Last week I sliced my ankle open on a wine glass.  It was Thursday night, and Zack and I were watching a terrible movie that I had borrowed from a friend.  

The tornado sirens started going of while we were watching the movie. I grabbed the remote and flipped over to watch the giant, hail-filled, lightening-laden storm barreling towards us with an uncommon fury.  Watching a storm like that move across a radar screen calls for action.  I didn’t really have anything that I needed to do; the cat and dog were already inside and the cars were as safe as possible–I was just getting up to wander anxious, storm-anticipating laps around the house.  I swung my legs off the couch, and crunched a wine glass with my left, outside ankle bone.  In keeping with the trajectory of the blow, my ankle then crashed down on the freshly-exposed, inordinately sharp, ankle-eating edge of the broken wine glass.

Zack called out from the office, where he had been checking the weather online, “And another wine glass bites the dust!”  I replied, “Another ankle, too.” Zack knows that I’m prone to cutting myself.  He hopped out of the office chair and rounded the corner with a make-shift first aid kit, several band-aids and a steady hand.  I’m not saying that we gawked at the gaping inch-long slice across the fleshy knob of my ankle, making the two newly formed slits in my ankle sing a little ditty before we bandaged it up–but I’m not saying that we didn’t either.  Five days later, I’m still taping up this ridiculous wound every day.  I’m astonished at how often my ankle touches things.  Perhaps I should have gotten stitches.  Perhaps I vastly underestimated the severity of the cut that day, or perhaps it was just that going out to get stitches would have been inconvenient considering the stormy circumstances and the simple fact that I had already given into the lure of pajamas for the day.  I don’t know.  All I know is that I still have a pesky wound on my ankle that is taking its sweet time healing. 

The real story here, though, is not that I cut my ankle.  The real story is that I was sitting on my couch on a Thursday night, drinking wine and watching a bad movie.  The real story is that I was not being effective with my time, I wasn’t doling out my minutes as if they were precious life-saving morsels.  The real story is the change of trajectory.  I’ve been scrambling, as evidenced by my radio silence, with how to deal with this change for exactly a week now.  After trying to figure out a way that I could talk about this, I’ve finally decided that I can’t.  I know you guys know that I have a pretty open-door policy when it comes to things in life that I’ll blog about, but it seems that I’ve found my limit. 

So here’s what you can know: I had to delay my nursing school plans by one year.  If you have any questions or concerns about this you can email me about it, and I’ll tell you what I can, but that’s about all I’m going to say about it here.  I still want to be a nurse more than anything in the world, much more than I ever imagined possible.  You all know what this dream means to me, and I’m not giving up on it, not by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s just a hiccup, a bump in the road, a slight change of trajectory.  I’m really sad, but I’m okay.  Like my ankle, my soul has a wound–the kind of gaping, attention requiring wound that I probably should go to the doctor for–but instead I just keep taping up the wound, painstakingly, every day.  I know that this time in my life, even though it’s incredibly heavy, is not going to last forever, and I have been overwhelmed by the love and support of my friends and family.  So don’t you worry about me.  Instead of RN’10, it looks like it’ll be RN’11 for me, and the truth is: this delay is SO not the end of the world. 

… I’m sure I’ll start believing it any minute now.