Yesterday, I faced two big fears: bridges and running. This was a big deal on both fronts. There is one bridge, in particular, that scares the bejeezus out of me; the
, which spans the Penobscot River between Prospect and Verona Island in the bay of my home town. I don’t even like to drive across this bridge. I avoid it like…well, like a
. I refer to it as “The Bridge of Death,” and not because
. It—and its predecessor, the Waldo-Hancock Bridge—have always filled me with a deep sense of deadly, deadly foreboding. I would no sooner walk (or run) across that bridge than I would volunteer to be buried alive.
And the running…why fear running? Especially someone like me, who was a multi-season All-State athlete, who loves to train, to compete, to run and to play—why fear a run? There are two reasons. The first is a fear based on past injuries. It’s a sort of nameless, generalized fear. I’m not sure I specifically fear another injury, or fear that I’ll aggravate an old one; although maybe that’s it. It’s hard to say, exactly, but the thought of road races—something I used to enjoy—triggers a feeling of panic and dread. My psyche does not want to experience the things I’ve gone through, with injuries, again.
I have injured my right knee severely, twice. The first time in 1999 while training for the San Francisco marathon. I tore something in the tenth mile of a twelve-mile training run just two weeks before the race. I finished all twelve miles of the run, limping through the last two, and I wound up having surgery instead of running the marathon. The rehab was long and painful and I never fully recovered the strength or muscle-mass in that leg.
The second injury, to the same knee, was even more severe. In 2007, I was in the best shape I’d been in since the marathon training injury in 1999, and then one horrible afternoon in June, I slipped on wet paint during a backyard volleyball game—the last point of the day!—and severed my ACL. In one horrible twist, that ligament was ripped fully off my femur, and I hit the ground with so much impact, I bruised the bone.
For eight months I was in terrible pain, and all alone in that pain. No comfort, no assistance, no support. The first few weeks were a struggle to survive, as I couldn’t drive, my knee was swollen like a grapefruit, I was in terrible pain, and there was no one to help me do simple things, like get food or do dishes or get the laundry up and down two flights of stairs. I remember asking an old friend if she could spare half an hour to help me one day and she said, “No.” She had to study for her bar exam. Everyone I asked was usually too busy and I sank into a deep and desperate despair and gave up asking. While I know that things are different now—I have Peter, friends and family, who would help me--the experience of being utterly destitute, living in a constant level 8-to-9 pain, and being so very hungry, are scars on my psyche that may never heal. To run a race, I have to face all of that deeply ingrained life-threatening terror.
I didn’t have reconstructive surgery after the ACL tear because I have a non-ACL-dependent knee, it turns out. The orthopedic surgeon said my right knee was as stable as it could be, under the circumstances, and surgery would not improve it. I did a lot of painful, grueling rehab, but since that day almost seven years ago, when my ACL snapped, I have been afraid to run or play any sports. I lost a huge part of myself that year.
I have always been a person who enjoyed sports and running very much. Tennis? Volleyball? Football? Count me in! I am an athlete. In the same way I am a woman, a Smithie, an American—“athlete” is inextricable from who I am. I’ve never been the greatest at endurance, but when I injured my knee the first time, I was doing well; a six-mile run was an easy day. I was never the fastest distance runner; a ten-minute-mile training pace for anything over 5K was about the best I could do. But I loved it.
All through my twenties, I was still playing in recreational volleyball, basketball and elite soccer leagues in Northampton or San Francisco. But since 2007, I have felt afraid. My knee often hurts and feels unstable. It makes bad noises and it just doesn’t feel safe to do anything with quick stops, starts, or pivots—or anything that requires pounding the pavement.
And, worse than that, there is a second aspect to my fear of running. This fear is dark, specific, and rational. Ever since 2007, I have been unable to recover from exertion.
You may think that’s an overstatement; or perhaps it’s a statement that just confuses you. How can a person not recover from exertion? If you think either of these things, it’s because your body does it for you without you having to think about it. My body no longer does.
