(Added Dec 28: Just found this post as I was writing an update - I can see that I never finished it and therefore never posted it, but I'm going to post it since it was such a momentous occasion! And I promise I'll finish my thoughts in the next post.)
Okay, big news first: NO MORE BANDAGES!!! All of my open wounds are now officially CLOSED. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! My skin is all still pretty fragile though, so I rarely get to walk around and feel the wind in my leg hair. (Have I written about that before? It's really an incredible thing.) Speaking of leg hair, I think that I've got it growing in all of my burned areas (on my legs. My arms have ARM hair, woah.), which is really good - pigment is tied into hair growth, so the more hair I've got, the better my chances are for getting as much pigment back as possible.
Other, more general news: I've been discharged by the visiting nurse association, which is sad because it means I don't get to hang out with Inna anymore. She's Russian and pretty much the greatest. I have physical therapy (hereby referred to as PT) twice a week at Cornerstone in Woodbury. It was both shocking and unsurprising to see how much stamina I'd lost - I knew I'd lost a lot, considering how little it took to exhaust me over the course of a normal day, but that first visit I was wiped out after 10 minutes on a stationary bike and 5 minutes on an arm bike. Now I'm up to 10 minutes each on the bike, an elliptical, and the arm bike, and rather than being wiped out, I feel pretty good! Tired, but good. The other day some of my excellent cousins and friends were over, and I managed to participate in a game of kickball! That was when I discovered that running after not running for 2 months is exhausting. I had to take a nap after, but being able to actually participate in a physical outdoor activity was just incredible.
A more difficult thing that I've been dealing with is my own self-image. You know how when you're daydreaming or just dreaming or if you close your eyes and picture yourself, you have an idea of what you look like? Well, it turns out that if your physical appearance changes rather drastically, there's a lag time before your mental image catches up. It's been getting better, but at least once a day I look down at myself and am surprised by what I see. It feels like having the hiccups, or hearing something that sounds like your alarm clock in the middle of the day. Oh yeah, I'm awake. It's hard to look at pictures of myself from before, because I know that I don't look like that anymore. I don't know if I'll ever be the 'wear shorts as early in the season and for as long as possible' person anymore, and part of me feels like that girl with the toothy grin and the long legs is gone. This is hard to write about.
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