Partially Bionic Sunday - Frozen Up

Sunday was supposed to be slow. Quiet. Ordinary I had a coffee in one hand, an audiobook playing in the background, and my plans for the day were blissfully haphazard.

That was before my left leg betrayed me.

Before a sharp jolt of electricity ripped through my thigh.

Before the words left my mouth—panicked, helpless:

"No, no, no, what happened?"

Muscles seized. Then everything. I fell halfway between the kitchen and the living room.

The floor caught me, but barely. Pain shot down my spine, radiating into my hip like a fire alarm I couldn't silence. My leg? Completely locked. Like a rusty hinge that refused to budge. I tried to pry it open. Bad idea. I screamed instead.

That's when fear crept in. A cold, creeping kind.

Because it wasn’t the first time.

Life with Titanium and Trauma You see, I’m partially bionic.

I have a rod in my left femur—installed after an accident I don’t talk about much anymore. There are pins holding parts of me together that weren’t meant to come apart. The metal makes me move. Usually.

But there are days—like this—when the machine breaks down.

It doesn’t matter if I stretch.

Or take medication.

Or follow the physical therapist’s advice like it’s gospel.

Some days, my body just freezes. And when it does, it freezes the trauma, too.

Flashback: The day that changed everything. I was 23. I was driving home after a late shift. Exhausted, distracted. Headlights flickering. A scream. The world turned upside down.

I woke up in the hospital with a scream tied around my throat and a brace on my leg. The doctor explained the things I couldn’t handle. Fractures. Metal. Rehabilitation.

“You’ll walk again,” he said. “But it’ll take time.”

He didn’t tell me that it would take long to trust my body again. That some Sundays I break not from pain but from the memory of it.

Frozen on the floor Back to the present.

I lay down on the cold wood, clutching my thigh, ready to let go of the muscle. Breathing like I was in pain. Every second felt like hours.

It wasn’t just physical pain—it was helplessness. A reminder that no matter how far I’d come, some part of me was still broken.

I whispered to the ceiling: “Please, not today.”

The quiet courage to get back up. Finally, the muscles softened. Just enough to move.

I dragged myself to the couch, sat back down, and cried—not from the pain, but from being alive again. The silent kind of survival. The one that no one sees. The one that doesn’t get parades or medals.

Just a bruised body and a steely determination.

It took me years to stop being ashamed of those moments. Accepting that healing isn’t linear. That strength sometimes looks like lying on the floor, feeling everything and not giving up.

I’m not invincible. I’m resilient. There’s a difference.

What it really means to be partially bionic. People romanticize the word “bionic.”

They think it means strong, fast, supernatural.

Sometimes it just means you make weird airport scanners beep.

But more than that — it means carrying the past in your bones. It means trusting that metal won’t fail, even when your mind whispers that it might. It means not just rebuilding your body, but your faith in it.

I don’t want to be a machine. I want to be whole.

But part of wholeness is embracing the pieces that had to be rebuilt.

Sunday, rewritten. Later that evening I made tea. The sun was beginning to set, casting a warm glow on the same floor that had held me before.

I didn’t clean up the spilled cup. I left the towel that cushioned my fall in the middle of the room. Not because I was lazy but because those things were proof. Proof that I had been frozen, and then unfrozen. Proof that even on those days when my leg shuts down, my spirit doesn’t shut down.

That Sunday?

It wasn’t ordinary after all.

It was brave.