I didn’t break any bones in my childhood. I had my first fall and back injury as a teenager, but made it until my late 20s before I broke a bone. I broke my first bone -a toe- sliding socked feet into a large 4x4 structure in our living room. When I explained what had happened to the children at the Day School where I was teaching, a 3-yr old gave me sage advice. “Miss Jessica,” he said with hands on hips and head cocked, “Next time you want to run in your house, you really should take off your socks, or maybe put on some shoes.”
My next broken bones were in my wrist, three tiny bones crushed when handcuffs were too tight for too long. My doctor cried when she gave me the X-ray results, because she knew the story. It aches when it rains, and makes krinkly cracking noises.
15 years ago, I broke my right leg after falling onto a slab of marble. This break started my foray into the world of formal chronic pain diagnoses when my healing went awry. But ever since that first fall at the swimming pool in the 80’s, my body has hurt. Now, I have a name for it, and ways to treat it. I am always in some (usually low) level of pain, and do experience debilitating pain for no discernible reason at odd times. Injuries stick around, and ‘freezing in place’ as a protective measure is constantly something over which I have to fight my brain.
All of those injuries, and I’d even include those I also got under unsafe working conditions, were the result of my going too fast, not paying close attention, not heeding clear warnings. Nothing is ever as linear as perceiving the message “Don’t run!” and then I run and fall into a hole. No, it’s always more a re-setting, a re-framing that is needed and that I had been ignoring.
I broke my leg at the beginning of last week, snapped my patella in half like a walnut and cracked its base. I ended the week with reconstructive knee surgery. Due to the aforementioned continual pain issues, I totally did not recognize this banged up knee as a serious leg break immediately.
Oh, it hurt. It hurt a lot.
But I iced it, and bound it up tightly, and drove to an important pastoral care opportunity. Drove. A stick shift.
I’m glad I went. My presence was helpful and serving in that capacity was very good for my own soul. But it was clear to me by the time I headed home that something was wrong with my knee. It hurt. A lot. It seemed like maybe it was more pain than I was used to. I decided that if the swelling hadn’t gone down in the morning, I’d go to the doctor.
Well, my knee was the size of a grapefruit in the morning and the other places where I’d hit stone steps were bruised and sore as well. Several X-rays revealed these impressive breaks, and an appointment with an orthopedist was made for 2 days later. He recommended immediate surgery, and so on Friday, inserted titanium pins with some sort of techno-organic thread weaving my knee back together.
I hadn’t done any further damage by using it, but he couldn’t quite believe that the pain hadn’t stopped me.
I get that. Pain is supposed to be a sign and signal that something is wrong, misaligned, askew or broken. And it is that for me, generally. I feel burns and move away from heat, for example. It’s not that I have massive nerve deadening. But I’ve always been able to tolerate more heat than others, like when I worked in restaurant kitchens in my 20s. I could grab pizzas out of the oven, or flip an egg without a mitt easily.
When everything sort of aches all the time, and some parts of your body spike pretty high on the pain charts regularly, you learn to tolerate pain, to absorb it. I do worry, as do many other folks living with chronic pain, that I am missing a very reasonable signal from my body regarding a new problem through the overall miasma.
My leg is healing and physical therapy starts this week. But I won’t be fully mobile for the next 2 months and the complete recovery time from this injury averages about 6 months. I am sure that the constant physical pain will fade. Now the discomfort of dependence moves into full swing.
I was raised to be fiercely independent. My community-based ethic evolved over time in my adulthood, as I received the same toxic messages of ‘competency means being able to do it alone’ and ‘if you want it done right, do it yourself’ that many got. I have moved away from that attitude as a base of action, having learned that cooperative and collective work is stronger, more creative, and more sustainable. But I still never want to be a burden, and want to be useful and helpful wherever I am.
It has been hard for me personally to learn the truth of something I’ve preached as true for years -that we give a gift of grace when we allow others to do things for us. I KNOW it’s true, that we all need help, and that insisting on doing something for ourselves actually takes an opportunity to assist and serve AWAY from someone.
This leg break happened in the middle of a household move, and in the middle of a major shift in my personal and professional life. Everything around me was requiring quick thinking and juggling of time, space, and resources. And somewhere throughout it all, I’d been very aware that I needed to slow down.
Now I must. I simply must make yet another gear shift in my pace. I know how to embrace this pace, and despite all the tiny tasks needling at me (RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF A MOVE!), I am looking forward to it. I want to be reading more, and this is a wonderful opportunity to do that. I’d like to write more letters, so send me your address if you’d like one.
And I simply must depend on others. I cannot do much on my own right now, and that won’t change for about 6 weeks. A friend came by today to pick up some of our moving boxes for a winter clothing drive she has coordinated. She reminded me that it was a joy to help, and that it was a good thing for me to allow others to care for me as I have for them.
It’s humbling, but it’s very real, and honestly it helps a great deal to simply need and to make that known. It is true for all of us at some time in our lives, and we would be more generous with each other if we could become okay with all of this.
We. Need. Each. Other.
Not only is this okay, it is crucial. It is the key to thriving, to adapting, to emerging into the world we can see just on the horizon.