Thank you for your speedy and transparent response to this ❤️

I'm skipping snowboarding this winter. Instead I'll be doing home stretching/body-weight routines, feeding off second-hand excitement of friends.
This ordeal hasn't put me off BJJ, I want to go back to that & kickboxing, but a return to contact sports will be slow as I learn to trust my body again.

As I said at the start, I'm walking around now. I've got my independence back (and we're both relieved about that). The plan now is finishing one last month of full-time knee brace wearing, strengthening this leg that has atrophied after 5 months of non-use and reclaiming range of movement.

You really learn things about vulnerability, trust, and love when you are standing on one leg in the shower, hands bracing the sides because you can't put any weight at all on your other leg, asking somebody to hose and wipe you down because you've got no spare limbs.

My partner has been a goddamn rock throughout all of this. Taking on all the household chores, taking me to appointments down in Vancouver, and gracefully accepting every fetch quest I sent them on as I laid stuck in bed / on the sofa.

A gnarly thing about the knee op is that usually they use donor tissue from the thigh for ligament repair. For my injury they would have had to harvest so much that it would have left systemic weakness in my thigh. So instead they used cadaver donor tissue and thus my knee is now haunted.

I've had two operations - ligament repair in June and a nerve transfer to try to regain ankle control in September. Fortunately the healing for both has gone about as well as it can. Prognosis is positive but nerves heal slow. I won't know if the nerve transfer was a success for another ~9 months.

The dislocation tore my ACL, PCL and a few other smaller ligaments and severed the peroneal nerve which is responsible for up/down ankle movement and lifting your toes up meaning my ankle is partially paralysed. Somehow luckily no bones were broken - which is very rare for an injury this severe.