Have you ever been forced into a hobby?

I can’t say that I’ve ever been the most creative person. I mean I like to think that I was creative, but I feel like every time, throughout my childhood, that I tried to bring to life something imaginative and joyful, I just didn’t have the technical skill to pull it together and make it beautiful. I had friends in high school that went through Art class with stunning abilities and skills, and even my Step Dad and my sister were quite talented at drawing, however, I just didn’t seem to make the cut with the creatives. I’ve always been good with words, capable of writing, and I’ve dabbled in journaling, or creative writing every so often, but it just never felt the same as having a talent like being a wonderful painter, or being able to make music. So, I think for the most part, I pushed myself into academia, always thriving, and then keeping my creative writing to myself, cause it’s not really something that anyone else was ever interested in.

So, I finished high school, and then I started working, and then I decided to move into early childhood education, and then I decided to start a degree in early childhood. I’d been working with disabled children and it was something that brought so much light and energy into my soul, because I genuinely thrive off the feeling of seeing people achieving their best and enjoying their life. And for people with disabilities, whether they are physical or intellectual, mild or severe, achievements are all the more thrilling. And so, my goal was to work towards teaching children with disabilities. And my degree would help me to do that. For six years, my husband was the backbone of our household while we both worked, and then I spent another 6 hours a day at the computer studying and learning. And we thrived off it, I loved it. I was doing so well in my studies, acing every class, loving every learning.

Towards the end of my degree my husband and I suffered some trauma in our family. Everyone says 2020 has been a terrible year, but it wasn’t as bad as what 2018 was for us, my husband and I. Between the sudden and tragic deaths of two of my husband’s three brothers, my mother’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, my workplace redundancy, the second year of our marriage was the toughest. By this stage I had been working hard at uni for nearly five years and I was due to graduate soon. But I was starting to lose interest in the learning and the joy that uni had given me for such a long time. For nearly five years, my biggest and most prominent hobby (actually now that I think of it, my only hobby) had given me so much joy and motivation, and all of a sudden it was the most dreadful task of my life. Every day that I sat down at the computer brought me stress and headaches, and it wasn’t the work. It was the trauma I’d experienced that year that had caused me to stop working towards a bright and rewarding career and was making me question what the point of all the hard work was. Why am I pushing myself so hard to make a difference in the world, when I could drop dead tomorrow? What’s the point in living a life full of hard work, what if I don’t get to enjoy it after all this? I was struggling with an existential crisis at the age of 26, trying to discover what the meaning of life was, despite the fact that I’d previously lived life under the guise of working hard to make a difference in the world.

Looking back, it was some gracious miracle that got me through the final 12 months of my degree, just a few more classes to graduate. But to be honest, I genuinely didn’t even care that I had graduated, because by that stage id moved into a new position where I was working with disabled adults and children full time, and my focus was now on working within disability, rather than teaching. My husband never said that my degree was a waste, but we have both thought it many times. I don’t find that I regret doing it at all, because for several years, that was my goal, and I was enjoying most of it. But towards the end, my lifestyle, my outlook and my goals for my life changed.

So, for the first time in a little under six years, I was no longer burning the candle at both ends; I was working full time still, but I was no longer pushing myself for six hours every night, and all weekend every weekend to complete a full-time student workload online. Finally, I had relaxed. I decided to give myself three months to relax and enjoy the freedom. But I became quickly bored of it all, and found myself going to work in the morning, coming home and plonking myself on the lounge for hours staring mindlessly into the television and whatever drivvle was being burned into my eye balls.

I remember one conversation with my husband during this time where I asked him, “Is this what it’s like for regular people, being this bored all the time?”

He told me that it was because I had no hobbies, I’d spent so long focussing on my degree that I had no hobbies at all, and that’s why I had this empty feeling cursing through my body, because nothing was engaging or enthralling my senses.

Well, that made sense. But what to do with this revelation? Of course, I needed a hobby, but how did you just discover a hobby, let alone find a hobby that gives you enjoyment? My learning in my uni degree had kept me engaged and invested, and now I have a bountiful knowledge of child rearing practices and child psychology, which has come in handy plenty of times, despite the fact that I don’t yet have any of my own children.

