I finally liberated my big black bag of old journals from the storage locker at my parents’ place.

Now the chronicles of all my former hopes and angsts are safely tucked away on a bookshelf in the basement of my home. There’s a certain feeling of wholeness to that.

Today I went with my mum to her church’s coffee morning. Those are great conversations I always enjoy, but today the youth minister went one further and volunteered to go to my house and unstack the boxes so I could start unpacking. Even better, once there, he also reassembled our couch.

The physical work was a huge help, but even more helpful was how it lightened my mindset to suddenly be able to make progress, when just yesterday I felt deflated and helpless.

Thank you, Nathan!

I’m finally back on Prince Edward Island!

I love our new house, and last night all our belongings arrived. Unfortunately, Craig’s in Scotland because his auntie passed away, and my arms are not back to normal yet, so setting up our furniture and unpacking the boxes will have to wait until Craig’s back.

I have a meeting Monday with a local surgeon, who I hope will be able to fit me in soon to remove the ‘dorsal bridge’ in my right arm. His secretary stressed that he has a six-month waiting list, but this thing is meant to come out early in December – and I need it out if I’m going to be able to start back to work in January. And I need to do that, because otherwise I’m going to be drifting into financial and career trouble.

Fingers crossed. (I can at least do that.)

For the first time since my second surgery, I sat down and had a drawing session.

At my request, the OT gave me a splint for my right arm. It just didn’t feel safe swinging it about while I know it’s still broken. Even though there’s a metal bar in there, I don’t want to run any risk at all of having to go through that surgery again.

Removing the dorsal bridge will hopefully be no big deal, though the OT suggested that there’ll be a lot of work to do once that happens. I’m just hoping that’s all to do with my wrist, and I’ll get to keep all the headway I’ve made with my fingers. I need to get back to work in January!

The splint is also to keep the bedsheets from rubbing against my arms, which has been driving me crazy.

Okay, I put some of the Tiger Balm cream on and my arms certainly feel… different. Like, burny different. I like the smell, though!

Today I stayed home — I guess that’s not unusual, since that’s where I’ve been for most of the last month, but at least I could choose to go out if I like, now that I have two arms that sort of work.

I wanted to go out to a coffee shop or something like that, but it’s still disheartening to try and draw, even though I’ve managed to stretch the tendons in my hand quite a bit over the past few days and can grip things a bit more.

Instead, I decided to stay home and cook things. I made granola, waffles, and a savoury pie! It’s easy to take normal activities as a given, or to be greedy for more, but I appreciate that the things I did today (I opened jars!) were each a little breakthrough.

Since I’m being transferred to PEI’s healthcare system, I’ve been given the notes about my treatment to take with me. They’re pretty gross.

We got our house. That’s a huge relief, and something to look forward to.

As for the arm saga, that’s a bit more of a challenge: I got the cast off both arms last week — right on Monday, left on Friday. Thank God, too, ’cause I was going crazy from the weight, the heat, and the itchiness of those stupid hunks of plaster strapped to my arms.

The left arm is in a brace for the remainder of the healing period. That’s fine. The difficult part is that my right arm isn’t working normally because of the temporary “bridge” bar that’s attached to my radius and the back of my middle finger to hold it steady so the bones of my wrist can all heal in place (since they shifted after the first operation).

As a result — well, the occupational therapist I saw described it thus: “It’s like your hand is a marionette and your tendons are the strings, but right now they’re pinned to the playhouse wall.”

Still, somehow, the surgeon and she both expect that I can get back the full function of my hand. I’m doing the exercises, which make my hands stiff and tired, and any improvements are very slight. That’s scary, and I just hope there’ll be a big jump back toward normal when the bar comes out — though that won’t be for quite a while.

Meanwhile, the nerves under the skin of my right arm prickle anytime it touches anything, and I have this ongoing feeling like I’ve hit my funny-bone. This makes it next to impossible to sleep.

I did manage to draw something today, though, but it took me a long time and left me tired.

Sorry for moaning!

Meanwhile, I did a little bit of packing today, and Craig did a huge amount. Moving day is not far away! It’s hard to do justice to all my connections here with all this wrist-business going on.

This morning I had my follow-up with the orthopaedic surgeon. One of his team-folk cut the giant tree-stump of Tensor bandages off my right arm, then I was sent to get X-rays on both arms.

I had lots of time, while waiting for the X-rays, to look at the horror-show that is my dominant hand. And, hey, it’s Hallowe’en, so it was all thematically appropriate.

