falling from the stars
Drenched in my pain again
becoming who we are.
As my memory fades
but never forgets what I've lost
Wake me up
when September ends.
-Green Day
The good news is that today is the end of the hardest five month stretch of my life. The bad news? Things don't seem likely to get that much better, at least for a little while.
If my life were a book (and I'm working on that!), I'd be somewhere in the middle at a point where the plot starts to drag and you want to skip ahead to the end where something exciting happens.
I sure know I do.
It was exactly five months ago when I broke my kneecap by falling on an uneven Portland sidewalk while jogging back to my hotel. The fall ripped my jeans, but it didn't hurt that badly so at the time I was relatively sure it wasn't that serious.
The next morning I strolled through the Portland Airport without issue, thankful I had escaped without major injury. By the time I got home, it was aching a little. The day after that, it was on fire.
I thought about going to the doctor, but I had a million things to finish up at work because I had a trip to Japan planned the next day. Also, I had a trip to Japan the next day.
I didn't have time to both go to the doctor and pack for the trip, so packing won. I thought about cancelling, but I knew my swelling would be too bad to get an MRI yet anyway, and for all I knew the knee would be fine in a couple of days.
It turns out that it wasn't.
It became clear soon after landing on the other side of the world that I was in trouble. But this was a once-in-lifetime trip, so I bought the first cane I saw (it immediately became the most expensive piece of my wardrobe) and tried to keep going, armed with the lesson that it is surprisingly hard to mime one's need for a cane to a Japanese store salesperson if you can't speak the native language.
I did the best I could for a week, coming back to my sister's apartment every night and lying on the floor with my leg in the air in the hopes that the swelling in my leg would recede enough to distinguish my ankle from the swelling. I saw some beautiful things while there, but the beauty and the pain will forever be intertwined in my mind.
Which is kind of how life works, if you think about it. I haven't been able to do much the last five months, so I certainly have.
I got back home a week later and went to the ER, where the young doctor who looked overwhelmed told me the X-ray didn't show a break, so it was likely just a bruise that would heal within a week. I reminded him it had already been 10 days since my fall, so his diagnosis didn't seem to match the evidence.
He told me to see a specialist.
The specialist told me I had a microscopic fracture that would take 6-8 weeks to heal. And then a few days later I went back to the ER, because I contracted some weird Japanese death virus requiring stronger pain medication to survive than did the broken knee.
Things got worse from there last summer.
I saw a veterinarian who told me my cat was dying. I saw my dentist because I developed a weird ulcer in my mouth in a spot where I'd had an invasive surgery 14 years ago. My eye specialist told me my vision would never fully come back in my left eye, and that I had yet another issue to keep an eye on (see what I did there?) in my right. And then I saw my boss, who told me that I would need to work the equivalent of three jobs because yet another attorney had left our team, and we can't replenish our workforce, even with lateral transfers, due to the idiotic federal hiring freeze.
I counted down every day of those 6-8 weeks, but when they passed I wasn't much better.
One physical therapist told me that this is just how life is going to be for me from now on because I have multiple sclerosis. I told him he was nuts and found a new physical therapist.
I spent the summer on crutches, occasionally my fancy Japanese cane, and for a glorious few stretches of days when the planets aligned just so, I felt well enough to get by with just a knee brace. But then I would walk one aisle too many in the grocery store and I'd be on crutches again for a week.
After he three cancelled appointments, I finally got a follow-up visit with my doctor, who recommended another MRI to see why I wasn't healing. It turns out my fracture was worse than initially thought, and those 6 weeks of recovery turned into six months, which I suppose was better than forever. And I'm now five months in, and hoping that the goalposts don't move again this time next month.
It still feels like I lost the summer this year, and most of the fall. You miss out on so much when you can't walk, I'm learning, especially when the disability is supposedly too temporary to invest in major life accommodations.
I spent all summer and fall wondering if there was some Cosmic lesson I was supposed to learn through my inexplicably extended recovery. I wondered if maybe my healing wouldn't come until I learned some lesson through the suffering, like the main character in Crime and Punishment (speaking of books that drag in the middle).
My pastor told me that wasn't how life worked, and I think he's probably right. Hard times don't magically go away upon the discovery of a brilliant insight or a magic genie. You just have to keep doing the best you can, through almost imperceptible progress that always doesn't flow in a straight line, until slowly things start to get better. Maybe a good book or supportive friend will breathe life into a few moments along the way.
Sometimes the only lesson in a long struggle is to get up and keep struggling.
And this week, the first signs of progress are showing. I did my first five-minute session on the elliptical machine this week, which I was excited about at first. Then I realized that if I continue to progress at my current pace (one minute of exercise per month of recovery) it's going to be two-and-a-half years before I can go half an hour.
I was hoping that I would be able to run again by my 40th birthday next week, but it's clear now that's not going to happen. If the timeline holds, maybe I'll be ready around Thanksgiving, which might make for the best one yet, but my doctor has been wrong before.
In the hopes that he's right this time, I'm counting down until the end of November. If life works out how I want it to, then by then I'll be running again, training to set another personal record at my hometown half marathon. If life goes how I hope, I won't have to strategize to reduce my number of trips to the office printer, and I can make social plans based on what sounds fun instead of what has nearby parking and a place to sit. If things work out, I will have even snuck away to Lake Tahoe for a few days around my birthday to regroup and I can find parking close enough to see that crystal blue calm in the water that I keep hearing about, this time firsthand.
If my hopes are met, I'll soon pick right back up where I left off in late May, and I'll hit December running, literally.
But until then, if I've learned anything by limping through the last five months, it's that sometimes the only way to get through something tough, is just to lower your head and walk through it.
Even if you need a fancy Japanese cane to do so.
I really hope I won't have to use mine again. But I mostly hope November goes by quickly.
Wake me up when it ends.