I started contemplating what type of hobbies I could get into. My husband had his engine rebuilding, gaming and computer building activities, which always gave him joy. My mother-in-law enjoyed sewing, and knitting and crocheting. I had a 13-year-old niece that was eagerly enjoying learning about make up. I had a girlfriend that was invested in her volleyball team, training twice a week, and playing on a Sunday morning. I tried googling. I thought about photography, but the idea just didn’t really capture me. It was during this time that I started remembering what id felt about myself and my ‘version’ of creativity as an adolescent. Thoughts were pushing at me telling me I wasn’t good at creating anything of substance. So creative hobbies were throwing themselves out the window before I could grab hold of them. I couldn’t decide on anything to dive into.

So, I threw myself into my work instead, increasing my hours, and my client load, and running myself ragged, I loved it. By September of 2019 I had a roster of 10 clients who I saw on a regular basis, some of them every day, some of them once a week, and sometimes I would be on the road for 12 hours in a day, visiting 4 different clients. It was thrilling, I absolutely loved it. I lived like this for about a month, before a new hobby would eventually be forced onto me.

On October 5th 2019, my husband and I went to a local shopping centre, with the intention of buying some groceries, some things for our cats, having lunch etc. I told him I wanted to walk into one big name store, and he said he was not interested in following me as I looked at women’s clothing, so he was going into the pet store next door. We agreed to meet each other out the front of both stores in about fifteen minutes or so.

I started towards the ladies’ section, and then changed my mind and headed right, into the babies’ section; a friend of ours was having a baby soon, and I hadn’t bought them any gifts yet. I started scrolling through the baby onesies, picking up things at random. As I walked around an aisle with the intention of turning left, I felt my left leg slide out in front of me, as though I was doing the splits. Instinctively, my brain told my leg to come back and regain composure, but it was futile; the attempt forced my leg to bend the wrong way as I fell, and my knee dislocated, bending the bottom half of my leg against its natural position. As I fell to the ground, my voice caught in my throat. They say you start screaming during sudden trauma, but it’s not possible, my brain was screaming, but I could barely get a sound out of my mouth, I knew it was open but I was struggling to speak let alone scream.

I hit the ground, and felt the urge to roll over, and I reached for my leg, feeling as though my knee cap was about 12cm to the left of where it should be, it was a surreal feeling of sensing my knee cap being in a different spot and still being a part of my body. I must have been able to make a noise, because a security guard approached me within about 10 seconds. I managed to catch my breath between sobs, tears streaming down my face against my will and I said something incoherently along the lines of ‘My husband, I’ve hurt my knee – I need my husband’. Within the next two minutes, my husband had appeared, he’d heard commotion as he walked past the front of the store and had a passing thought that it could have been me. Upon seeing my husband, my panicked state had begun to calm, and the physical aspects of shock started setting in. I could feel myself getting lightheaded, sweaty and needing to pass out.

Over the next forty minutes, we ascertained that id slipped on a small puddle of water on the floor of the store, that I was unable to move my knee, whether to straighten or bend it, much less put weight on it. An ambulance was called and I was taken to the local hospital, with my husband following behind in the car. What followed was a four hour stay in emergency, an Xray administered to determine that there was no bone damage, but there looked to be some ligament bruising. I was given a knee brace, strong painkillers, underarm crutches, and a crash course in crutching without putting any weight on my injured leg. I was told to get my GP to set up an MRI to ascertain the extent of the ligament damage.

For the following week, I hobbled around on crutches in my house, immediately taken off work, and my husband secured a wheelchair for me, which made a big difference. A friend took me to get my MRI and six days after the injury, my GP told me that I would need surgery to repair the damage to my knee and I would likely be off work for over six months. I’d torn my ACL completely in half, as well as two other ligaments. For those of you that are aware, there are four main ligaments in the knee. Two of the ligaments that I’d torn are generally capable of healing within six weeks without surgery, requiring rest. However, the ACL is not capable of healing due to its location within the knee. The ACL controls the level of stability within the knee, and allows a person to pivot, step sideways and jump with control. It also keeps a knee cap from sliding out of place, and without an intact one, my knee had been sliding out all week every time I accidentally put pressure on my left leg.