The middle two fingers don’t bend very well or much on their own. The surgeon told me that’s because they moved the tendons out of the way to make room for the bar that’s reinforcing the wrist. (Yes, rebar in my arm.) The three long scars — two on top, one underneath — were puckered around little black sutures, bleeding in spots after being separated from their crusty, old, mummy-ish dressings. And the skin was a sore desert of eczema, having been trapped in a damp, airless, dark, closed case again after the last surgery.

[I took pictures, but you really don’t want to see them.]

Every possible “Walk Like an Egyptian” pose on the X-ray table later, I was upstairs in the Hand Clinic again, worrying and hoping about what the scans might show.

Craig asked me this morning what I’d do if it turned out I needed another operation. I seriously thought for a moment that I might rather die. On second thought, I said that I’d want to be kept in overnight and sedated after the procedure.

Thankfully, none of that will be necessary: The left elbow is well lined-up and has formed a nice callus, which will later be replaced with bone. The tendons are a bit f#$*ed, as it seems they may have “evulsed” away from the bones on impact with the ground. I didn’t ask what that meant, ’cause as much as I could imagine was about as much as I wanted to deal with just now.

And the right arm? All the hardware was holding everything together perfectly, and nothing had moved since the operation. Doctor Furey kept getting me to try and make a fist, then spread my fingers out, but it just didn’t feel possible. He told me to keep trying, so I guess I may get that back before the bar comes out.

(In the X-ray, the bar looked like a ninja’s butterfly knife secreted underneath my skin.)

After an intern took my stitches out (which hurt!), they wrapped my arm up in gauze, and sent me off to make my next appointment — the last before I go to PEI.

I snapped (via e-mail) at my mum last night for stressing me out with her list and questions about which surgeon I’d be referred to in PEI. I said I didn’t suppose it was like going to the hairdresser, and doubted one had a choice. But when Doctor Furey brought up the subject of referring me on for the last procedure, I mentioned Mom’s list and he said he’d like to see it. “With the gossip?” I asked. “Well,” he replied, “if there’s someone in particular you want, I can refer you specifically to them.”

Whaddya know? Mom’s right again.

Speaking of PEI, at the end of last week, Craig and I filled out all our papers and had them notarized, and couriered them off. They reached the lawyer in Charlottetown this morning.

We’re soooo close, but I’m so scared the lender is going to ask again at this eleventh hour for more proof of income. I’ll be working again in short weeks, but right now it would not look good, me being off sick right when this is all going through.

My friend Lisa drove me to the hospital and hung out with me for a few minutes before my appointment, and she assured me this was no big deal. “People get sick. They still buy houses.” At least for a moment, I believed her, and that was a relief.

Finally, finally my kooky life fits nicely into form-field boxes, right up until this very last bit of the home-buying process. ACK!

By Thursday, this deal will be done. On Friday, I should get my other cast off.

I know in life it’s always something, but I really, really want these particular two things to be happily resolved.

On Monday the cocoons will open.

What will be born?

Two scrawny, scaly arms, one of them looking like it was chewed by a polar bear.

At some point in my upbringing I picked up the lesson “Don’t get into debt.”

Don’t borrow money – and if you lend money, write it off. And don’t ask people for favours, because if they do things for you, you owe them. (So, therefore, it’s better to say thank you but do it yourself so you aren’t indebted.)

So this time in my life has been a real challenge to that old programming. As soon as I had this accident, my old friend Lisa set up an online calendar so friends could book a time to bring me lunch and physically feed it to me. Friends arranged to drive me to appointments, and one even cancelled the rest of her appointments that day so she could stay with me as my follow-up ran long then turned into the bad news that I needed more surgery.

Then there’s Craig, who’s spent so much of the past month bathing me, brushing my teeth, taking care of – ahem – very personal hygiene needs, and doing two people’s worth of work around the house while I sit and watch helplessly from the couch.

I loved all these people already, but it’s impossible not to feel extra-adoring while looking into their face down a toothbrush or a spoon.

I’m in debt to these people beyond anything I could ever possibly repay. And here, where the economy of personal debts breaks apart, the truth of it shows through: There is no “break even” here, nothing I can do or can say to deserve this care.

But nobody has to – or could – earn it. We’re already inherently worth it. And that’s true even when we’re cranky, ungrateful, or not-nice. No amount of being funny or pleasing is equal to having someone wipe your arse for you.

I went through a not-nice, angry period with my work shortly after this accident happened. I sent one of those horrible messages – you know the type, the kind you really should have sat on for a few days. Instead, having impulsively fired off the “Norma Rae” rant they needed to hear, I had to go through the “disaster clean-up” procedure afterward – moreso because I’d used all my powers to write the most withering, poison dart message I could. I was, after all, the hard-done-by victim here.

