On healing

 It's hard not to feel betrayed by a broken bone.

Part of my broken bone story is how it's changed my relationship with my body. I've always prefered to think of myself as someone who is physically strong. I take pride in the wilderness hikes I've done, in challenging yoga poses I've worked on and occasionally found may way into, in my ability to lift heavy suitcases and move furniture around. I used to live in a 5th floor walk up - that's not for the faint of heart! 

All of a sudden I made one wrong move that interrupted a tiny piece of bone and it fractured that part of my identity. I was rendered weak and fragile, in need of special handling.  I found myself incapable of many things that once felt easy. I lost some agency. 

Six weeks of limited mobility and a lot of streaming television later, I find myself breathless just from moving around the house.  If I were an antelope I'd've been picked off by a lion by now. My phone's pedometer stopped giving me motivational notifications because it thinks I've given up on life. I'm allowed to take my foot out of the boot now when I'm at rest, but parts of my foot are still swollen and discolored and the ankle feels stiff and tight. It annoys me to think of the long road ahead even just to get back to where I was a few weeks ago. Weird spasms shimmy through my leg when I'm going to sleep. And dealing with the ongoing, low-grade pain in the blade of my right foot is like have an unremovable pebble stuck in my shoe for weeks. 

But I grudgingly recognize that, as with most challenges in life, I probably should be thinking of this as an opportunity to build self-awareness and grow compassion. Once I've ended my pity party, I'm probably supposed to dig deep and look for some Life Lessons and radical love from within. So let me try.

With time on my hands and the internet at my fingertips, I've learned a lot about bones in the last few weeks. I learned that my bone has been attempting to heal itself from the moment it broke. The job of the cast or splint is just to keep it still and let the body do its work. The body knows what to do.  This seems like a metaphor for emotional healing as well: the moment something breaks, we lean towards healing, if we can just give it enough time and keep it steady and stop outside forces from interfering too much with whatever has to happen next on the inside.

And despite what I might fear during my late-night bouts of frenzied googling of bone infections and nerve damage and other things my darker midnight imaginings try to convince me have gone wrong, I try to remind myself what my daytime brain knows: my bone is healing, cell by cell. Eventually it will get better. It just takes time. I'm gonna be ok.

The long, ongoing nature of my recovery also reminds me of an epicly long bikeride with my sister. Twenty-something miles in, she'd had enough. Her muscles were aching, she'd developed a pinched a nerve in her hand, her head ached, her stomach was unhappy, and it was most definitely uphill all the way... We passed several of those tired miles by naming any of the body parts we could think of that didn't hurt...hair follicles? Fingernails? Teeth and gums? Ear lobes? We counted our anatomical blessings as specifically and minutely as we could.

And from the pandemic and its surrounding events I also learned that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. So when you can muster it, it's a good idea to try and acknoweldge and appreciate the things in your life, or in this case, your body, that are not currently gone to shit. Here's what I got:

Most of me is still in tact! Percentage-wise, I have a passing grade. My arms and abs are strong enough to get around on the crutches when I need them. My brain is still more or less lucidly thinking away and helping me perceive the world around me and complete tasks and remember things and interact with others. Good ole spinal column continues to hold me up and lay me down as needed. I can still taste and chew and digest and enjoy food. My hands can still create: I can crochet, write, draw, build things out of wood, bake cakes, boil noodles. It's been ages since I had a cold. I can see the sky and feel the breeze; smell flowers or baked goods; pet dogs; laugh and hug.

The rest of me will be strong again one day. We living things are destined to heal. Like trees clinging to sides of mountains and flowers stretching towards sunlight, we living things cling to life. All we know is to adapt and change, to continue to grow against whatever odds. The only way out is through. We persist because the alternative is to cease to exist.