It has been far too long yet again for any kind of update and oh boy has a lot happened. I hurt my knee playing soccer back in September. After initially hurting it I wasn’t able to walk for a couple days. I thought, sure, it’s just a bad sprain. At least I really wanted it to be a bad sprain. So I had some local medicine men work on it, torque it, inflict pain if you will, and it began to feel a little better. So I tried to kick the ball around again and…oops knee bends sideways out of place I crumple to the ground and the reality of a real sports injury sets up shop way in the back of my head. Weeks go by, I keep working. My work at that time was becoming very fulfilling. I can walk just fine but other activities prove troublesome. Hiking is out of the question due to constant stumbles and grimacing pain thereafter. Dancing holds up until I throw a girl the wrong way and the knee gives out. This happened in Tegucigalpa one evening whereby promptly the next day my med-student friend had me in a doctor’s office having it looked at. And the rest so to speak of is history. I kept dancing, because well, Jesse always keeps dancing. Kept hurting myself. Went to a series of doctors visits and an MRI. And the knife came down when a Honduran knee specialist and the doctors in Washington D.C. all determined that knee surgery was not only necessary but mandatory as well…then the knife actually came down.
So I went to D.C. with the absolute fear that I may not return. There are no facilities to do the surgery in Honduras, leaving the country was not a choice. When any given volunteer is medically evacuated they have 45 days to resolve the majority of their issue or they do not return to country and are medically separated from service. So I arrived on a Wednesday night, met my surgeon the next morning, and walked across the street to the hospital and had my ACL replaced with that of a cadavers. Needless to say Honduras one day to surgery in the U.S. capitol the next was nothing short of intense. But it happened. There were a lot of pain meds involved for those first couple days, kind of a blur really. I came out alive though. My time in D.C. was a very big roller coaster of an experience emotionally for me. No one could indicate whether or not it looked like I was on the road to return to service for the first couple weeks after surgery. There were a lot of good days and a lot of bad ones. It was one day at a time for weeks. I spent a lot of time reading on the Potomac river and watching T.V. and week by week I was able to move around and see things farther and farther from my hotel.
Most Med-Evac’d volunteers get paired up with roommates in the hotel where they put everyone in, yes, Georgetown D.C., the ritziest, most nose-up-in-the-air neighborhood in the city. I was not so lucky to have someone to help me out post-surgery. However, there were many other volunteers from all around the world of whom I was able to truly connect with a few. Namely of those were a volunteer from Rwanda, one from Peru who had the same surgery as me only a week later, and a volunteer from El Salvador (you all know who you are and I consider you all my friends for life!). With these and a few other volunteers I was able to see sights, complain and compare knee recuperation and crutch and walking techniques, and talk about our respective experiences and challenges in very different parts of the world.
Weeks after surgery I was told I was on my way to recover in time to get back to country within the 45 day mark. I focused on my knee and on filling my time productively. I did some volunteering around thanksgiving with senior citizens, saw countless museums and monuments, and caught up with friends and family over the phone. I worked really hard at physical therapy and continue to do so on my own today. The results have paid off. I got cleared to come back to country almost two weeks early; earlier then they had ever seen with this type of surgery at Peace Corps Headquarters. I had to take vacation days to stay a couple days extra and see family and friends in Colorado for a few days. But then it was finally back to where I had wanted to be since the first day being back in the country for knee surgery, Honduras.
There were a number of ways I grew from the trip. Being so strenuous emotionally and physically, if you don’t grow you weren’t really there in my opinion. A number of people reached out for me during this time. Barb and Ian and Gavin, you guys are the best. Truly caring, open, and wonderful people. I wish you the best on the rest of your trip and I cannot thank you enough. Everyone that sent a how-are-you from Honduras, even if it was just a sentence, it meant the world to me up there when I was hurtin’ and showed me you care. Friends and family in the States, your conversations and support were invaluable. I became a stronger person in some respects. I was on my own for the most part in D.C., knowing almost nobody, taking care of myself. The states are nice for a vacation from service, but not so much for me under those circumstances. The experience made me realize how much my life right now is in Honduras. I missed it everyday. Everyday.
I came back! I was so high on Honduras for weeks. The air smelt better. Even the burning trash smell. Nothing bothered me. Not the 12,3, or 4 o’clock in the morning rooster. Not the constant barrage of questions about the States, or money, or whatever other completely inappropriate questions some of these kids come up with. Life was grand. I got back just in time to plan a little work for the new year and it was Christmas and New Year and our town fair for the next 3 or 4 weeks. It was a great time to get my fluidity back a bit with the Spanish, settle into my house again, catch up with everyone and the like. More or less that brings me to today. I went to Utila for New Years and caught up with a bunch of Volunteer friends, and my town fair was very amusing. Sure there are details missing all over the place. But that’s what happens when I don’t update this thing very often. Of which I plan to try to do at least once a month. That’s a good goal for the New Year. Other year goals include riding a bull, seeing Nicaragua and Guatemala and the sites of a couple good buddies, and trying to make the most of this full year I have of service ahead of me. There is a lot of work to be done this year.
...Much more photos to come when better internet is found
