This is my fourth surgery, and I have to take off all my earrings and rings. I wear tiny titanium earrings that I bought in February, when I was in Israel, from a lovely young woman from Pardes Hanna who had a piercing stand at Beit HaMecholot in Jaffa. I had not taken them off since. She fastened them so well that removing them seemed practically impossible, certainly with long fingernails, and honestly I had not wanted to try. But I woke up at three instead of five, as I had planned, because I suddenly remembered in a panic that I had to leave all my jewelry at home before going out. I knew it would probably not be simple, so I had better start trying.

The first four earrings came off surprisingly easily. The fifth was harder than all of them put together: a tiny gold heart with a flat, round backing that refused to turn. It took me an hour and a quarter to remove it. In the end I used a small pair of flat-nose pliers, the ones I had used to close the yellow bracelets. It was the only tool that worked.

I put the jewelry in a little drawer, hoping I would be back for it by this afternoon. All signs point to that. It is what happened the previous times. Everything went according to plan, when there was a plan.

I wonder how tightly the screws are fixed in my leg. Today they will remove one from my knee and two from my ankle. Perhaps I will ask to see the pieces. Perhaps I will take them home. They will surely look at me very strangely if I ask, but I will try anyway, if I remember.

In the space of a year and a half, all in the same leg and all because of that one accidental, foolish fall by someone with no experience of a place that freezes in winter and blazes in summer. It changed my life in a single moment and keeps insisting on being present, adding more and more chapters to a story that never seems to end.

Last April I began walking without a cane. After a year and two months of using every device and aid there is to function and get around, I was suddenly walking “without hands,” with my hands free. Yesterday Omer brought down the crutches from the attic, where they had been sitting for a while. I had padded them with bright pink accessories, and now they look ridiculous to me, far too bright. I wish completely transparent accessories existed. I will probably get a new walking boot today, too. I threw the last one out with a vengeance because just seeing it made me feel sick. For four months it never came off, and I suffered every moment I wore it. And now, again.

Healing and rehabilitation after complex injuries, somewhat like therapy for psychological trauma, are deeply nonlinear processes. They do not follow a straight line. There are unexpected turns and side streets, dead ends, U-turns, and unmarked routes. It is discouraging and heartbreaking. It takes enormous patience, and sometimes there is none, especially when so many other things are going on, as there always are. So much is invisible, so much happens inside, and sometimes it surprises both me and the people around me. After all, I am already fine, so what now?

When we visited Israel not long ago, at the beginning of summer, we celebrated a bar mitzvah, rejoiced, traveled, and spent so much time together. Being tourists in Israel is wonderful, a perfect vacation destination. Every day I imagined putting each good experience and each pleasant moment into a kind of savings account I could open this morning, when I would have to make my way through this route I know all too well. It is like the route through an airport on the way back from a vacation when you desperately do not want to go home, the wait is long, exhaustion hits, and there are familiar stations you have to pass through. Being identified again and again. Spelling my name in English and giving my date of birth. Confirming that I know what I have come in for, and marking with a pen, on myself, the places that need treatment. That wristband. The IV line that always takes ages to put in because, no matter how much I drink, my veins are invisible. The see-through, unbearable operating-room clothes. The questions about medication and anesthetics. The questions about the note in my medical record that says I am allergic to ketamine and oxycodone after my extreme reaction to them the first time I arrived there by ambulance. Then darkness. One blink, and I wake up afterward, on the other side of the river, hurting and exhausted.

For all of this, I have the savings account I filled in Israel: joy and contentment, sunshine and true friends who do everything they can to see us, real food, an extended family celebrating together and cheering each other on, fresh paint and more moving exhibitions that meant so much to me, a wonderful, funny play with my grandmother, sweet nieces kneading Fimo clay and building a tent. I can draw on all of this, and more, as I stare at a fluorescent ceiling of Styrofoam squares, tears running down the sides of my face and soaking that dreadful cap, sometimes slipping into my ears and making me feel as if I am underwater. I will try to remember that through all that time I was on my feet, and that I will be again, perhaps soon. And that maybe, maybe, maybe this will be the last surgery. And even if it is not, I can handle all of this.

I hope.