Feminist reflections on fitness, sport, and health
Author: Mina
Writer. Playwright. Performer. Citizen. Traveler. Enthusiast. Author of Run Like a Girl: How Strong Women Make Happy Lives and Run Like a Girl 365 Days a Year, plus other stories, books and plays.
the present/ is a feather/ on loan from the wings of time/ that only attention/ makes beautiful/ and only kindness/ valuable.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship to time (and work and rest), so when I read those lines from Maria Popova’s bird divination cards a few days ago, they felt like they were meant for me. I’ve been getting her newsletter for years and only rarely open it anymore. That I even clicked through to see the words had that divine timing feel (speaking of time again).
With sports, I’m diligent about taking one day of complete rest per week and balancing my workouts within the week. Where I’m not so attentive is when it comes to my work-rest balance. I am about to go away for five weeks. To spend time with family and friends. And alone. Usually work comes with me, anywhere I go. This time it is not. This will be downtime. I’ll be doing things I love, which fill my cup. Reading novels. Writing. Running. Hiking. Cycling. A meditation retreat. I can’t remember when I last took this kind of work-free time for myself. Part of me thinks, I’m not successful enough to take this kind of time.
My trip, as it turns out, is coming at either the perfect time, or exactly the wrong time. The planning happened months ago, before I knew that my work would be in quite the state of transition it is (good and much needed changes, yet …). My plate is not as full as I’d like. I’m not a person with a full-time job and salary. I don’t have a long waiting list of potential clients. That’s good, in terms of making it easier to get away. And not good, in terms of I don’t know what September will look like workwise when I get back. What if none of the seeds I’ve planted take root and I come home to nothing?
This choice feels reckless and scary. I am going anyway, stepping back from the hustle. Not getting paid. Fear will board the plane alongside me.
And what a waste it will be if Fear rides along the whole time, leaching the joy out of my days and agitating my rest. Can I allow myself this period of resourcing and renewal, without getting sucked into a vortex of self-doubt? Or worse, the spiraling worry of how I will be judged? I can’t bring myself to write out the verdicts I imagine.
Still, I’m going. How will Fear and I spend this feather of time?
Fragment of Maria Popova Bird Divination card
I’m counseling myself to be in the moment. In practice I find the present moment extremely hard to be fully inside of. Encumbered as it is by my past baggage and future plans.
This is my gentle challenge to myself: Can I quiet Fear and heighten my attention to the feather? Make each present moment while I’m away more beautiful. A respite from pushing and chasing. Should-free.
Can I find that kindness the poem mentions and offer it to myself?
Two months ago, I tripped over a big old tree root while running and hurt my shoulder (I wrote about it here). The Urgent Care doc said that probably it was just a sprain and I should come back for an Xray and MRI only if the pain or mobility symptoms worsened in the next couple of days. I’m averse to medical tests, so that recommendation aligned with my own avoidant inclinations. Nothing worsened. So, I went about my life. As was possible. Given that I had severely restricted mobility and, yes, some pain, which I worked hard to minimize, going so far as to take fewer of the prescribed painkillers, to monitor my recovery, I told myself. Minimizing pain is an inherited trait. Discomfort was not to be acknowledged in my family.
More than a month after my shoulder injury, I finally started physical therapy. Although I already felt miles better, the therapist said she wouldn’t treat me without an Xray and MRI. The results were shocking (not just to me, also the doctor and the physical therapist). I had multiple fractures and partial tears. You know that feeling when you have just had a close shave and then afterwards you are shaky, thinking about what might have been? That’s how I felt when I got the MRI results, oh — that’s why my shoulder hurt so fucking much. The results gave me retrospective permission to feel all the pain I’d been in. Even though it was mostly gone by then. I realized that I’d been very tuned into what provoked more pain. But I was less tuned to the level of daily pain.
I would like to move beyond my inherited relationship with pain. And yet, here’s what I’m wondering: did not naming the pain, nor seeking an accurate diagnosis, help me? My recovery has gone better than expected. I’m not back to doing handstands or pull-ups. Yet. Eight weeks out, almost everything else is back, with only minor tweaky discomfort. I can throw on a jacket or wrestle off a sports bra without a significant extra physical negotiation. Running. Cycling. Yoga. Oh, yes, I am using lighter weights at the gym. I’m not that insouciant.