I injured my knee in June of 2007. That same month my truck (to which I had a deep emotional attachment) died, my beloved cat Calvin died at the age of 12, and I turned 35. I was suffering terrible physical and emotional pain, and was completely alone, as well as financially strapped. I worked very hard to keep myself alive, to heal, but I wasn’t doing well. In August, I saw a psychiatrist about my depression and he put me on a very small dose of Prozac. Over the next three weeks, I gained 30 pounds without changing diet or exercise. The depression did not lift, but I gained 16 inches on my waist and three cup sizes in my bra. And I became unable to recover from exertion.
I went back to the psychiatrist who took me off the Prozac, but none of my symptoms improved. I have spent the last seven years seeing doctor after doctor, specialist after specialist looking for answers. Most of them told me to exercise more and eat less. When I told them I was already on a low-calorie diet and that I couldn’t exercise because it made me sick, they didn’t believe me.
“You are constitutionally flawed,” said the prestigious endocrinologist I’d waited months to see. “There is nothing western medicine can do for you.” He didn’t do a single blood test. No lab work. Just looked at me, listened to my heart and my lungs, asked me about my medical history (starting from the day I was born) and then rendered his verdict.
I once told a friend that I was frustrated because exercising made me sick. “It’s like I’m allergic to exercise,” I confided to her.
She laughed. “I know, right? Nobody likes exercise.”
“No,” I said. “My body actually does get sick. It’s like I have the flu.”
She winked. “Exercise makes me sick, too.” No one seemed to understand.
I got a similar reaction from almost all of the doctors and nurses I saw. I couldn’t make them understand.
So when I decided to run across that bridge yesterday, as part of the
Bridge the Gap race, I was not only facing my fear of that (terrible) bridge and the nearly uncontrollable urge I have to fling myself off it every time I’m on it (not from suicidality, just because that’s what happens to me with heights), I was also facing my fear of losing the next three weeks of my life. I was facing my fear of collapse and embarrassment. I was facing my fear that I am old, constitutionally flawed, and will never be able to run again.
I set the goal to run that race—just the Fun Run, the first mile across the bridge, not the 5K or the 10-mile—the year before. I began training in October, running diligently every single day on my elliptical machine. I started gently, very gently, running five minutes each day, slow and easy. And I was overjoyed that I was okay! No flu! No symptoms. I could do five minutes a day—about 6/10 of a mile—and be fine. I was overjoyed.
This small bit of daily running was possible because in 2013, I finally found
a nurse practitioner who believed me. She not only believed me, she immediately recognized my symptoms and knew what to do. While it has been expensive and hard work, and while I still have a long way to go, for me, in this particular body, at this time in my life, the ability to run five gentle minutes a day, every day--it was like summiting Everest. I loved it. I gave exuberant reports to my nurse practitioner and to Peter. It was exciting.
In November, I moved up to six minutes a day—7/10 of a mile. In December, seven minutes a day, 8/10 of a mile. January, eight minutes a day, 9/10 of a mile. I was doing great, and I was on target to be able to run the mile-long race over the bridge in April. This was happening!
One of the things I have done with my improved health and wellness is to join a volunteer fire department. It is remarkable that since 2011, I have gone from wheel-chair-dependent to yoga teacher and firefighter—and I had set my sights on being a runner again, an athlete who could do things.
Every now and then, I would look at my situation and feel embarrassed and demoralized. Who has to train with this much devotion and dedication to run
one mile? But the key to my recovery has been, in part, a compassionate approach to understanding the biomechanics of my system. An essential part of my healing has to be compassion; anything else only stresses my system and actually makes the problem worse. Being ashamed of my size, my limitations—this only increases my size and my limitations. Shame does not serve me.
