It’s been 11 months since The Pomerianian Incident left me with a tibial plateau fracture and a broken femur. Although I’m not happy I had this accident, there have been times when the gratitude I feel for the experience of this long, complicated, and on-going recovery has brought me to my knees (uh, figuratively, obviously).
But I wouldn’t be so thankful for the things I’ve learned if my ego hadn’t taken a huge beating this past year. Huge. Because ultimately it’s the surrender of ego that allows us to see through the fallacy of our lives in order to let go of the stories we tell ourselves so that we may blossom and grow into whom we are meant to be.
My recovery has been a series of contradictions and humble pie:
- I can leg press 200 pounds, but I still can’t run.
- I can confidently climb stairs carrying things in both arms, but I still keep a death grip on the railing when I take my first steps walking down them.
- I work out for 1 to 2 hours every day, but until recently, I needed to hold on to someone if I was walking down a ramp or down a slope of any kind.
- For months after I no longer needed crutches I endured dirty looks when I went into the accessible bathroom stall (I looked able bodied, but I needed those bars because my tiny little noodle leg did not have the strength for me to sit or stand on my own).
- Because I look fit, people have expected me to move out of the way on a sidewalk when they are walking past, yet until recently, pivoting and doing anything but walking straight ahead was cause for an elevated heart rate.
- After I returned my disabled parking placard, for the longest time parking lots were sheer terror for me because I wasn’t able to walk fast or jump out of the way of a moving car.
- I endured looks of pity when I was in the wheelchair, that is if people noticed me at all.
- When I first started PT, I wept in front of my new physical therapist out of sheer terror of getting into the water therapy pool. Being a strong swimmer all my life, the fear I felt about getting into the pool was completely foreign to me.
- Until recently, airports sucked. People zipping around me while I slowly walked as I concentrated on lifting my knee cap and activating my quad, engaging my calf and then moving my leg forward to take a step while putting my hamstring and buttock muscle on red alert that I need them to participate for the backward movement of the step (all while terrified someone would bump me and make me fall), made me choke back tears of shame because I used to be the speedy airport walker.
- Today I can walk fast, squat, kneel, jump, and I can even walk downhill without holding onto someone, yet there are still times when out of the blue I feel like my leg is about to give out.
Oh I could go on and on and on with other ways that my ego was stomped on this past year, but I think I’m making my point.
I remember last July when my orthopedist told me that after the long non-weight-bearing period of being locked in a metal-hinged DonJoy brace, I would walk in three months. At the time I presumed that meant that’s when life would be back to normal. He was right in the sense that my first steps were at the three-month mark. But what I didn’t grasp was that these would be wobbly toddler-like steps, and it would be over a year before I would be back to normal.
The past 11 months have involved physical therapy, massage, cupping, CBD oil, chiropractors, KT Tape, Aleve, ice (So. Much. Ice.), doctors, a CT Scan, an MRI, cortisone shots and more x-rays than I can count. Despite it all, my body has hurt every single day. It’s a complicated recovery because after being non-weight bearing for months, basically everything in my body atrophied. When I started physical therapy, some of my muscles were almost non-existent. I have needed to rebuild, and then teach to move properly, everything from my ankles up to glutes and lower back. It’s been an absolutely frustrating, yet completely fascinating process.
This recovery has been a series of firsts: first standing shower, first time I put a shoe on my foot, first steps, first time driving, first time kneeling-jumping-squatting-skipping. I’ve always been a Type A overachiever, so it’s been a big mental shift to learn to celebrate that little things are actually the huge milestones for me.
Check out the photo at the top of this blog post of me sitting cross-legged. I’ve always been pretty bendy and this is my favorite way to sit; yet I wasn’t physically able to do it until about two months ago. Only in the past few weeks have I been able to hold that position for longer than a few minutes.
I finally graduated from PT on Friday. I went 3x a week for the first six months, and have been going 2x a week since March. At the beginning my exercises were things like squeezing a ball between knees, or even simply staring at my quad and willing it to engage. Now I’ve progressed to a level of strength training and cardio that leaves me drenched in sweat after my workouts. Having always been a fit, strong, ambitious woman, I was determined to get back to normal life in record time, and so I have pushed myself harder than I ever knew I had in me. Unfortunately this aggressive approach to recovery has led to many set backs, including one that landed me back on crutches for a couple weeks over the holidays.
But nowadays I feel strong, and at times even confident. I’m still working on my knee’s stamina, and oh my gosh I want to run soooo badly. I know I will get there. This past year has been the most physically and emotionally challenging of my life, yet it has also taught me patience, and that I need to be gentle with myself and the demands I make on my body.
The cool thing about being on this end of recovery is I can look back with awe and pride that I found it in me to power through the continuous ego-blows and physical setbacks to get to where I am today. I mean really, if I taught myself to walk again, that should serve as proof that if I fully commit myself, there really is nothing I can’t accomplish.
This is where the gratitude comes in. I’ve learned so much about my mind-body-spirit, about other people, about what really brings about shama (see my post about Broken Bones and Inner Peace). I have so much more patience, compassion and understanding for the differently abled and for people navigating hurdles of any kind in life.
This past year will forever be a reminder to take pause when I’m tempted to quickly pass judgment, because on the surface, you never know what kind of internal emotional or physical battles someone is fighting.
So to finish where I began this post, I think you can understand how even though I’m not happy I broke my knee, I’m eternally grateful that it happened.
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