Of course, it very quickly transpired that, while, yes, it’s started a conversation about what happens when an employee gets hurt, the company’s leaders’ and owners’ behaviour was nothing like the cold, calculated cauterization I’d described. Instead, they were compassionate, personal, and devoted in the way they handled me. The more caring they were, the more of an ass I felt.

“See, see, I knew you were like that all along…! Except, uh, you aren’t. At all. Oops. Sorry.”

For all my fawning apologies and gratitude after the fact, I now realize that I can’t earn the love they’re giving me. It’s just there, and – amazingly – makes allowances for my fallibility, too. (“Actually,” said Babs, the Coach’s co-owner, who courageously flew to my side to take of me when she got word that I was wigging out, “I’m interested in seeing what Dark Hamish looks like!”)

So why, I’ve been asking myself, did I react like this? It’s like some long-forgotten bit of old programming was activated when this happened.

Asking myself about this, I got the mental image of a dusty old box of dynamite in the corridor of a mine.

My grandfather, Dad’s dad, was a coal miner in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. Everything in town belonged to the Dominion Coal and Steel Company – including the workers’ houses and the store where they bought their groceries. Thus the town’s income came from the Company, and it went right back to them. When the miners went on strike, the Company’s owners called in the National Guard, who fired on them from a gun set up on the church steps – and the Company’s owners could pull in that favour because they also happened to be members of parliament.

So I can see why Rankin MacDonald was a communist: The existing order was so corrupt and unfair that the only possible hope had to be found in a completely different system.

This worldview is woven into my family’s mindset.

As someone who worked with and inside government systems throughout his social work career, my father has a very jaded view of large organizations. We often fall into conversations about corporations, political parties, and other groups, and generally wind up at the same despairing, resigned dead-end view of the humankind’s collective activities.

Then I look at the myths of my childhood, hugely shaped by the Star Wars universe, where all large organizations are evil and impersonal, and the plucky individuals who break away and resist the prevailing order are portrayed as alive in spirit and charged up with purpose.

I’m surprised how often this narrative still shows up in children’s stories, and gets a free pass every time – like it’s the safest fallback trope, even though it’s being delivered by entertainment behemoths like Disney.

This has clearly influenced my thinking, and even after 18 years of being around the Coach environment, where I’ve seen extremely successful entrepreneurs do incredibly kind, generous, and creative things, I’m disappointed to see how I retreated back into this old line of thinking when I felt scared and hurt.

I’ve also been on heavy narcotics, if I’m making excuses. (Except I haven’t felt high, just free of significant pains when they’re working.)

Yes, there are disappointments and unfairness in the world, but there’s also just as much, probably more good that happens every day. Which one is real and true is a matter of your choice of perspective.

At least I applied what I learned to the next round of fear: “Oh no, I have to get to PEI before November 3rd to sign the papers for the house! But I’ve just had surgery, and I need to have another follow-up with Doctor Furey!” (Great name, eh?)

So this time, instead of reacting, I questioned the basic assumption. And, speaking to my various real estate people, I discovered that we can sign everything here using a notary public and courier it to the Island. No biggie! So that’s our next task.

As my client and friend Dan says, everything is mindset. It was the subject of our last book – The Mindset Scorecard – and, right on schedule, I’ve wound up living out that theme in my own life.

Today I’m grateful for my body’s ability to quickly regenerate itself.

At my follow-up appointment on Monday last week, the surgeon said he wasn’t happy with the way the bones in my wrist had moved since the operation. (He seemed as disappointed as I was!) So he booked me in for a follow-up on Friday.

After Friday’s operation, I felt like I’d been mauled by a bear. I was in so much pain, and was pumped full of enough drugs to kill a roomful of Princes, yet none of it was having any effect on me.

Eventually, they managed to tranq me up enough to send home, where I spent the next day in agony because we’d used up my limit of acetaminphen — so Percocet was off the menu.

Fast-forward two days, and I’m mentally present, and my arm is sore but that kind of tickly-good sore of something that’s getting better.

I stopped by the hospital yesterday to book my follow-up appointment and get my painkillers refilled, and as I’d hoped I might, I got to speak to the surgeon, who talked me through what he’d done:

• reposition and secure everything with the first plate
• pop a carpal bone back up where it should be
• put a long brace across the top of my arm to protect everything else and add some traction so the joint will be able to flex properly. That will have to come out after eight weeks.

He warned me that it’s likely I will only get 75 to 80 percent of the strength back in that arm. We’ll see about that one.

Next week, I go in for another follow-up, where my casts will come off — hallelujah! — and we’ll figure out what happens next (like getting the brace removed in PEI).