In 2025 I was a Convalescent

I am ending 2025 how I began it … on bed rest. 

The weekend before Christmas, my foot caught on some uneven pavement outside the mall. I tripped and fell, mercifully not breaking any bones. My right side is bruised and cut, with the worst pain coming from a skinned knee and a swollen red bump on my foot.

I know, I know. Stay off the foot. Rest. Arnica and ice and binding and elevation.

Do I even need to say that the timing was awful? We are the Host House. It’s Baby’s First Christmas and we want to make holiday magic. I began a tradition of stuffing stockings and it’s so fun to think of little treats for everyone!

And the process involves hopping up and down the fireplace many, many times.

I am also embarrassed to admit that I fell wearing shoes that are now too small. Thank you, pregnancy!

It’s SUCH an endeavor to replace all footwear. I did one purge in October but totally overlooked the slip-on clogs I purchased for the third trimester, when I completely gave up on bending down. (No shoelaces till 2025, I said back then.)

I thought I could stretch things with the clogs. They don’t lock me in place because of the open-back heels. No problem, right?

WRONG. I paid the price, ultimately, for refusing to let that pair go. Those clogs were flopping around and tripped me up.

The Fun House Mirror

In the last two years I have been pregnant, given birth, been postpartum (including a period of hair loss around month four), needed a surgery that changed how I eat and move (radically and forever). It has already felt like looking into a fun house mirror every time I see myself. But my feet also grew since I gave birth!

My spouse didn’t seem to believe me when I actually purchased new shoes. My baby was already nine months old. “Have you just been wearing the wrong wrong size shoe?” he asked.

I had purchased new walking shoes in March of 2025. I thought, What if I bought a half size “too big” in the hormonal haze of newborn life? 

Then I started wearing new shoes that fit right. Broke them in, and wear them most days now. After a month of this, I slipped on my old walking shoes. I could not deny that my toes bunched up in front. How had I not noticed?!

Other things on my mind, I suppose. The change was subtle and sneaked up on me. Three rounds of anesthesia in six months may play a role in my ability to perceive things?

ALSO. My eyes are so much worse now! Perhaps that is simply age. My optometrist humored me and said, Sure, maybe it’s the hormones. But I do have a Milestone Birthday coming in July 2026 …

As if I need a reminder that I am aging every day, I now wear bifocals.

I have felt like a seasick shapeshifter throughout 2025. And at the very end of the year, I had to throw out most of my routines to literally put my feet up and not exacerbate my injury.

I went eight days without walking my daily four miles. The swelling is down and my bruises are yellow, no longer that angry purple and red from the day after my fall. Sitting still was hard, but these things helped:

Walt Whitman is a Comfort 

My university library system brought Specimen Days by Walt Whitman into my life at just the right time. This is his diary from his time visiting soldiers in Civil War hospitals. There are heartbreaking scenes of teenagers and those in their early 20s dying of typhoid or gunshot wounds to lungs or heads that there weren’t any ways to heal. Walt brought them sweet treats, books, bars of soap, and stationary so that they could write home. His mission of consolation took its toll; after the war ended he had a stroke that resulted in paralysis.

To recover, he went “down the country” from his house in Camden, NJ, to … what is actually the neighborhood I live in now! It has been so special to read about flowers blooming, bird calls, open skies, and farmland in this area. He found bathing in the cold spring here to be healing.

I actually began this read one week before I got hurt, aligning with a day volunteering at Harleigh Cemetery. Placing wreaths on veterans’ graves was what finally put me in the holiday spirit this year.

I also visited WW’s grave, and saw it decorated for the season.

WW’s journal is the second book I read this year that describes the natural springs in the area I live in now, back when cold spring spa/resorts were a cottage industry. (From the colonial era until the beginning of the Twentieth Century.)

I am thankful every day that modern medicine has advanced since the Victorian Era, when these kinds of spas were most popular. But I do see value in the idea of Convalescence, or a period of time after the markers of an illness have passed, but a person is not necessarily recovered. The patient must still move slowly, rest intentionally, and is not expected to jump right back into the hubbub of life. WE NEED TO BRING THIS CONCEPT BACK.

I like reading about people taking two cold spring baths per day, then sitting by a roaring fire in flannel pajamas. I’ve been taking daily baths as my foot heals.

