A woman walking down a city sidewalk on crutches, her leg immobilized from thigh to ankle

Six Weeks in a Long Leg Cast: A Castlife Story

Castlife Stories are short fiction inspired by everyday life in a cast. Names, places and events are invented.

Day 1: the last run

It was the last run of the season, and Mia knew she should have stopped one run earlier. The snow had turned to slush by three o'clock, heavy and grabby, and when her left ski caught an edge the binding didn't let go. Her body went one way. Her leg went the other.

She remembers the sound more than the pain. A dull, wooden crack, like someone stepping on a branch under a blanket.

At the clinic in the valley, the doctor held the X-ray up to the window as if it were a postcard. "Spiral fracture of the tibia," he said. "Clean. Not displaced. You're lucky." Mia did not feel lucky. "Six weeks," he went on. "From the top of the thigh to the toes, knee a little bent. No weight on it."

A nurse came in with a tray of fiberglass rolls. White, pink, navy. "You get to choose," she said, as if it were a reward.

"Navy," said Mia. "Something that goes with everything."

The fiberglass went on warm and wet and set in minutes. By the time her sister arrived to drive her home, Mia's left leg had become a long, hard, navy-blue object that she could not bend, could not lift easily, and could not quite believe was hers.

Day 2: the first night

Nobody tells you how heavy it is. Not heavy like a suitcase you lift once. Heavy like a suitcase you are tied to. Every time Mia shifted in bed, the cast stayed exactly where it was and the rest of her had to negotiate around it.

She slept on her back, leg raised on two pillows, the way the leaflet said. She woke at three, at four, at five. Each time she forgot, for half a second, and tried to roll onto her side. Each time the cast answered: no.

Day 4: forty-seven stairs

Her apartment in Lausanne was on the third floor, no lift. Forty-seven stairs. She counted them on the way down to the physio, sitting on each step and lifting herself backwards with her arms, crutches handed down by her sister one flight at a time.

The physio showed her how to go up on crutches: good leg first, then the crutches, the cast hanging behind like a passenger. "Up with the good, down with the bad," she said. Mia wrote it on her hand.

By the evening she had done the stairs once on her own. It took eleven minutes. She sat at the top and laughed until she cried a little.

Day 9: the itch

It started behind the knee, exactly where nothing could reach. Not a polite itch. A personal one.

The rule was clear: nothing inside the cast. No knitting needles, no chopsticks, no ruler. Her brother suggested a coat hanger and she hung up on him. In the end it was the hair dryer, on the cool setting, pointed down the top of the cast, that saved her. She sat on the bathroom floor for twenty minutes with the dryer humming and decided it was the best thing anyone had ever invented.

Day 12: back at work

She went back to the office on day twelve, in a skirt, because no pair of trousers she owned was willing to go over a cast that started at her hip. Her colleagues gathered around her desk like it was a birthday.

Her manager drew a tiny skier on the shin, mid-crash. The intern wrote slow down in silver marker, which was fair. Someone left a thermos on her desk with a note: You can't carry coffee on crutches. We checked.

People held doors. People she had never spoken to asked what happened, and she got the story down to one line: "Last run of the season." Everyone nodded, as if that explained everything. It did.

Day 20: the tram

On the tram, a man in his eighties stood up to give her his seat. She tried to refuse. He would not hear of it.

"1971," he said, tapping her cast with one finger. "I had one just like this. Plaster. White. Heavy as a sack of cement. It took two people to get me into a car." He looked at the navy fiberglass with something like envy. "Yours looks like a spacesuit."

She thought about that for the rest of the day. A spacesuit. Something that kept her in, and kept the world out, while something inside slowly fixed itself.

Day 28: the bad day

It rained. One crutch slipped on the wet tiles at the bakery and she caught herself on the counter, heart racing, bread everywhere. She made it home, sat on the bathroom floor, and cried for a long time, mostly about the bread.

Her sister came over with soup and didn't say anything useful, which was exactly right. They watched a film with the cast across both their laps, and her sister fell asleep under it.

Day 35: the photo

A week before the cast came off, her friend Noor showed up with a camera. "You'll want to remember this," she said. Mia did not think she would. They went down to the lake anyway, at sunset, and Mia sat on the wall with her crutches beside her and the navy cast stretched out across the stones, covered in signatures, a tiny skier, slow down in silver.

When she saw the photos she was surprised. She looked tired, and strong, and somehow more like herself than she had in months. She realised, with some irritation, that she was going to miss parts of this.

Day 42: off

The saw was loud and frightening and did not hurt at all. It vibrates rather than cuts, the technician explained, as it buzzed a line down both sides. The two halves came apart like a shell.

Her leg looked like it belonged to someone else. Thin, pale, the skin dry and flaking, the knee stiff and strange. When she stood, it felt weightless, almost unsafe, as if it might float away without its navy anchor.

She asked if she could keep the cast. The technician shrugged and put both halves in a bag.

After

Physio three times a week. Bending the knee a few more degrees each session. Walking without the crutches, then without thinking about it.

The cast sits on a shelf in her living room now, the two halves taped back together, covered in other people's handwriting. Visitors ask about it. She tells them the one-line version. Last run of the season.

She has not stopped skiing. She stops one run earlier.

More from Castlife

Curious what six weeks in a long leg cast feels like, without the fracture? The LLC Brace locks the knee from thigh to ankle and comes off in a minute.

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