In an easy version of this scenario, I tell myself, see, not knowing healed me, the mind is powerful, trust the body over the scan. The reality is that I have no control case. I don’t know what would have happened to this shoulder if I’d had the MRI on day three instead of day thirty-two. Maybe I’d have been sent to surgery, immobilized properly, protected from re-injury, and healed faster and cleaner. Maybe the delay allowed me to heal in blissful ignorance. I can’t know.
Here’s a possibility I’m considering: Not knowing how bad my injury was meant I didn’t guard the shoulder the way I might have if a radiologist had handed me a list of exactly what was fractured and torn. I kept using my shoulder, to the extent my body allowed, without the extra layer of fear that comes from a diagnosis. Pain research talks about fear-avoidance, catastrophizing, the way bracing against a movement can cost you more function than the injury itself does. Maybe less fear meant less guarding, and less guarding meant more range of motion stayed available while the tissue healed.
At the same time, I’m suspicious of my own desire for my not-knowing to have helped, because that’s the version where I’m tuned into and trusting my body. I like that story. And I’m going to hold it loosely.
What I’ve learned from this incident is not, don’t get a scan. In fact, I’ll be more likely to get an early scan next time. And I want to create more permissive space for my pain to be real, no matter if there’s a diagnosis or not. At the same time, I want to stay tuned to my body and keep dancing with my potential fear and the threshold of what’s still possible.
The morning after I turned 60, I headed out on a run with my youngest brother who was in town. What a treat! And he pushes my pace. For the first bit, I felt fleet and strong. Flying. The kind of run where your feet barely seem to touch the ground, tiny levitation rockets in my shoes. And that was just a feeling, since my feet were clearly on the ground when I tripped over a tree root.
I went down hard, catching myself on my shoulder. The result: a badly wrenched shoulder and a pivot from a brisk 9-mile run to a nauseous crawl toward CityMD, arm cradled against my body.
Everything in me wanted to scream until my lungs gave out, why me? Beneath that was a darker feeling, too: that the universe had smacked me down, put me in my place. I had wanted too much. I had been too pleased with myself about still being strong, still being fast, still being the person who runs the morning after her 60th birthday. So, the universe decided to show me who was boss.
I was already prickly about 60. About a month ago, a young man I passed in the final kilometers of a 21k (he could not have been older than his early 30s) said, with dismissiveness: well, maybe when I’m 60. I didn’t hear past that snippet. I kept running. I hear versions of these casual dismissals of people based on their ages often. The unquestioned assumption that age is a one-way street, that it diminishes us.
Even with a hurt and hurting shoulder, I questioned. With difficulty.
The list of things I could barely do at first was graceless in its mundanity. Open a bottle. Get dressed (oh yes, including pulling up my pants after going to the bathroom). Brush my teeth. Grab a glass in the cupboard. Never mind trail running or mountain biking. Did I mention I was three days from leaving for two weeks in the Canadian Rockies? I had planned solitude and mountain time to contemplate my new decade.
I had to borrow rolling luggage, because I could not haul a pack on a wrenched shoulder, and I always travel with a pack on my back. My mountain bike stayed in my middle brother’s garage in Calgary. Still, the first full day there, I wrestled myself into a sports bra, shirt and hiking pants and ventured out. Cautiously. Arm in a sling. A few days later I packed the sling in my little backpack (which didn’t hurt to wear, it was getting the straps on that was the trick). Gradually, I transitioned to trail running shoes and worked myself up to a slow trot. Always aware of my arm.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been managing the background noise of persistent pain.
This is not how I pictured opening this new decade.
And yet. And yet.
Curbed in my go-go mountain enthusiasm, I moved at a pace that allowed me to bask more in all the signs of coming spring. The runoff streams that got deeper with every warming day, so that I had to find new ways to get across that particular bit of trail each time. I had space to think about what it means to cross this threshold.
Because it is a threshold, even if I am, rationally, the same person the day after my birthday as the day before. I have sat with my complicated feelings about being a person in my sixties now for three weeks and something is shifting or emerging from underneath all the accumulated detritus of the years and the immediate distress of the physical setback. It’s a feeling, a sensation, a way of being that is harder to name than fleet or strong or flying.
