I am awake enough now to write for the first time in the last one week. I had my achilles tendon reconstruction surgery done on my left ankle on Monday, December 16th. Posted final grades, took out the recycling and went to the surgery. I briefly remember waking up sometime in the hospital after the surgery, then the car ride home, then sobbing continuously as Krish propped me up on my non-weight bearing operated foot with crutches as he helped me up the long, wintry walkway and steps to our front door– it was a long walk; I didn’t think I would make it — slumping into bed, then searing pain, seething pain, screaming pain as the general anesthesia and nerve block from the surgery wore off, then periods of wakefulness and sleep, wakefulness and sleep, and wakefulness and sleep. Many many Percocets later, I am awake now with my pain manageable enough, so that I don’t have to dose myself into narcotic and narcoleptic oblivion for another four hours. I didn’t take even one opioid this morning. 
I had the following procedures done: they opened up my left ankle, cut out the extra bone growing out of my calcaneus and into my achilles tendon (Haglund’s deformity and resection), cut and repaired the achilles tendon where the extra bone had broken it, and rebuilt my achilles tendon by doing a tendon transfer from my big toe and giving new insertional points. I had the same surgery and the same recovery in 2017 for my right foot. I am in a splint for 3 weeks, in a cast for 12 weeks, in a boot for four weeks. I am in the splint stage now. I am non weight-bearing with full and partial immobilization of my left foot for the next foreseeable future. With physical therapy I will be able to walk and drive by the end of May 2020. I am on medical leave from the university for the spring 2020 semester. As my friend Sharon astutely observed: another saga of the Achilles without the glory of the Iliad! Indeed.
It is a strange Christmas. Dayani is home which is wonderful. I put up the tree for her before I was immobilized. But I am not able to bake the cookies for her and with her, which is something I have always loved doing over christmas: peanut butter cookies with chocolate and peanut butter candy, peanut butter cookies with hershey’s kisses, sugar cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies. Next year.
2019 was a good work year, except for the daily pain reminder. Four good classes; thank you, students. Some of the student evaluations were very sweet. Two presses gave me a contract for my manuscript on indigenous films: I accepted Rowman and Littlefield/Lexington Books. My SdB review essay is coming out shortly in SdB Studies; my review essay on Vera Hildebrand’s Rani of Jhansi regiment is also coming out soon. I will miss campus, my friends, colleagues and students in the spring semester. I have never not taught, so this feels strange to be marooned on this invalid bed like this for 20 weeks.
But here is my winter solstice blessings for you. May the great mother goddess Sun protect you through the dark pathways of your life.
“With faithful progress,
The Great Sun has traveled,
From north to south again,
And on this day pauses.
So we also stand still,
With the whole Earth,
In quiet thankfulness,
To the Source of Blessing,
The Giver of All Light.” [https://www.uua.org/worship/words/ceremony/292649.shtml]
The Red Earth 