Taking Myself to “The Movies”

I don’t know if I agree that The Sound of Music is a Christmas movie (it takes place in summer!!), but I’m leaning into it hard. We never watch Christmas movies in my household (though probably this will change as our kid gets older.) But I need the familiarity and the sing-along.

I’ve rewatched this many times as an adult, always when I needed a little tenderness. I screened it once when I was burned out from working three part-time jobs, and could go one month straight without a day off.

I watched it alone that time we had COVID. I was symptomatic 48 hours before Nate, so I isolated from him at home, hoping to spare him. (We were infected at the same gathering, so his fate was already sealed.)

I’ve never been so lonely as I was for those two days. I read the poetry of Leonard Cohen. I kept my daily fiction-writing practice and wrote scenes about characters longing and crying and despairing.

Nate has never seen the movie but heard the song about the lonely goatherd through the floor. There was much yodeling that he messaged me “what is happening ?”

Ever since that COVID viewing experience, I sob every time Captain von Trapp surprises the children by walking into the room and singing “I go to the hills when my heart is lonely.”

Just thinking about it makes my eyes well up.

Thank you, Past Self!

I was able to stay off my feet by heating up leftovers I froze. I can have August squash and November cranberries that taste fresh and local.

End-of-Year Reflections

It’s odd to have a winter solstice where I didn’t take a long walk. Feels like I’m watching the short daylight hours slip away like sand in an hourglass.

It’s hard for me not to ruminate on the hard parts of January 2025. Or, the hard parts throughout 2025.

I was hospitalized for 36 hours only one day after being sent home after giving birth. Diagnosis at the time was postpartum hypertension. When I was released the second time, I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to rest. (I would learn about the other issues I was having when I went to the ER in April. An experience I still have PTSD from, and maybe always will.)

I leaned into the concept of Confinement, in many Asian cultures. I am so lucky that my family of origin and my in-laws made daily visits, cared for the baby, fed me sliced fruit and fish, moved laundry and dishes, and all-around cared for me. I don’t think I have accepted that level of care from ANYONE since I was a baby myself. I struggled with my own pride and internalized ableism. I still do.

Nate and I kept looking up things I could do to lower my blood pressure. The results were always hot baths or long long walks. Things I truly missed and enjoy. Having them out of reach when they were so needed, and bring such comfort, in the wasteland of January, was so, so difficult. 

And then in April I got sick again. I went to the ER for the first time and cry when I remember the RELIEF when the PA at intake told me, “You are not crazy, YOU ARE NOT CRAZY!” I got a diagnosis and had to meet with specialists and get more tests to confirm for insurance what they told me in the Emergency Room: I needed surgery to remove my gallbladder.

I spent six weeks exhausted and scared and in pain. I weighed the fruit and greens I would eat to make sure I was hitting nutritional minimums. (The GI doctor wouldn’t give me food recommendations when I asked for them. She told me, “Trial and error.” The next day I was convinced I had the flu because my hands and wrists hurt, and I was too weak to stand or lift my baby. Nate told me I had to track my nutrients. THANK YOU, TRIAL AND ERROR.)

I had an upper endoscopy and I woke up from that anesthesia confused and screaming WHERE IS MY BABY, I WANT MY BABY. My dad took time off work to drive me to and from that procedure, and then to/from the surgery. Just as my mom had taken off work to spend a day with me in the ER.

My first MRI was canceled because insurance took too long to approve it. I cried and I cried and I needed my spouse to stay in the room with me so I could fall asleep each night; then he would get up to take the overnight shift with our baby. I met with a psychologist and psychiatrist. I made a playlist called “Convalescent Mix.” I prayed a Novena to St. Rita with a darling friend. We wrote daily devotions. I reread beloved poetry.

I woke up after gallbladder surgery because of the pain. They pumped me full of so many drugs, but nothing lessened the hurt. “You’re going to sleep really well tonight,” the nurses promised me. They were right about that! Somehow, I slept at night. But whenever I was awake, the stinging ache persisted.

Ice packs and Motrin and Tylenol helped, but really, it faded over time. It’s just that time passes so slowly when a body is in pain.

I lived two weeks being unable to lift my baby. He wasn’t crawling yet, though he started soon after. My spouse put him on a yoga mat near a sunny window in the morning. I fed him and changed him there. I caressed him into naps there. At least I could touch him. At least I had that.

I cannot type or tell this story without crying. Maybe I will never stop crying.

My body had to convalesce a lot in 2025. I don’t know if my spirit will ever cease convalescing.