Out on the mountain trails each morning, even moving with more caution than usual, a feeling spread in me, as the sun moves quietly into the world each day. Grounded, yet light. Buoyant, yet stable. It feels like I have the right to be here without further justification or proof of worth.
This whatever-it-is-ness feels like an arrival. Or a coming home. Belonging. Did I arrive at this feeling because of the fall? Maybe. If I choose that version of the story, then I can silver line the fall and injury. Forced to slow down, woman discovers inner strength. Another part of me resists the patness of that explanation. Maybe I just fell. Because I run on trails and other uneven surfaces. A lot. Life happens.
My shoulder is healing. Not as quickly as I’d like. And when has any injury healed as quickly as we’d like? The pain is still there. Background noise every day. Wearing. And it is retreating. I can increase my effort. Mindfully. The mountains will still be there for next time. My bike will still be there.
I am still here.
Landed in a new decade. Not as elegantly as I might have liked. Penguin-style, which is to say, with awkward grace.
A few weeks ago, I shared my excitement about a longer run I’d done with a close friend, a runner and occasional running companion. Some context: as those of you who read my posts know, I’ve set myself the challenge of doing a 21k run once a month this year. This is a stretch, given I never ran that distance once last year and had foot surgery. It’s a challenge I think can complete. And each time I’ve set out so far this year, I’ve felt a frisson of fear. So, when I finish, I’m relieved, with a side dish of woohoo. When I shared, my friend said, with real frustration: “Every time I think I’ve done a good workout, I hear what you’ve done, and I feel like a loser.”
Crap. My first instinct was guilt. Am I a jerk? Why did I even need to say it? Did I offer the news in a showoff tone? Was my timing bad? Out for dinner on a Friday night. I am still thinking through how I might have said things better or whether I should have held off. I’m still examining my own motivations for sharing. Why do I even need to? (Even as I’m sharing my accomplishment here, too).
Sure, I know that the comparison isn’t mine to manage. Still, I don’t want to make my friend feel bad. Nor do I want to have the wind sucked out of my sails. The math her brain ran wasn’t her workout versus her goals. It was her workout versus mine. And she felt like she’d lost. And then I lost, too. Because comparison is a rigged game. Nobody wins.
This is happening all the time. Someone gets a promotion and we audit our own career, instead of truly celebrating their achievement. Someone posts a beautiful photo of themselves, and we scrutinize ourselves in the mirror, alert to everywhere the crow has stepped. The scoreboard is running 24/7 in the background, and we are behind.
I have those game announcer voices, telling me someone else has more. More success. More money. More love. More beauty. More … you name it. All of which can spiral me down the I’m not enough drain. So much noise.
When is anything enough?
I know. You know. We know. Enough is enough when we decide that it is so. We live in a maelstrom of enablers (hello social media), which inundate us with opportunities to compare and despair. The real accounting has to happen inside our own selves, or it will eat at us in perpetuity.
Our work is to find that tiny pause between the comparison and the collapse. My longtime mindfulness practice serves me here. When I give the voices space to rant and offer them gentle support. Plus, the slow accumulation of wisdom that comes from long years of repeatedly recognizing the fruitlessness of comparison.
There’s no finite supply of fitness, or success, or beauty, or achievement being divided up among us. My enough does not necessitate someone else’s not enough. Even if the voices inside our heads want us to believe that this life is a zero-sum game.
Oh, and also, when I told my youngest brother that I’d run my April 21k, he told me that he’d done seventeen (yes, 17) 21k runs already this year. Did I feel frustrated? Maybe the teeny, tiniest bit. Mostly, I thought, wow. He’s on a streak. Also, youngster!
On May 1st, I did my 21k for the month. I woke up with that pre-run anxiety. I arrived home on my doorstep with a thrill. A reminder of the joy that lives inside my body.
Cognitive surrender is an essential new term that’s arisen to describe the abdication of our own reasoning to a machine that sounds fluent, confident, and authoritative. Studies are showing that when people interact with AI tools, they accept flawed reasoning at a startling level (almost 75% of the time). Not because they don’t have the capacity to reason better themselves. But because it is easier not to question. As a writer, it will likely come as no surprise that I’m leery of outsourcing. I worry about dulling not just my cognitive capacity, even more so my creativity.
