Healing

Yesterday, I went on a 3.6 mile hike at Eno River State Park.

This may not sound like a major accomplishment or even very exciting. But I broke my left foot at the end of July. Slowly, often painfully, usually whiningly, I've been nursing it -- and the rest of my body -- back to a state of health.

After 4 weeks in a cast, my leg looked just as disgusting and shriveled as everyone said it would. When I tried to "walk" out of the doctor's office, I'd grown so used to the crutches, so used to not bearing weight on that side, that it was like they'd attached a totally foreign limb in a place it didn't belong. I commanded it to move, and it flopped limply in front of me. When I tried to take a step, the foot barely grazed the ground's surface -- my crutches took over by instinct. It was a little like flying.

It wasn't long before I was daring myself to see how far I could walk without my crutches. Within a few weeks, I was walking nearly everywhere. But I began noticing, apart from the expected soreness and stiffness in my leg, that my neck hurt, my back hurt. With my entire body overcompensating for my left leg's shortcomings, I could barely sleep some nights from the tension in my muscles. I began doing toe raises, climbing stairs, but halfheartedly and therefore without much success. It had been six weeks, for Pete's sake. The doctor had said it would only take 4. I must be crippled for life. Oh, God, what if my neck hurts forever?

But it didn't. It went away quite naturally after a few more weeks (patience, many will tell you, is not my strongest virtue). And along the way I began to marvel at the fact that a bone in my body had been broken -- broken, snapped in two -- and that now it wasn't. The human body is amazing, but wow, do you know HOW amazing? My body fixed itself. It regenerated, just like a science fiction movie, without any instruction from me, and in fact quite despite my insistence to overuse my tenderly healed foot. My body fixed itself.

So yesterday I walked in the woods and communed with turtles and cranes and my bones to celebrate. I haven't walked so much since the days before my fall, actually, when I was wandering Europe, miles at a clip. It felt full circle, somehow, like I'd been living on hold until that moment. I am done. I am here again.

Remember, Christy: Time. Patience. Wounds heal.