Step By Step…
My knee was injured for the first time while playing high school football during my senior year. I hurt it again playing football in college. The years that followed consisted of more pain, more stiffness, more swelling, less running, and fewer walks. Then one day in my mid-thirties, I couldn’t run at all anymore or take long walks without a knee brace. When I hit forty the knee brace stopped being effective. I have been experiencing knee pain since I was 18 years old. I got so used to it that it became a part of me. Years ago, after a particularly long and grueling hike in Glacier National Park, I stripped off my clothes and plunged myself into a stream. The water felt so good. I held onto a boulder and let the current wash over my body. I think about that moment often because I knew that my body needed me to take better care of it. It took another decade but I finally listened and had a partial knee replacement on March 13th, 2023.
Currently, the pain is like nothing I have ever experienced. My right knee is swollen beyond what I thought was possible. The tightness, the throbbing, and the sharp pangs are all a constant and according to my doctors, there is only more pain to come. It’s an odd thing knowing that the worst hasn’t arrived yet. I can’t find a comfortable position in bed most nights so I pace around until giant tears roll down my cheeks. I have not cried like this since my dog Bernie died in October of 2021. As much as that loss hurt those tears were from a different source. That pain came from my spirit, these tears are coming from deep, deep down in my cells, from my DNA.
I was not ready for this at all! I thought I was, but I was very wrong. Over the years, my ego and my tolerance for pain have been intertwined more than I would like to admit. I have taken pride in my ability to withstand both physical and mental abuse. It is, quite frankly, stupid. I was not raised to be like this. I was brought up in a loving home and still developed such a hard shell of protection that I stopped being able to feel much of anything, just preparing for the next hardship, injury, and disappointment. I may have been raised with love but I grew up in the 80s and during that time, you rubbed some dirt on it and you kept it pushing.
I have been in therapy long enough to know that some of the responses and protections I developed over the years are there for a reason; survival being the main one. There are too many examples of people who look like me having their chapters cut short and I want my story to be a tome when my time is at an end. But for now, I have to learn how to walk again, and if I’m learning how to do that I might as well learn/re-learn some other things. There was a time, long ago, when I felt my feelings without shame or judgment. They came and then they went and I lived my life. I don’t need to nor do I want to tolerate pain anymore. If something hurts, I need to address it and not with dirt. If someone does something that is hurtful, I need to address them and not just keep it pushing. Life is too long and too short to live that way if you don’t have to.
This pain will eventually pass. But I am in the middle of it now, and it hurts. After a lifetime of taking walking for granted, I find myself back in chapter one. I’ve been here before, it’s familiar to me. I start with baby steps, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other and see where I end up.