And, yes, I have started working with AI tools, because I also think it’s important to understand what these machines are all about and how I might use them in an un-surrendered manner. I almost used the word collaborate in that last sentence, instead of use. I chose not to, because I’m not yet ready to acknowledge these machines as entities. That feels like surrender. This from someone who is more than willing to see trees as sentient beings well before reading Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears.
I am exploring the border between surrender and leveraging these cognitive machines to free my time for deeper engagement with the world. More akin to my vacuum cleaner than a friend.
I have been thinking a lot about surrender in my body, too. Every time I read an article about aging and activity, which tells me that I should move more gently, now that I’m on the verge of a new decade, a part of me growls protectively. Not yet.
This physical version of surrender can be seductive. Messaging that encourages the little voices that say: I’m older now. Intensity is harder. Recovery is harder. Maybe I should just… let these things be harder. Be gentle with myself. Slow down. Stop. Lie down. The End. Okay—those last four are the hyperbole kicking in.The reasoning (without exaggeration) arrives fluently, confidently, with authority. And, as with AI reasoning, if I’m not careful, I might accept these blandishments about aging without interrogating the particularities of my own case.
I see the parallel this way: an authoritative-seeming signal in the form of an AI answer or an aging body; the availability of a path of least resistance; the ways that acceptance is not neutral, reshaping what we expect of ourselves and ultimately what we are actually capable of.
What the cognitive surrender research captures is that the problem isn’t using external tools. We humans have been off-loading cognitive tasks for a while now. Thank you, calculators. The red flag is what happens when we stop verifying. When silken reasoning substitutes for truth. When we accept not because we’ve evaluated, but because it’s so frictionless (and pleasant) to not expend the effort.
In the physical realm, adjusting our expectations as we age is not always surrender. Of course not. Surrender is unexamined acceptance. Letting the message of limitation go unchallenged. Sliding past the effort of finding out just what we are still capable of.
I turn 60 this year. I’d like to say I feel easy, breezy about that. I don’t. I’m in search of the right balance of grace and grit. I have set myself the goal of running a half marathon (21 kilometers or 13.1 miles) every month. Twelve months, twelve runs (among all the other runs I will do). When I was younger, that distance was a regular sized effort. Last year, I did not run that distance even once. And my year culminated in foot surgery in late November (which I wrote about here).
The decision has an element of stubbornness, to be sure. I am a Taurus, after all. On New Year’s Day, I started the year running 21k with my brother on mountain trails. I had a genuine concern that I would not run the whole distance. It took a while. I got it done. I was inspired. And so, this challenge. As I write this, four 21k are done. Eight to go.
I hear the voices that tell me: You’re not built for this anymore. I’m checking their veracity. They might be right. I might not be up for the challenge. I want to be gentle with myself, if I’m not. This is not about punishment. It’s about exaltation. The joy of discovering, each month, that I still have the capacity.
When I was a child, my mother always made us take the stairs. I remember glancing longingly at elevators as we passed them by. Now I live on the eighth floor, and I take the stairs almost every time I leave or come home. Not always. I’m realistic, not rigid. Not because I’m proving something. Because the habit of not surrendering has become its own kind of instinct. My mother was training something in me: the reflex to push gently against the available convenience, to stay curious about what I might actually be capable of.
The AI researchers found that people with higher fluid IQ scores were more likely to maintain their own judgment under pressure. I do not claim any extra intelligence. I think gentle resistance is more about habit. The habit of fact checking.
This is what I want to hold onto as I run my way through this year, one half marathon at a time. Not the delusion that there no limits that come with age. I have plenty. Instead, I want to cultivate the discipline of inquiry, to distinguish real limits from the limits that are presented with confidence, waiting for me to accept them without scrutiny.
My body, like a large language model, will tell me what it thinks I want to hear in smooth and reasonable tones. Rest. Take the elevator. Watch Netflix.
Sometimes my body is right. And I will be dancing with surrender and resistance, until I find the choreography that leads to graceful, gritty acceptance.
I can’t even remember exactly when I started meditating. It was somewhere in the early 2000s. I had a ghost-writing client who had a meditation practice and was writing about it. Or rather, I was writing about it for him. As him. That is, after all, what ghost writing is. So, in the spirit of understanding the mind from which I was supposed to be writing (that is, the mind of my client), I thought, I ought to meditate a little, to see what it’s all about.
