At the End of the Fourth Week

Stability is restored.  The alignment of the bite is still off by a few millimeters.  Soft foods are doable.  I bit into a cheese-it cracker because I had to know if I could or could not.  The pain was not overwhelming.

I can trot up and down stairs and shake my head this way and that without my jaw sliding loose.  I think a lot of the muscle function is returning.  I can swing a hammer without it shooting back up my arm and across my clavicles and up my neck into the angle of my jawbone.  I think I will try to ply the basketball court again this week.  Not being able to exercise with vigor or lift free weights has taken its toll.  My body feels rusty and delicate.  Extremely delicate.  I have to be careful with it.

I still do not understand how I weighed 150 pounds through most of college, jumped up to 170 afterward, and then jumped up to stable 185 after that.  I chalked it up to a late growth spurt of muscle and I do believe it to still be true.  Nothing really changed beyond stints in the weight room and more aggressive behaviors in terms of physical conflict resolution.

I've taken on water and fat since the injury.  The muscle tissues are still there, waiting to be awakened and pushed and pulled apart.  Sometimes, the ideal of 220 looms.  Two hundred and twenty pounds of "thank you kindly" laid over five feet, ten inches, and change of bones and arteries.  The ideal power to weight ratio where nothing is impossible and armor is thick and well.  Ringing in at 189 and having trouble pumping a bicycle tire is not healthy at all.  I think that is the highest cost of dealing with this injury.  Knowing you have been set backward by months, chunks of years of hard work, sweat, tears, and shouts of victory and the best you can do is wait and watch it happen and think about all of the time you are losing and all of the training you cannot do.

I cannot help it.  I want to fight.  My pop was a fighter.  It is in my blood.  I love it.  I love the challenge.  I love going knuckle to knuckle.  I love putting wear and tear on my frame and I cannot do it again or try to while the soft tissues finish knitting.  It is supremely aggravating.  That part of me continues screaming: sate me! sate me! sate me!  The factory continues churning out weapons that gather dust.

It's not about making someone pay for my misfortune.  It's not about spreading pain.  It's about the test.  It's about hand and eye coordination.   It's about enjoying tumbling and rabble rousing and rises and falls.  It's about split second decisions.  The joy and exhilaration of making the right call in the fraction of the second and then following it up with another one in the split of the next second and knowing, had you been blind, your body knew what to do before your brain did.

I feel sometimes that every persons body has two brains.  A machine brain and a quantum one.