When I hurt my right leg in the freak home accident on July 15, I found immediate difficulties in maintaining my normal routine. Each step I took was extremely painful. The accident happened mid-morning, after I had finished about half my daily time in The Dungeon. That’s the computer room in the basement where I do almost all my writing, and other projects. But I could tell it would be too painful to go back downstairs. I finished the day away from The Dungeon and away from my laptop.

The next day, after sleeping (not very well) in an easy chair all night, I knew I needed to get to The Dungeon, at least for an hour or two, work there, then bring my laptop upstairs. I had begun using a walker upstairs, and could see it would be too difficult to carry downstairs. Walking downstairs was going to be impossible. I could ask my wife to go down to get my laptop, but I didn’t really want to ask that of her. What was I going to do? How could I get to The Dungeon?

I got there by walking backwards downstairs on all fours. That took some of the weight off my bad leg. It gave me stability going down the staircase. I actually went down fairly quickly. But then there were the fifteen steps to my computer desk, with a slight deviation to switch on the light. Once I was in my seat, I was okay. But the getting across the floor was very hard. When it was time to get breakfast, I went up the stairs on all fours, then once again went down and over—in much pain. I could tell it wasn’t working.

So after an hour, I took my laptop with me and said goodbye to The Dungeon, promising to be back as soon as my leg healed enough to walk on it and go up and down stairs as a normal person. My easy chair in the living room—the same chair I slept in—became my office. Needless to say, my productivity suffered. In the same time I could write 1,000 words in The Dungeon, I was lucky to get four or five hundred in my chair. I prayed for healing and productivity through unusual circumstances.

In my reading recently, I saw where Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a friend, sort of commented on this.

But to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

I felt like that was me. To finish a Bible study book in an easy chair, with a laptop on my lap, not on a desk, forty-five feet and twelve stair steps away from my usual working space, would be difficult. But not impossible. I finished the round of edits to the Bible study, set it aside, and moved on to my next project. I slowly gained a measure of productivity and got things done.

But healing did come to my injured leg. I was finally able, last Sunday, to sleep on a bed. Monday too. So Tuesday morning, I grabbed my laptop and wireless mouse, leaving my coffee behind, and walked down to The Dungeon with no trouble and no pain. By Thursday, I was able to make the trip with computer and coffee.

So I’m back at my retirement work: writing books; trying to figure out how to sell them; trading stocks; and working on downsizing. My leg is not quite fully healed, but six weeks after the injury, it has healed enough for me to say, “Hello, Dungeon! It’s business almost as usual.”