At first, I meditated fitfully. There was no regularity in my practice and when I sat, my mind could not even grasp itself. The whole idea of watching my thoughts like so many passing clouds, as some meditation teachers proposed, was an image that did not speak to me. My thoughts were more like a rickety wagon, piled precariously high with junk, under constant threat of toppling, if the wheels didn’t just fall off first.
I found a low-key meditation center in New York City and went from time to time. Mostly with a friend. Every once in a while, on my own. Sometime before 2009, I recall doing a walking meditation on a misty summer day, during which I walked around the house my then-partner and I had in Vermont. Passing barefoot over grass and our pebbly driveway and flagstones. I might have done that meditation more than once. Not often enough that it rose to the level of ritual. I know it was before 2009, because we sold the house that year.
Still fitful, my practice was deepened by three silent meditation retreats and a vision quest. Again, I can’t quite remember when the first retreat was, possibly 2012. I do recall that after a retreat in October 2014, I joined the Insight Timer meditation app, which I’ve been on ever since. I remember the timing, because on my way home from the airport after the retreat, I had the conversation with my father in which he told me that he had decided to stop radiation treatment for his skin cancer. He died 6 months later.
At this point, my meditation was far from daily. Now and then, I would set myself a goal of 10 days in a row, which felt heroic. Then, at the end of 2018, following a teaching session about meditation with a group of friends (an experience we’d bid on at a gala), I set myself the goal of 30 days in a row. Never done before.
Now that I’m writing this down here, I see that was a step change moment in my practice. Since then, my meditation practice has been a succession of long periods of daily sitting, followed by no more than a month of not-quite-daily, then a return to daily practice.
Two shifts happened. I became conscious of whether I had meditated on any particular day. And, after much self-testing, I realized that, for me, longer than 10 minutes was not necessarily better and something was better than nothing. With these two shifts, meditation has become part of my daily routine, akin to drinking water, sleeping and brushing my teeth. A third and more recent shift, since I started living alone, is that I allow myself to meditate in bed first thing in the morning (or, if I’m not sleeping, sometime in the wee hours to help myself get back to sleep), instead of always getting up to sit on my cushion.
Here’s what has happened when I meditate almost daily. I’ve become more aware of my thoughts as they are arising. I can even find that sacred pause between thinking a thought and acting on that thought. Less often than I’d like. Which is okay, because the sacred pause is a lifelong practice.
Here’s what has not happened. The rickety wagon of junk is still there. Except now, I notice more of the distinct thoughts on the pile. Which means it is less precarious. Just noticing increases my capacity to be with uncomfortable thoughts without descending into self-laceration or lashing out at others.
Recently, I’ve been engaging even more specifically in the practice of noticing. My only goal in my meditation is to notice my thoughts. I’m listening to the same 20-minute meditation every morning, which begins with a body scan. This makes it easy to notice when my mind has wandered away and when it comes back.
On Monday, for example, I breathed in and said to myself, I am aware and breathed out and said to myself, I am aware of my feet. As instructed. My attention stayed enough in the meditation to get to breathing in and out and being aware of my thighs. But then I totally missed my pelvis, belly and heart, my attention returning to the meditation as I was being guided to breathe in and say to myself, I am aware and breathe out and say to myself, I am aware of my nose. What was I thinking when I should have been breathing in and out awareness of my midsection?
Here’s a random sampling of thoughts: My legs are tired. I don’t want to take the day off, because I only have a few days left before I leave the mountains and won’t be able to cross-country ski. I need to get caught up on email. My heart feels squeezed. I should have looked at email on the weekend. But it was so nice to read Greenwood instead. Do I love trees enough? Am I being genuine when I hug my tree at home? Did I miss the pelvis in this meditation? I still feel put off by how sharp M was with me on the phone. When will I mend the holes in my cross-country ski long johns? I don’t want to spend money on new ones. Why does my thumbnail grow back faster in that corner? Don’t forget to cut your nails today. I’m running short on tahini, so I’ll have hazelnut butter by itself on my toast and save the tahini for my roasted vegetables. Are we already at the nose? I miss my matcha. I’m lonely. How great is that bran muffin without raisins at Blondies? Why do people like raisins in muffins and other things, like cinnamon bread? Tragic. I miss my mother, even though she would never leave the raisins out. Should I wear the green sweater today? Why have I never heard that line before in this meditation?
