The first two weeks were the hardest emotionally, because lying in a hospital bed processing the fact that your husband had been trying to kill you with your own bedtime tea is not something there are adequate cultural scripts for. There is no greeting card for it. But my body was healing. Sensation returned to my upper legs first, that warm prickling feeling of blood returning to something that had been asleep, then my knees, then my shins.
After three weeks I stood up in the hospital corridor and took four steps, Noel beside me holding my arm and crying the good kind of crying, the kind that happens when something you were afraid you had lost turns out to still be there. Four steps does not sound like much from the outside. From inside, when the last time you were on your feet someone was standing over you telling you to stop faking it, four steps is everything.
