I continued to ride my scooter and to believe that some school, somewhere, would make a place for me. I didn’t see my future self briskly striding through hospital corridors. I just needed to get through school so that one day I could sit behind a desk at a health center or work in an outpatient clinic. There was plenty of nursing work that could be done just as well in a surgical boot as in a shoe. I could write a prescription, give a vaccine, insert an IUD. I could look a patient in the eye and listen.

In July 2017, I was out of the boot and walking again for the first time in years. My spouse and I were thinking about moving to Australia, so I applied to programs there and was admitted to nursing school at the University of Melbourne. After completing my first semester, I decamped to Sydney for a month. There, I lived in an apartment overlooking Bondi Beach, perhaps the most beloved urban surfing destination in the world.

Day after day, I watched the surfers. I daydreamed about taking a surfing lesson, but my hold on walking felt so recent and unlikely, I didn’t chance it. And in other ways, it already felt like I was surfing. I was surfing on the arthritis medication I had starting taking in spring 2016. I was surfing on the steroid shot I’d gotten in April of 2017. I was surfing on the immuno-modulating probiotics with which I was experimenting. Just as if I were a surfer, any little thing could knock me off my board and back into arthritic misery, back into the boot and scooter I had come to know and loathe.

Watching the surfers, I noticed that the time they spent standing on their boards, riding waves — doing what nonsurfers would call surfing — was minimal compared with the time they spent bobbing around in the water next to the board, generally going nowhere. Even the really good surfers spend far more time off the board than on it.

If you added up the seconds that a good surfer actually spent riding the waves, it would amount to only the smallest fraction of an entire life. Yet surfers are surfers all the time. They are surfers while they are working their crap jobs, daydreaming about surfing. They are surfers when they wake up at 4 in the morning. They are surfers when they walk the board down the hill to Bondi Beach. They are surfers when they drink their predawn espressos. They are surfers when they paddle out on their boards. They are surfers when they wait and wait for the right wave. They are surfers when they wipe out, thrashing around blindly in the waves, praying the board doesn’t crack their skulls. They are surfers when they sit by their trucks with their friends after surfing, silently eating their grain-bowl meals.