And on and on it goes. Incredibly rarely I’ll have a moment, a glimpse, a nano-awakening to something important or simply touch a state of open awareness and connection with all that is. Mostly it’s about bran muffins and fingernails and emails.
So why do I meditate? Because of this: The practice of noticing that meditation enables creates space between thought and action. Even if that space is only infinitesimally larger than it was before, that space, that sacred pause, is the moment where I expand my self-compassion and my compassion for others.
That’s why I meditate.
Oh, and, also for the gold stars from Insight Timer. Tomorrow, all going well, I will hit a nice milestone of days in a row, which I won’t mention, because I don’t want to jinx my little dopamine hit.
I have not been flattened-out-sick since sometime before the pandemic. I’ve had covid twice and both times I was extremely lucky that the symptoms were so mild that I didn’t even stop working out. Then came this past Sunday. Flattened. Making it from the couch to the bathroom was a project. Retrieving my computer to watch a movie. A massive effort. My phone recorded zero steps. I thought I might have a sunburn, from spending so much time outdoors the day before on a sunny, frigid day (-15C), though I was careful with sunscreen. Then I realized that my face was fever-red. My head bursting. Coughing like my smoker grandparents. All plans (which I was so looking forward to) canceled.
At first, despite my level 9 discomfort, I didn’t want to believe I was sick. That’s why the sunburn theory, which lasted a red-hot minute (literally).
Even though I have an auto immune condition, I still want to believe that I don’t get sick. Oh, and I also don’t want to call my auto immune condition by its name, which contains the word disease. Addison’s Disease. As if, if I don’t say that word, then the condition will be less than it is. Which is medication three times a day for my life. Not to improve my quality of life. But to ensure that I live.
I especially didn’t want to be sick because on Saturday I ran a broken up 21k, which involved an outdoor run, followed by a treadmill workout, followed by two more blocks of running outdoors to get home. So, the run included all sorts of transitions from cold to indoors to subways to indoors to outdoors etc. I even finished the run with a pair of boots under each arm, that I’d picked up at the shoe repair 6 blocks from home.
One of my challenges to myself for this year is to run one 21k per month. Saturday (though the 31st) was my February 21k. Check. And then because that wasn’t enough, for good measure, I did a 2-hour walk with a friend in the afternoon. By the end of which, I was well and truly done with the cold.
I did NOT want to admit that my maximalist Saturday had turned out to be too much.
It was too much.
Can I allow that to be what it is? Penguin awkward! And not use it as something to criticize myself and my lack of fortitude?
A work in progress.
p.s this post is short and not polished as I would have liked, because … sick (I am, sigh) and out of energy.
I wasn’t going to choose a Word of the Year. Again. I struggled with choosing a word last year, too. I ended up with EASE, which, every time I thought about it over the last 12 months, stuck it’s tongue out at me. Hahahahaha. Not. I don’t want to be taunted by my word again this year. I decided to abdicate from the WOTY process (though my fellow bloggers have offered many lovely words here).
Then, lying in bed last night, my word came to me. PENGUIN. The thought started with this. What can I write about this month that will allow me to share the cute penguin photos from my South Africa sojourn over the holidays? This led me to think about penguin-ness. What it is about penguins, especially the knee-high penguins in sunny climes, not on polar ice, which is so irresistibly charming that even the coolest, most blasé, jaded, seen-it-all person will be delighted. (Side note movie recommendation: The Penguin Lessons. How a pet penguin can make you a better person, even or especially when living under an oppressive regime, such as Argentina in the 70s.)
Penguin-ness is that unique combination of utter grace in the water and goofy awkwardness on land. Not to mention the transition from swimming to standing in the shallows, which seems to involve making a tripod with their wings (more like flippers) and then walking forward. The way we walk forward out of a downward dog. Except the last bit of the journey to standing, when the penguins’ wings pop out of the sand and, Weeble-like, they pop upright.
Awkward grace. Graceful awkwardness. This is the essence of penguin-ness. Capturing the art of being with what is in life. The grace of so many moments. The awkwardness of so many of the very next moments. Their inextricability. The impossibility of constant grace. The inevitability of goofs … and grace.
