Broken Ankle and 2020 Chaos
2020 has been an all out shit storm for me.
February 02/22/2020 our shop burned down. Well, it caught fire and burned over 70% of our careers… Dramatic.. Yes, this company has consumed my husband and myself, so the shop is everything to us… The fire ruined quite a bit and the building is toast. However, we were already signed into a new lease for a space nearly 3 times larger because our company has been rocking it for the last 3 years and 2020 was projected to be pretty f-ing amazing. To date, the fire was the scariest thing I’ve ever dealt with.
Mid March, COVID-19 shuts down Dallas. So, while working from home while waiting to move into the new shop, post fire. We had a crew working from our home and a crew on fire recall. Basically cleaning the soot off any and everything salvageable from the fire. The more real coronavirus was becoming and developing around us, we decided Friday March 20th would be the last day to run the crews for at least 10 days. Though that quickly turned into 6 weeks. Sort of. The city announce a stay in place order effective the following Monday. One tiny clause was if you were in the process of moving you could continue. So we rotated teams of two to keep working and moving and setting up the new space. Kept the payroll going for those that had design and research work to finish up on current projects. It felt really great to be a small business and be able to keep our troops paid during this crisis. Even though all our clients were closed and the future is still a haze of uncertainty. And the ppp loans seem like a total pipe dream. It would be nice to recover some of this loss.(cornavisrus and the future is now to date the scariest thing I have to deal with).
Now for the worst of 2020…April. (well, no covid is still the worst)
All I wanted to do for my birthday was to go camping. Kind of hard during stay in place orders. But having a total “boss” of a husband, the back yard got converted into camp grounds. The tent was pitched. The 3,000 gal koi pond was the “fishing hole” (no hooks on the lines). The canoe was parked in the “lake section of the yard” If you had to get to the other side of the yard, you had to get in the canoe, and pretend to cross. The spa was the “swimming hole”
Everything was going swimmingly.
Roasted hotdogs in the fire-pit, dancing to music… What a great birthday. Until about 12:30 in the evening/morning, whatever… When I fumbled my intoxicated dance step, lost balance, heard a snap, snap and fell. Grabbed my now, wobbly foot and shrieked for help.
You know where you don’t want to go during a pandemic, a hospital in a major city.
We get to the ER, grab a wheel chair, he rolls me in but we had to back track and go through the make shift, check in tent for fever tests and masks. Then I get handed off because they wont let me husband stay. No unnecessary people are allowed in the ER at all. in fact it was strangely dead for a Friday night, main downtown hospital of Dallas. I had nothing with me. We took my shoes off before I got in the truck, to check my ankles. No phone, no book, no gloves hand sanitizer, no nothing. Just laying in fear. Waiting. Getting the bones sets the first time and split placed, worst feeling ever… being told surgery was necessary, also, the worst. Over hearing the doctors and nurses causally talk about what is was like for them being sick with COVID-19, the worst…
But having doctors and nurses hold my hand when I was in pain, be there for me. Lend me their phones so I could call my husband and have him build me up because I was terrified of going under for surgery. The amazing staff, kept me hopeful… Thank you.
A week after surgery and I’m really hating life in bed. The first three or four days were outright miserable. I’ve never felt so weak before. I am mad at how this year is unfolding. I’m not sure if things will ever get normal again. It’s probably the pain meds talking.
This week I’m going to pull myself out of the pity. I’m not going to spend all day in bed looking out my window. 2020 has been the kind of the ride you don’t want to get on. It isn’t the end. It’s just painful and uncomfortable. But goddammit, I’m an artist and it’s time to channel this chaos into something bigger than myself.
Rant over.
I declare no more BS this year.