What I understand now, thanks to the insights of my wise young nurse practitioner and the very helpful book
Are You Tired and Wired? (Marcelle Pick), is that I am not “constitutionally flawed.” My body had a very natural, very understandable, very treatable reaction to prolonged, unremitting stress. I have endured so much stress and trauma in my life, right from the very beginning, that by 2007, I was poised for collapse. It’s really a miracle that I made it that far. With all of the intense physical and emotional stressors that exploded that summer, and the addition of the Prozac, my system “flatlined,” as Pick would say. I demonstrated all of the classic symptoms.
In August of 2013, I took a diagnostic quiz (
Are You Tired and Wired? pp 57-58). A score of 26 or more would have indicated that I was suffering from severe adrenal dysfunction. My score was
83. Why had no other doctors put this together before?
I decided I couldn’t think about that question.
“Aren’t you angry?” my sister-in-law asked one day, as I shared with her what I’d learned and how much it was helping me. And I realized, I wasn’t. I was too grateful for what was happening now to think about all the ways in which those other practitioners failed—and even harmed—me.
This run across the bridge was going to mean something big. It was going to mean that I could be well. It was going to mean that if I am slow and steady and faithful, I will, perhaps, one day be a person who can go jogging, bike-riding, hiking again. It represented my commitment to rise up out of helplessness, fatigue, and despair, and cross that bridge to wellness.
My future felt bright and I felt elated each month when I added another minute to my daily run and remained without side effects. But then, on January 6th, I had an accident during firefighter training. I
suffered a concussion and a severe neck sprain with repercussions for not only my cervical spine, but my thoracic spine and shoulders. The blow was so hard and at such an angle that the damage was extensive.
The next three months were a nightmare of pain, sadness, brain fog, and isolation. There were many aspects of the injury and the worker’s comp bureaucracy attached to it, which were unbearable. Not only did I no longer have access to firefighting, I also did not have access to yoga, to my students. I couldn’t teach or practice. And I couldn’t do my daily run.
The Bridge the Gap race I had set my sights on was going to come, and it looked like I was not going to be able to do it. And yet…a few weeks prior to the race, I was finally cleared by my doctor to return to full-duty with the fire department on a trial basis. My physical therapist encouraged me to resume normal activity and see how it felt. I was afraid to climb back onto my elliptical machine. Afraid to face the inevitable losses; afraid to experience how winded, and weak and tired I’d be; afraid of the potential return of the flu-like side affects; I was afraid to begin losing days again.
During the worst days of my injury, in January, my concussion combined with my migraine disorder, made it impossible for me to think. Literally, if I formed thoughts or if I used my eyes to watch TV or read or even look out the window, it would trigger cascading migraines, blinding, searing, indescribable migraines. The only thing I could do was to lie in restorative yoga postures, close my eyes, and listen. Listening would keep my mind from forming thoughts. Music made me too emotional, so I listened to stories. Story after story after story. Whatever I could get my hands on. I even listened to James Earl Jones read the bible. (There sure is a lot of “begetting” in that book.)
My brain injury, combined with the loss of income, the loss of almost everything I held dear, the heartless and crazy-making bureaucracy of worker’s compensation, and the pain--good God, the pain…it was too much. I was struggling, all day, every day. And then one day, I had a thought. It was like a key clicking into a lock. “Kill myself.” I felt a wave of relief. The world felt so simple, so clear. I can’t accurately describe the rightness of this thought. Nothing in my whole life had ever felt so purely correct, so absolutely, perfectly right as that thought. If we had had a handgun in the house, I’m certain I would no longer be here. For some reason, it had to be a gun, in this thought. It was so simple, like opening a door if you wanted to go outside. Why wouldn’t you?
Because my gun is a .22 rifle, it wouldn’t do the job. My mind then went to the bridge, as a second thought. Without a brain injury, and without the exacerbating forces of the nightmarish experience of trying to work through a worker’s comp claim—a process my occupational medicine doctor describes as “uniquely adversarial,” and which, according to him, drives everyone (100% of his patients who have to deal with it for more than three weeks) into a deep, unrelenting depression, so much so that he asks everyone to take a sanity questionnaire when they visit and he keeps referral cards for suicide hotlines in his office—without those things, I would not have had that thought. I’m certain of it. It wasn’t like me.
