THE DERELICT ANKLE SAGA: I Am Not Allowed to Jump, Which Is a Sentence I Have to Live In Now

Quick status check from the part of the saga nobody warns you about: the long, boring, grinding middle. If you are just joining us — and at this point I assume the spreadsheet people have a whole pivot table — the ankle itself is fine. Genuinely fine. The bones, the hardware, the graft, all holding. The villain these days is scar tissue, my body’s overzealous repair crew that fixed everything so thoroughly it forgot to leave room for me to use it. So now I do physical therapy. Slow exercises. Boring exercises. Exercises that on paper look like nothing and in practice flatten me like a forgotten houseplant. Progress is happening. I want to say that clearly because last time I was scraping the aluminum lining. Things are better. Slower than I’d like, but better. And then, in the middle of a perfectly normal session, my physical therapist said the words that have been rattling around my skull ever since: No jumping. I’m sorry — what. Here is the thing you need to understand about me. I…