My GP gave me a referral to a surgeon, who I saw two weeks later, who schedules surgery for the ACL reconstruction a further three weeks after that. The entirety of the five weeks from seeing my GP and going for surgery was spent with me on the lounge in a brace, in pain, incapable of managing my own tasks, and being waited on hand and foot by my husband before and after he left for work. Most days he even came home in the middle of the day to check on me. I was unable to work, and after developing an insatiable love for my job, having that ripped away from me, left me hating myself. Id gone from my hobby of studying, to working, to pitying my sorrowful self, and wallowing in self-hatred. Id never experienced mental health issues, or low self-esteem, but the trauma had brought a loathsome nature to my brain that caused me to focus on every negative thing about me, and I no longer had any joy or happiness. I struggled to find reasons to smile and I let myself drown in anger and sadness, frustration and disappointment, until finally I decided I could no longer do this and I started the process of attending psychotherapy to help my brain work through the trauma. This was hard work, and it was lengthy and exhausting. But not as exhausting as learning how to walk again.

Mid November of 2019 came my surgery, as well as an excruciating amount of pain, which my brain eventually turned into a trauma that manifested as anxiety and PTSD, which is a whole other process. Very quickly I realised that my newest hobby would be learning how to walk, and how to love myself again. Within two weeks of surgery, after some rest and healing, begun my physiotherapy journey, which consisted of a daily exercise regime, three physio sessions a week, and constant pain relief. My physiotherapist Giuseppe worked tirelessly to bring me relief from the pain with manual therapy and guided me through a range of exercises. The first part of the process was to manage the pain, so pain killers were regular, massage was constant and a variety of machines were used to increase blood flow to the area. Most of my time at home consisted of keeping my leg elevated, napping throughout the day and rotating ice packs. I remember going into surgery, after only ever having my appendix removed at the age of fourteen, thinking yeah, I should be able to handle this. Boy was I wrong. Recovering from reconstructive surgery is exhausting on the body, even just sitting on the lounge, reading, listening to podcasts, watching television, the body works so hard to cope with the repair that has been produced, and managing the pain. I was constantly in and out of sleep during the day, and waking through the night in need of painkillers.

About four weeks into the recovery, the exercises were constant, I spent approximately three hours a day doing exercises, split up into various sessions, in between resting and sleeping. Heel slides, to encourage my knee to bend, extension resting, to teach my knee how to straighten, contraction exercises to reactivate my left leg quads, which had completely died following the surgery. Forcing my knee to do the work was hard. I invested in little foot pedals, and after three days of trying slowly, I managed to reach full revolutions, which pushed my knee hard, another painful and exhausting achievement.

Learning how to stand up from a seated position was undeniably difficult. It’s something that you completely take for granted, and here I was learning how to stand up with both feet on the ground, and trying to use both legs equally. It was another two weeks, just after bringing in the new year of 2020, that I managed to wean off two crutches, to just one crutch. This was exciting because it meant that my knee was becoming capable of bearing a little more weight. Thus, trips from the lounge to the toilet became a little easier, and I would practice walking to the kitchen and back with one crutch. It was a very exciting day when I discovered I could walk from the lounge to the kitchen, grab a packet of biscuits from the pantry and carry it back to the lounge for afternoon tea. I started making my own coffees in travel mugs and carrying them back to the lounge. Along with the increase in walking (with one crutch), came more exercises from Giuseppe to be doing at home, which included side leaning, to slowly increase the amount of weight I could bear on my left leg.

Giuseppe had also taken me to the pool for a hydrotherapy session during this time, and I was ecstatic to discover that, after much trying, I could eventually take a few small steps in the water, at over 1.2m depth, unaided. The joy I felt walking, with a very heavy limp, without leaning on something else was so exciting. I was eager to do this constantly. He told me to take it easy and not overdo it, because my knee was essentially learning how to do everything from scratch. Obviously, I didn’t listen because by the time id returned home, I was so fatigued I could not keep myself awake, and the physical pain from such hard work lasted the following two days.

From here on out, I was taken to the pool three times a week for self-guided activities to promote strengthening in my knee, my quad and my calf. I engaged in unaided walking, focusing on trying to walk without limping, squatting as best I could to increase the strength in my quad, and leg extensions, to try and improve the range of movement. This was the first stage of me starting to find happiness again, as I realised that my body was working so hard, along with my mental motivation to be a functioning and walking person again. It brought me so much joy to head to the pool every couple of days to practice my walking and strengthening. This was an exhausting process though, combined with my continued efforts at physio on a different three days a week, as well as continuing with my exercises at home each day. It had genuinely become my only hobby, learning how to walk again. It might not be classed as creative, but it was joyous to see that my body was improving, my capabilities were increasing and my leg was slowly rebuilding is strength. This hobby, that I had been forced into by a freak accident, whilst it wasn’t overly enjoyable, it brought me joy, the process of rebuilding and restrengthening.

