Mary Bellamy

I'm mostly chipper. (Especially in the mornings, much to the consternation of most of my travel partners.) So even after royally fucking up my knee, I did my best to remain upbeat. Dislocated the knee and have to stay off it for a while? OK. Going to need a few months of rehab? OK. Oh, hey, it's actually a torn ACL? OK. Gotta get some surgery and it will take a year to recover? OK. No family or boyfriend or roommate around post-surgery? OK.

But I'm not made of stone. I had to break eventually. In the end, it was the lasagna that did it.

See, at work we have two half-size, under-the-counter refrigerators. If you've ever had one, you know that the freezer space in them in tiny and prone to excessive frosting. So it's no surprise that one of the freezers is completely frosted over and utterly useless. The other freezer is only half-frosted over. (Should half-frosted be hyphenated as a compound modifier in that sentence? It feels right and wrong at the same time. I digress.) This leaves me enough space to jam in the ice pack I need to use constantly at work. I'm really struggling with the swelling in my knee, and the solution is ice and elevation, both of which are tricky to do at work.

On Thursday, I was icing my knee while eating lunch because I'm a multi-tasker. When I returned the ice pack to the kitchen, I found a frozen lasagna wedged into the freezer. It wasn't just wedged in there, it was dominating the space. There was no room for my ice pack. I suppose I should also mention that there is a full-size refrigerator and freezer in the ARSC offices one level down. But the lasagna was upstairs. A refrigerated ice pack is not nearly as effective, and my knee was pretty achy by the time I went home.

At physical therapy the next day, it all came to a head. My flexibility had been getting worse, and my strength was rapidly fading too. I got downgraded to the 2.5 lb ankle weight for short-arc quads. The previous week, I had been rocking 7.5 lbs, but now I was struggling with 2.5. When my timer went off, the PT asked me how the set had gone. I said "Fine," and promptly burst into tears. Yes, I turned into that emotional wreck of a person, sobbing in the middle of the physical therapy center. There was no rhyme or reason to it, but I just couldn't stop crying. The PT recommended I take the day off from work, which I readily agreed to.

I spent the weekend relaxing, elevating and icing. I got back to PT this morning in a much better mood. I still had that damn 2.5 lb weight, and my flexibility was still crap, but I was in a better mood. Then I got to work. The fucking lasagna was still there. Who does that? Who not only buys a lasagna in the middle of the day and takes up all the freezer space with it, but also leaves it there for 4+ days? I moved it to the fridge and sent a blanket e-mail explaining that I had moved it and that I needed some freezer space for the ice pack. No one has fessed up yet.

Damn lasagna.