The Road

I'm training for the Philly half-marathon and had to do my eight mile run today. It's beautiful out, but it still took effort to drag myself out the door and off to the Schuylkill River. I've never run eight miles before, and it can be difficult to get motivated if you're running alone. I got on the trail and the road seemed endless out in front of me. As my feet hit the pavement, images flashed through my head of the past four years. Recovering from each new surgery, re-learning how to walk three separate times. Each time I would drag myself out the door and hit the trail on crutches, a cane, and finally my own two feet. During those times, the road seemed endless too. I felt as hard as I tried, as strong as I was, I could never reach the end of that road. All I could do was keep my head down and power through each step.

Today the sun was out and the leaves were turning, and I kept my head up to absorb everything around me. The river ran along next to me as I traveled further and further. And would you believe somewhere around mile 4 a monarch butterfly flew along with me for a few seconds? If you recall this post from almost exactly a year ago, you'll understand my life continuing to come full circle.

The road used to be so frightening to me because it was boundless and I never knew when or if I could get off it. Now I'm realizing that's the beauty of it. The road stretched out in front of me and I released my feet and just ran. For the first time, I enjoyed how limitless it was. Because this time I could keep running.

Transitions

My life is currently in a series of transitions. I'm transitioning from suburban life to city life, from a familiar home to a new apartment. I'm transitioning from an employee to a student. Most importantly, I'm transitioning from a patient to a practitioner. Granted this transition will take me three long years, but the process is beginning. The problem with transitions is you cannot simply forget the past.

I'm having some difficulties moving from the patient mindset. This is because I still have pain and frustrations about what exactly is occurring with my body. Sitting through classes is quite difficult at times. It seems like my piriformis muscle refuses to relax, no matter how much I stretch it, stim it, or ice it when I get home from school. I'm looking into pelvic floor therapists in Philadelphia and will hopefully find some time to make improvements.

Don't get me wrong, my pain levels have tremendously decreased from a year ago. The combination of hip and pelvic surgeries, as well as the proceeding physical therapy and the intense prolotherapy injections into trigger points have made the pain much more liveable.

I think today was an especially emotional one because we covered the pelvis and pelvic floor muscles in Anatomy class. On the one hand, I was ecstatic because it's structures and muscles I'm so familiar with, which will give me time to catch up on previous lectures. On the other hand, it was difficult to sit through- mentally and literally. When we talked about the ischial tuberosities, I was more aware of the pressure and pain emanating from my own sit bones. When we talked about the pubic symphysis, I was more aware of the scars covering that area on my body, and the erosion of the bone I'm dealing with. We talked about the obturator internus, which I know too well how that feels to be internally palpated and worked on by a therapist. Finally we spent a great deal in the powerpoint talking about the piriformis and how it is the reference point of the pelvic region. Slide after slide, I stared it down, almost challenging it. This is my great enemy, who I will do everything in my power to finally defeat. I'm determined to learn everything I can so that I am no longer at its mercy. And so that I can effectively treat my own patients one day.

Just a side-note: now that I'm in school, I have less time to answer the personal emails I receive. Please know that I read each and every one, as well as all the comments you leave. You are not alone. And if you ever find yourself in Philadelphia, drop me an email and we can get coffee.

Power
 
Living     in the earth-deposits     of our history

Today a backhoe divulged    out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle     amber   perfect   a hundred-year-old
cure for fever     or melancholy     a tonic
for living on this earth    in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered     from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years     by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin     of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold     a test-tube or a pencil

She died    a famous woman    denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds    came    from the same source as her power

                    -Adrienne Rich


I came across this poem today because I am reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed, a grief-stricken and lost woman who decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail to find catharsis. She is completely unprepared and ends up carrying a ridiculously heavy pack. Later on in her journey she is given some help on what items she can get rid of to lighten her load. She relented on most things except her copy of The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich. She brought other books as well, but was able to burn chapters as she read them. But there was something in this book that she safeguarded and there was some reason she carried it thousands of miles. I wanted to know why. I felt connected to Cheryl a few pages in because she was a female backpacker, choosing a poetry book as her lone companion. It had to be pretty special.

After no luck in a used bookstore, I decided to cross the street and search in Barnes and Noble. Lo and behold, there was one copy left. Too curious to find a table, I plopped myself down on the carpet. Tall bookshelves rose above me as I turned to the first poem. It was the same poem Cheryl turned to her first night on the trail. It was perfect.

digging through notebooks

I found this entry in one of my notebooks, dated 2/25/12 and wanted to share it.

I have been gone a long time. Updating is getting difficult for me because I find I'm distancing myself from past horrors. And even though there are still health obstacles to overcome, I find it easier not to write about it. I want to enjoy life and relish in this happiness. For months now, I wake up in the morning feeling happy. Truly happy. For a period of time, the joyous emotions were so overwhelming that I would cry. Not just a few tears either. I opened my eyes each morning, and felt such a dramatic reduction in pain that I bawled. It was a right I thought I'd never get back.

The crying did not stop there. Life became dramatic- the sunlight caressing a tree a certain way would move me to tears. One day I was walking down the streets of Philadelphia with my sister and started crying without any sort of trigger. Luckily my sister was used to these reactions and told me to pull it together because we were about to walk into a pizza parlor to meet all her teammates. And it's best not to meet twenty girls on your sister's crew team when you're bawling your eyes out. Because then they'll want to know what's wrong and you'll have to tell them that nothing is wrong. In fact, things are wonderful. And they won't believe you and then you'll become that weird older dramatic sister that they try to avoid.

Luckily I pulled it together and no one was the wiser.

The frequency of these episodes has greatly been reduced over the past months. But they'll still happen if the trigger is good enough.

Many people have been writing to me asking me if my pain is gone. I'm still undergoing intense prolotherapy treatments, but I feel they are helping. I am being patient and putting faith in my doctor and my body to heal itself. But I don't want to talk about that today.

I remember years ago being so frustrated by all the depressing stories of women I found online. I realize now that writing is very therapeutic when you are struggling. People tend to stop when they are doing well. I think we just want to forget this ever happened to us and are anxious to go back to the way things used to be. This is of course impossible because we have been forever changed.

I wanted to write this post to give strength to anyone fighting a difficult battle right now. I remember how hard it used to be. I remember hitting my arms, bruising them repeatedly to try and distract myself from the pain. I remember driving in the car and thinking how easy it would be to turn the wheel slightly and escape from the pain.

I remember specific nights, crying on the floor, wondering how I was going to get through another day. If I only knew the happiness, the elation that I would feel just a year later. I couldn't whisper in my ear back then, so I'm whispering in your ear now.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever your battle, however long it's been happening, keep going. Keep going. You can't give up when you don't know what tomorrow will bring.