You know that stereotype of the “absent minded professor”? The one who shows up to lecture in his bedroom slippers, with the bedhead hair, and the distant, hazy tone in his voice? The one that can hold a completely coherent conversation on string theory and its recent fall from favor in the quest for the unifying paradigm, and yet puts the cat in the fridge instead of out the back door?

I see that person every day in the mirror when I brush my teeth.

This isn’t so much of an issue when I am more, um, self-correcting than I have the ability to be right now. But in my current state of dependency, it has been a source of embarrassment (to me) and annoyance (to everyone else).

Have I ever mentioned that I have four flights of stairs in my house? That it is impossible to access a bathroom in my house without ascending at least one of them?

Oh, yeah. Crutches are a complete blast.

I am capable of ascending and descending the stairs. I am capable of most things, really. But it all requires major planning and orchestration, worthy of a big stage production, and there is a line between what I CAN do, and what I am SUPPOSED to be doing. That line is hard. Hard because I can SEE over it. Hard because I can even cross it. And hard because of the consequences when I do. An aching lower back and strained arms is one thing – but a re-broken or displaced bone is another. And God forbid I fall down the stairs and break the other leg. I don’t even want to contemplate the consequences of that.

But staying on the good girl side of the line means that every person that I live and work with ends up at the mercy of my foggy-headed absentmindedness. Every time I reach the top of the stairs and realize I forgot to put the-absolutely-needed-object-of-the-moment in my backpack, it means somebody with two good legs is going to have to make the trip up and down and relocate the object from one of the many creative and non-intuitive hiding places that I manage to put it down in. If I empty my water glass, somebody else has to make the trip to the kitchen (glass and liquids are very unforgiving to my current state of gracelessness – the combination is a veritable time bomb). If I get into the shower before I pulled out a towel, or the pants I want to wear are in the dryer, someone else has to retrieve them. Contrary to popular belief, being waited on hand and foot is stressful when you aren’t paying the servants. Sometimes I would rather just go thirsty or uncomfortable or bored because asking someone else, for the fiftieth time that day, to fetch whateveritisIneed is just too much angst to bear.

It has taught me two important lessons:

1. The people I live and work with are incredibly patient people.
2. Stairs, as an architectural feature, are highly overrated.