Can I live into my penguin-ness this year? Goof or grace. Awkward or elegant. Prosaic or sublime. Be with what is. In this moment. And this one that comes next.
The foot surgery I mentioned last month has come and gone. I didn’t meltdown or freak out, except in the moment when the physician’s assistant was trying to put in the IV port and I got so stressed out that my veins went into hiding and I started to lose consciousness. The poor PA was mopping sweat from my face, forearms and shins, as he tried to keep me awake. The surgery itself was a black box, after the anesthesiologist said the words, I’m just going to start with something to calm y ... I woke up in the operating room, while they were vigorously swaddling my foot in a dressing, thick wads of cotton batting and a tenser bandage.
At home that evening, I kept waiting for the pain to hit, mindful that I’d been instructed to, Get ahead of the pain. There was none. Nor the next day. Or any day. There was no swelling either. The only mild discomfort I’ve had is when a shoe causes pressure or friction against the stitches on the top of my foot. I had prepared myself for immobility. Instead, after Friday afternoon surgery, I could walk around normally by later that evening on my one bare foot and one swaddled foot. If my steps were tentative, it was out of anticipation of the pain that did not arrive. I was surprised. After all of the everything around my auto-immune situation, I lost quite a bit of faith in my body’s ability to heal. With each hour that passed post-surgery, then each day, then week, now 10 days, my cup of healing faith is refilling. I wonder how much of the healing is due to my restored faith in my body’s ability to heal.
I diligently forced myself to stay on the couch over that first weekend. With no pain to remind me of why I needed to be sedate, by Sunday night I was feeling confined and itchy to move. I rode a Monday morning loop of Central Park on Citibike. I wore a surgical boot, to be safe. On Tuesday, I wore a sturdy, regular boot when I rode the same loop. Wednesday was on the Peloton (in running shoes, not bike shoes). And Friday, a week post-surgery, yoga (with modifications to upward dog, so as not to aggravate my stitches).
To be clear, although my foot looks ugly with stitches and bruising top and bottom (be glad I’m not sharing a photo), all of this activity is pain and swelling free. I am not pushing limits. I carefully re-read the post op instructions, which clearly say, weight bearing as tolerated. I was told to expect 2 weeks in a surgical boot, followed by 2 weeks in super sturdy shoes. I was told that maybe I could think about running after 6 weeks. Was my foot doctor just setting low expectations? It hasn’t even been 2 weeks yet and the challenge now is to resist the siren call of running. I see the doc tomorrow (if you are reading this on the first Wednesday in December, when it posts). I’m guessing (please please) that he will take out the three stitches. He really adhered to the minimally invasive promise of the surgery with his tiny incisions, each of which only required one stitch. I’ve promised myself to do nothing over-exuberant until I see him.
Which is hard, because I am bursting with astonished gratitude at this moment. All I want to do is dance and run and jump up and down, to test how much better my foot feels. I can feel how much more mobility there is. How the pain that I had is gone. I can stand on my tippy toes, for the first time in several years.
I tell myself that I should moderate my hopes. After all, my toe also has a bunion and arthritis. Even as another part of me is jumping ahead, wondering, if my foot can heal like this, then what about my Addison’s Disease? Finding the balance of faith in my body’s ability to heal and being realistic about what’s possible is delicate. Some people say that faith is everything. While I believe that faith counts for a lot, I don’t think that my belief in my own healing is enough on its own.
Things I’m wondering:
Is faith a virtuous cycle, in which the faith in healing supports the healing?
Is it more than a virtuous cycle, as in, without the faith the healing cannot happen?
How far can faith go, as in, why does it seem to pertain to my foot and not my auto immune situation? I had a lot of faith I could be cured of the Addison’s. At first. Now, that faith has gotten complicated. How do I untangle the knotty question of whether my patience with a longer road to recovery is faith, or resignation to my fate?
And is this faith I’m talking about just another word for control? A veiled way of satisfying the human hunger for control over our lives?
One last wondering, can faith harm my healing? I have an answer to this one. Yes. If I use faith as an excuse to not actually follow medical protocols. I did that in the beginning with the Addison’s. Going off my medication. Against doctor’s orders. Believing that I could cure myself with infusions, supplements, meditation and a positive attitude. That didn’t work. Now I’m on my medication. Diligent and compliant. Mostly. Plus, meditation, faith, vitamins and supplements. That really works.