By the end of January 2020, I took my first few steps, on land, without any crutches. It was so intensely overwhelming that I was immediately overcome with emotion. I started sobbing uncontrollably, because for weeks I had worked so hard to get to this point that it felt like it was almost unattainable, like it was always going to be so far out of reach. Finally, with a very noticeable limp, my knee supported my entire body during each step I took, and I was able to take about four steps at a time. Finally, the light at the end of the tunnel was close to me and I could reach out and almost touch it. And so, walking unaided became the next part of the exercise regime. In a desperate attempt to take back some of the household chores from my husband, to give him some kind of break, I started doing the laundry myself. As in, he would bring the laundry downstairs and into the laundry room, and I would put a load on. When the wash finished, I would pick up two pieces of clothing and carry them to the little foldable line my husband had put in the dining room and hang them up, then walk back to the machine and get another two pieces of clothing. Unsurprisingly, this process meant that, in between pain, resting and the exhaustingly slow method of carrying clothes, hanging up one load of laundry would take about seven hours. But it was part of the process, it got me off the lounge, it got my leg moving and it got my knee remembering what it was like to walk again.

My days consisted of this routine, hydro, physio, home exercises, walking to the kitchen and the laundry. I eventually started walking up and down out the front of my house, and I was afraid to go by myself, so my husband would come with me, with the wheelchair, or the crutches, in case I couldn’t make it back home. Slowly I made the walk a little longer each time, and about four weeks later I managed to get all the way around the block of my house, a total of 480 metres. That was an exhausting but thrilling day of exercise!

By mid-February I was slowly getting back to functionality. Walking was a very deliberate movement for me still, and I was constantly watching my feet, and the ground in front of me. I still had some pain and plenty of exhaustion. It would be another six weeks before I could be fit enough to start weaning back into my job with short shifts and light duties. It was at this time though that the anxiety started to set in. I was struggling with being in public, particularly by myself, and the PTSD symptoms were aggressive in nature. I would be in the shops with my husband and a full-on panic attack would settle in and id be incapable of moving. It has always felt weird to say that it has been PTSD but I’ve had several professionals tell me that despite not going to war or being involved in a shooting etc, that my body had still been through trauma and that my brain had interpreted it as something too difficult to work through by myself. This level of dysfunction was crippling my life and inhibiting my abilities to get by. The second tier of my latest hobby was to work through the mental and emotional trauma that my brain was trying to push away. I think that’s for another story though.

What is the point of this story? I know the intention was for a creative hobby, but learning how to walk again was in itself a hobby for me. It consumed my life, and gave me frustrations and joys similar to many other hobbies. It’s now July of 2021, almost two years after my injury and my reconstructive surgery, and I have to say, it’s a hobby that has stuck around for a long time. It’s not going to go away, and despite the fact that it has gotten easier, there are times that are still painful and fatiguing and stressful. I still have facets of functionality that are lacking, and I still experience pain frequently. I have to constantly exercise to keep my entire leg strong, and the degree of muscle loss to my entire left leg is extreme. For other people who have gone through this saga of reconstructive knee surgery, I feel your heartache, and I feel your sorrows. Losing the ability to walk, and the extremity of the pain that comes with a torn ACL and subsequent surgery is intense; it cripples your soul and it leaves you feeling defeated in a way that you can’t imagine ever coming back from. For those at the beginning of the journey, if you’ve just injured your knee, or just come out of surgery, know that it is a long road ahead, and it is bumpy and chaotic, and stressful and exhausting. But at the same stage the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel is there, despite how far away it seems. There were many times where I thought that I should pick up a hobby whilst recovering but at the same stage, I look back now and realise that I needed to focus all of my time and energy into the process, and trust that it would be worth it. Now that I’m back at work, albeit a slightly diminished capacity, and I can walk and move again, albeit with some limitations, I know I will never take my knees for granted again, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget the hard work I put into this hobby to make it something worthwhile and achievable for me.