionally, on and off, then all at once. You experience relief when it pauses its quiet torture and the numbness that comes with it. You think you’ve felt all the pain there is to feel, then someone grabs your leg and tries to bend it into shape so it can fit in a cast.

When your sister tells you, ‘You taught me how to feel,’ you manage a smile because someone, at least, is gaining something from your pain.

You also dream strange dreams. In one dream, you were in your NYSC uniform, leg disconnected from the body, but you continued marching as the blood pooled around you. In another, you had no visible wings but propelled yourself through the air — you did not need your leg. When you woke up, you felt like you could fly, like your cast didn’t weigh you down, like you could walk without bleeding, move without walking.

You are very aware of your body. When your heart does that strange flutter, your anxiety takes the form of a god — all-knowing. It tells you there’s something wrong, and you question, has your heart always beat this way? Is this how you’ve always moved your leg? You’ve caught yourself many times placing two fingers on your neck and feeling . . . just feeling. Because how do you tell if something has a chance to survive? You check for a pulse.

More than anything, this season taught you that you could be in the presence of a stranger and be met with warmth as you’ve never displayed or experienced before. That you could look into the eyes of a stranger and sense a familiarity that makes you question what you think you know.

Then there's patience with your body, the people around you and God. You learned you could hold your body in all its disappointments, loneliness, and questions and say, “I will be patient with you. However long you take to put bones back together, I will be patient with you. However long you take to heal wounds, I will be patient with you.”

V. Walking

There was a stiffness when your cast came off.

When the first gust of air hit your leg, and you finally scratched the itch that had been bothering you for months, you revelled in it. If you weren’t supposed to be extra careful, you might have jumped up for joy and combusted from the sheer brightness of it.

Later that day, you and your mother held up Fanta bottles and toasted to learning to walk again.

You had a new leg — a sensitive, misaligned, shrivelled leg. As you ran your hands over your scars, your mother reassured you they would fade, but you weren’t worried about that. You wanted to keep them forever. You needed a reminder that your leg bore the weight of what it didn’t want your head to carry. So you kept touching, wondering if you had just discovered a new meaning for love.

Love (noun, verb):

To behold scars and still not want to let them go.

Sentence Usage:

I will love you, despite the uneven colour, despite the nerves that died. I will love you because I waited for you. You are as beautiful as the day I broke you.

In February, when your doctor told you to begin partial weight bearing, fear wrapped itself around your legs. Your physiotherapist held you when you almost fell, saying (in Yoruba), ‘I’m holding on to you. You can’t fall while I’m here.’

Two months later, when the doctor informed you to let go of your crutches, you released a breath you didn't know you were holding. It was time to teach yourself how to walk fully again.

You eased the weight off your crutches and stood on both your legs. You had trained your brain to balance on one leg, but you now had two. It was a strange sensation. Your physiotherapist told you you’d come a long way, and you exhaled. Yes, you have come a long way.

It was odd to walk into the hospital with crutches and walk out without them. You walked for the first time in almost seven months without support and did not fall. You limped and winced but did not fall.

VI. Fusing

Walking was arduous.

First, you forgot how to do it. You forgot the natural movement of your foot, which caused you more physical pain. In public, you often stared at strangers’ feet and how they moved to see if you were missing something. Then you noticed something in your foot that wasn’t there before the accident — a crookedness.

Following your first two operations, you were informed that you would develop arthritis in the future. ‘We couldn’t restore the natural alignment of your bones during the surgeries, which could lead to arthritis in maybe 20 years. You’ll need to correct that with an ankle replacement or fusion,’ they said.

Though you tried to pray the post-traumatic arthritis away, it was only a matter of months before it crept up on you.

You visited another hospital for a second opinion. One expensive MRI test later, the response was no different — replacement or fusion. You knew you had no options, really. That was just an illusion. A fusion was a much better recommendation for someone your age — fewer risks and complications, lasting results.

It took you two months to come to terms with this; another surgery, another year of recovery, another year of trying to find balance; and an entire lifetime with a limited range of movement. It seemed like an extreme step to take, so you waited for walking to get better — it didn’t. You went on fasts and praying sprees, begging God to give you your leg back.

One day, you woke up and knew that an ankle fusion was the response to your prayers. You were losing fluidity of movement to gain something more — a life without pain.

When you walked into the hospital for your third ankle surgery, you mentally prepared yourself for the postoperative pain. You had a better grasp of what to expect this time because, despite everything, the body eventually adjusts to long-term discomfort. It didn’t matter if you would no longer walk the same; you needed to walk, regardless. You needed to see the places your feet could take you to.

VII. Accepting

December 6, 2022

You are here, marvelling at the miracle that is your life.

21 was the year you forgot and taught yourself how to walk again, the year you became protective of your pain because it comforted you. You hid, lost yourself, looked in the mirror and desperately wished to be someone else. You learned how to scream, to pray with voice breaking, hands shaking. It was the year you finally embraced the uncertainty of your situation.

Today, you’re 22. The air is soft and buttery. There is a gorgeous vanilla-chocolate cake in front of you, and this time, you don’t just taste the frosting; you dip your entire face in it.

You know that when your new ankle cast comes off, you will have forgotten how to walk on two legs again — you already have — but you’ll learn. You will stuff the fear under your legs and walk on it. There will be dancing, running, and screaming for joy. No shame will reside in your scars. You will understand that you lost nothing but gained everything. You will look back on this time and remember that there are other ways to walk.

You will ask yourself, “The world is yours. Where would you like to walk to first?”