Exercise
One Injury Becomes Another
Keep moving
It started with a scissor kick.
No, not like the one in the photo. But dang, isn’t that a great photo?
I was seven months into a weight loss journey. A committed diet and exercise routine that had me shedding nearly 50 pounds. I was feeling good.
I was this close to my goal weight.
I was on my back, swinging legs and arms in a fluid motion, so happy with myself. I felt strong. Invincible.
Something ‘popped’ in my gut. It didn’t hurt, so I kept going. A few days later I went to the doctor and suddenly the injury became serious.
The real problems started when something else started hurting. And then something else.
First, it was my feet. Because I wasn’t able to walk normally, the plantar facia in both feet stiffened up. It became painful to walk.
Then my Achilles' tendons stiffened up since I wasn’t walking normally, nor was I spending any time stretching, or doing anything else I’d been doing consistently, daily, for seven months.
Walking was painful. Exhausting.
Walking was hard. I couldn’t believe it. Me, the runner. I not only felt like I was 100 years old, but I also walked like it. I was the old lady hobbling through the grocery store, the one causing young people to make sounds like air escaping a tire because I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. It wasn’t like I wasn’t trying. (And some of them weren’t so young themselves. Just sayin’.)
Then, I bumped my tooth. Just a little bump, I smacked myself in the face with a box I lifted out of the bed of my truck. Nothing spectacular.
Twenty-four hours later, I’m in the dentist's chair with the worst abscess my dentist had seen in 35 years of practice. Worse, he had to go through my front tooth — through my front tooth — to get to it.
He gave me a pain pill, a narcotic before I was out of the chair.
I took a second pill about three hours later, terrified I’d wake up in excruciating pain and have to wait an hour before feeling the effects of the prescription.
**Let me just say, I can see why people get addicted. And, I can see how easy it would be to take another pill and slip off into the next existence.**
In between taking the first pill and the second, I walked around my house, barefoot.
Disclosure — I never go barefoot because my feet have no fat on them. It’s like walking on bone.
But, in my drug-induced stupor and feeling no pain, I did, bruising my heel bones so bad one foot was put into a boot and the other was padded up in an orthotic tennis shoe. I spent the next three months, summer, of course, trying not to re-bruise my heel bones just taking a shower.
All of this led to a lot of sitting. More sitting than I was used to.
Which led to Sciatica back pain. Oh My God does this hurt.
I wasn’t able to walk OR sit for more than a few minutes at a time. Laying down wasn’t any better — Sciatica back pain doesn’t stop just because you’re laying down. Neither does IT band pain or even foot pain for that matter.
I couldn’t figure it out. How did I hurt myself by sitting? I mean, I know I’ve put this human body through a lot during its half-century of abuse from my alien soul, but dang. This was crazy.
There was no accident. There was no explaining exactly when this pain started. Maybe it started and stopped? Maybe it just wasn’t bad enough to garner my attention because my feet hurt so friggin’ bad?
When it did get bad, bad enough to get my attention, it was BAD.
I wasn’t sleeping, which meant I wasn’t healing. How could I? The pain was intense. It was constant.
Depression
I can now understand depression. How it doesn’t happen quickly, like catching a cold. You don’t wake up one day and think, oh crap. Here comes depression. It happens slowly, like the water around the proverbial frog. The internal scoldings, the doubts, the ‘why the fuck is this happening?’ question that circles your mind with every painful movement. And every movement is painful.
I’m on the road to recovery now, but it’s been a very long journey.
I’ve learned many things during this time. Mostly, that pain doesn’t have to be from a visible wound to be real. And, a lot of people are in pain. I move slower and try to be helpful when I see people limping, or wearing a brace, wrap, or shoe I recognize. I know why they wear them.
I also learned movement begets movement. Even though I was in pain, I should have kept moving, even if I had to modify whatever I was doing to the point of seeming useless, I should have kept moving.
Creating the life of my dreams, one story at a time. www.nanciwrites.com