So, for my foot, weight bearing as tolerated. That’s working so far. I’ll see the doc tomorrow. A little girl part of me is bringing him my foot, as if it is a drawing from school, wanting him to be impressed by my healing. Pin it up on the fridge. Give my faith a boost. What if he just says, yup, this is what I expected? It changes nothing about my condition. Puts a question mark in the power of my faith.
Maybe the trick is to have faith and hold it lightly. Faith will intervene when appropriate and only it knows when that is.
My right big toe is in pretty much constant pain, varying from low level to limp level. High heels are out of the question now. Back in May, I gave away all my highest heels, preserving only a few less vertiginous favourites. Still, I can’t actually wear any of those shoes or boots that I held in reserve, because I can’t bear the agony. I can run though, without excessive pain. Which is brilliant. Also, the reason I haven’t done anything more than a couple of cortisone shots and orthotics to alleviate my toe situation. Until now.
Because I’ve started to notice other small, and troublesome, tweaky pains and imbalances, which I’m guessing are related to all the micro adjustments I make all the time to evade the pain in my toe. Tightness in my left lower back. A weird discomfort in my right thigh muscle. Strange weakness in my psoas when I take first steps into a run. You get the picture. As hard as I try not to adjust my gait, I know that’s impossible. I remember my mother being wildly insulted when an acupuncturist commented on her limp (the result of a fall that shattered her pelvis and shoulder). Meanwhile, I was surprised that she wasn’t aware of her limp. All to say, I know that my gait is not right, even if I think I’m walking “normally.” And then I imagine how much that gait distortion is magnified over the miles of running I still do.
Yes, I could stop running completely. That would go a long way to alleviate the pain. But I’d also have to cut out long walks, hiking, cross country skiing and snowshoeing. I’m not ready. I am resisting the urge to elaborate on the hundred ways giving up these outdoor communions with nature and my body are essential. I’ll just say this: These activities and ways of being are intrinsic to my wellbeing. Especially (!) as I navigate my aloneness, which I’ve been exploring of late (here, here and here).
My foot doctor has offered me a solution. Not the one I expected. He has recently developed a new bunion surgery. I hoped it would be for me. I was ruled out immediately, because I also have arthritis in the same toe. And he told me that neither the bunion, nor the arthritis were likely the source of my pain. I apparently have some protruding bone on my toe joint, some of which has broken off and is floating, which obstructs my ability to bend my toe. Causing pain, and, of course, inflammation, causing further pain. A vicious cycle. You get the picture. Because, yes, I am constantly bending my toe. It is one of those movements intrinsic to much of human movement.
Minimally Invasive Cheilectomy. That’s the name of the surgery. It’s not covered by my insurance. Because in the United States, pain is not considered a good enough reason for a procedure. Alleviating pain is only for those who can afford it. Which I can. With some significant sacrifice. And it’s worth it, because, well, intrinsic to my wellbeing and human movement and all that. I recognize that I am lucky to be able to make a choice to prioritize the surgery.
I’m scared, too. What if it doesn’t work? What if I spent the money for nothing? The pain persists and I can’t do the activities that support my wellbeing and elevate my solitude. Even if the surgery works, complications could arise related to my auto-immune condition, Addison’s Disease. I need to work out the correct stress dosing of hydrocortisone between my endocrinologist and foot doctor. That feels daunting.
Hands reaching toward each other Farioni on Unsplash
Undertaking this procedure alone is scary. The little girl who still lives inside me wants someone to hold her hand on the way there and on the way home. The last time I had foot surgery, I came out the other side of the anesthesia to my partner picking me up and hanging out with me during my recovery. Of course, I can get home in an uber on my own and order in food. Plus, no one will have to endure my worried freak outs about the surgery. Or my restless homebound agitation. I can meltdown to exhaustion, without bothering anyone. Except me. Still, this all taps into a latent fear of dying alone in my apartment and no one finding me for weeks.
Oof. That’s a lot. Thank you for allowing me to share that.
Now that I’ve put all these fears into words, on this page, it all feels more manageable. One step at a time (even if some of those steps are in a surgical boot).