I know for certain that were I to have had a suicidal thought, without the influence of the brain injury or the inhumanity of the worker’s comp maze, I would have thought of gas or pills or something really gentle. I am not a girl who would shoot anyone—or anything—especially myself; and I am not a girl who would willingly step foot on a bridge if there were any other alternative. The fact that guns and bridges felt right to me shows, even more than the suicidality, that something in my brain was absolutely not functioning normally. Without a properly functioning brain, we are at the mercy of thoughts we have no way to control.
So it was the lack of a pistol in my home, more than anything else, that saved me from dying that day; and it was my experience as a first-responder,
looking for the body of a man who had jumped from that bridge, that kept me from jumping that day myself. My misfiring brain was, thank goodness, able to at least put these thoughts together. First, that my gun couldn’t get the job done, so don’t try; and second, I could remember the experience of being out on the water looking for a body; I knew what that was like, and because of that and only that—the thought that I couldn’t possibly ask Bobby or Julia or John or Casey or Dave to go out into the bay to recover my body—I lived. My malfunctioning brain was able to find those two logical thoughts within its buggy programming, and it saved me: “The gun won’t work" and, "You can’t hurt your first-responders; you
love them.”
Once I’d made it past that thought, which took about 18 hours, it was like putting on a new skin. I shed my injured, crazy skin, the one that had been created on the day my skull rammed into that fire truck, and I stepped forward, lighter, more peaceful, and aware that I needed to meditate—and pray—if I were going to hold myself together. I would stop fighting for anything from worker's comp. I would pay my own way. None of this was worth dying for. It became a life-and-death battle and I wanted to make certain that my brain knew to choose "life."
Eventually, I developed a new daily practice, of meditation, mantra, and prayer, and I have done this without fail. In the same way that I ran every day before I was injured, I have come to my meditation, mantra and prayer each day with devotion.
And it was this—more than anything—that got me to the bridge yesterday. I was afraid to face the place where my friend’s sister had jumped, just a few days after I decided not to; I was afraid to face the place where I almost jumped. I was afraid of hurting my knee. I was very afraid of collapsing half-way across and suffering the humiliation of publicly demonstrating that I could not run a mile. And I was afraid of losing weeks of my life to the recovery process, even if I did make it across.
But here’s something else I’ve learned from yoga and volunteering as a firefighter:
I can do it. It doesn't matter what it is; if I decide to do it, I can do it. I can do 108 Sun Salutations, if I set my mind to it. I can stand on my feet for hours at a training or a fire scene, knowing it will take days or weeks to recover, that my knee will swell and my body will ache, and I can do it. I can even
smile while I’m doing it. And I can go out, in the cold and the rain in a tiny little boat and look for a body under the bridge, even though every single one of those things terrifies me. I know this about myself. I know it so deeply that even when I was lost in the confusion of a battered brain, I accessed that knowledge.
When I meditate, I meet myself in the place inside myself where I know I’m okay. I know how to get to that place because I have worn a steady path to it, day by day by day. I know how to be confident in my ability to get things done, difficult things, and I know how to breathe. Thanks to my meditation and yoga practice, when I decided to run yesterday, all the buzzing fear stayed out around the edges, and the only thing that existed was the here and the now, this breath, this footstep, this moment, this me.
And that’s how I ran the race, the same way I meditate. Inhale, count to four, exhale, count to four. I just did that, over and over and over. I kept my eyes straight ahead, I put one foot in front of the other--and I let myself be loved. My friends,
my students, had come to be with me in this. They ran with me, on either side and behind, and one was waiting at the finish line. And so, I was transported, across the Bridge of Death, one footstep, one breath, (one silently uttered curse), at a time, until I was on the other side.
