Dear Readers, many wonderful things came about as a result of my broken leg last year, strange as it might sound. I had been lucky enough to have never broken a bone, never spent a night in hospital, never had a general anaesthetic or an operation. I had never been immobilised for so long, or so completely. And I feel as if the experience changed me in a lot of ways, mostly for the better. So, I thought about how I could symbolise the event so that I wouldn’t forget the lessons that I’d learned, and I suddenly remembered that my Facebook friend Joanna Smith, someone that I’d never met, was a jewellery designer.

Joanna and I had chatted a bit online because she followed the blog here, and when she heard about my leg she was a great support, being the proud owner of a titanium implant herself. And as I started to heal, I asked her if she’d be up for collaborating with me to design and create something to commemorate what had happened.

You might remember that I had a spiral fracture, and the image in my head was always one of the bone unpeeling like an orange. And to fix it, I had a piece of titanium implanted through the bone. The spiral being held steady around a metal rod held a lot of resonance for me, for reasons that I’ll try to unpack shortly, but what I especially loved was the design that Joanna came up with – a real rod of heat-treated titanium in the middle so that it glows a discreet blue in certain lights, surrounded by the swirl of silver. The whole pendant has the heft of a reliquary. I haven’t taken it off since I received it a week ago.

So what does it all mean? On the surface, it’s about physical healing, about how a traumatic wound can be brought back under control by a surgical intervention. But it also symbolises how interconnected we are – when I think about all the people who helped me get better, from the medical teams to my friends and relatives who stepped up time and time again, to my good friends here on the blog who offered advice and counsel and taxi rides (thank you Mark!) and support. However independent we like to think we are, we are truly need other people, and I was moved by people’s kindness and generosity over and over again.  When we feel as if we’re spiralling out of control, it’s that solid core of our friends who hold us together.

And the final thing is that the titanium symbolises resilience, the ability to endure and to harness what has happened, in all its swirling complexity, and to make something solid out of it. To allow pain to open our hearts to all the other people in pain, to increase our understanding. I was fortunate because my pain gradually faded, but I know that there are many for whom that’s not the case. The pendant both reminds me that I can come through, and that there are those who are still in the maelstrom, deserving of patience and comfort and support.

And so that’s quite a lot for a little pendant to symbolise, but it does its job quietly and sincerely.

If you’d like to see Joanna’s work, or if there’s something you’d like to commission, you can find her here. Highly recommended, as I’m sure you can tell!