I often tell my students, we can get through anything—get over or under or beyond anything—if we do it one breath at a time. We can bridge any gap this way, if we are kind to ourselves, if we are devoted, and if we have the courage to try.
Post Script: I was among the last to cross the bridge yesterday, having been outrun by at least a dozen small children, but it didn’t matter at all that I was nearly last. I have never been the sort of athlete who needs to win. I love winning, don’t get me wrong, but what I love most of all, is excellence; I love doing my best, and that is what I did yesterday. My best is measured only against myself.
It was important to me to prove to myself that I had the heart to do this without stopping. No matter how much my body screamed in protest, I wanted my willpower to keep me going. And it did. My body was not in good enough shape for that run, but I made it do it anyway, and for an athlete, that is a victory.
For a person recovering from severe adrenal fatigue, unfortunately, it is not a victory; it’s a setback. Within ten minutes of finishing the race, my body’s immune response was bull-blown. My nose was running like someone had turned on the tap. I was sneezing incessantly. I drove myself home, drank water, took homeopathic remedies. My eyes and throat itched, my sinuses tingled non-stop, as though I’d just sniffed pepper. I had lots of energy and enthusiasm for about an hour, but then the collapse took hold. By the time Peter came home from work three hours later, I was in bed, too weak to move. Face raw, already, from hundreds of nose-blows. My head was stuffy, my chest was burning, my voice was nasal and scratchy, and I was so weak I could barely lift my head.
I had taken a Claritin the night before. I took two Benadryl when the allergy-like symptoms began to peak. It didn't really help. Peter fed me. And I kept drinking water and taking homeopathics. I was glad I had triumphed over the bridge, but so incredibly sad that my body was collapsing. I lost all of Sunday. I took more Benadryl at bedtime, along with a Flexoril, and I turned off my emergency dispatch pager. I would be no good to anyone at a scene, and I needed my rest.
I woke up this morning and my eyes were almost swollen shut. They were not infected, just reacting as if they had encountered an allergen. They remained dry, itchy and slightly swollen most of the day. My throat hurts. My nose runs. I’m tired and sneezy and my lungs burn. I am weak. Too weak, I think, to go to my firefighter training tonight, and this makes me
incredibly sad. I want to put on my turnout gear and learn about fire extinguishers. But...I can't. It is the sadness I feel, even more than the physical symptoms, that makes the experience of being in this body hard. Whenever I do one thing—like run a race—and then I have to pay a heavy price, like losing every other activity for days, I feel the loss keenly. It is one of the things I was afraid of when I thought of running across that bridge. And...it happened.
It was neither kind nor gentle of me to run that race when I knew my body couldn’t take it. I was sad and humiliated as my friends rejoiced on Facebook about our run, and asked if I wanted to run a 5K next month. They, of course, have no idea what that race cost me, and how ill-equipped I am to run a 5K right now--or how badly I want to be able to. Feeling ashamed about this is counterproductive; and yet, I do. There is a level of self-acceptance that I have still not reached. I still see myself as able-bodied and athletic, and every single time I realize I am not, I grieve all over again.
My work today—and every day, even after I am finally well—is to practice self-acceptance. To practice lovingkindness, to my Self. To allow myself that grief, for what is lost when I feel it, but also to connect with the joy of what is. To let that grief be water under the bridge, and to be with the joy of acknowledging that I was brave, I was well-supported by loving friends, and ultimately, the joy of being able to run across
that frigging bridge—because I
did make it! I
did run that mile without stopping. I could not have done that at any other point in the last seven years. Flawed as it still is, this is progress.
My “Bridge the Gap” race my have been slow, and it may have been a little too much for my physical body right now, but the fact that I
did it proves that this combination of yoga, meditation, prayer, the care of a good nurse practitioner, and volunteering as a firefighter have given me the tools I need to bridge the gap between illness and wellness. It also proves I have a long way to go. I intend to get there, one little breath, one giant bridge, at a time.
