On Taking Risks and Turning 50

alternately titled Chronic Post-Traumatic Deformity

That’s what I have. According to a March 2022 MRI of my right leg, ankle and foot: Chronic post-traumatic deformity.

I read it right there in the doctor’s report on MyChart. And I laughed out loud, because what else can you do? I sort of feel like I should have a t-shirt made with those words. Maybe accompanied by an artistic still life rendering of the hardware that holds me together.

You know how when an old person falls and breaks their hip, it seems to precipitate their aging? Like everything speeds up and then they die? 

I sometimes feel like that happened to me. Not the dying part but the aging part. When I walked out my door in July of 2020 to go for a run, I was fit and strong. I was running 6 to 8 miles every other day, doing hourlong boot camp classes twice a week — granted, they had moved to Zoom, but they still involved burpees and tuck jumps and jump lunges and jump rope and jumping jacks and lots and lots of jumping.

I don’t jump anymore. 

Because on that July day, I slipped a mile from home and broke my tibia, fibula and talus bones, shattering one into what the doctors called “bone dust” and dislocating them all from my ankle. It really is a story, perhaps for another day, but the point here is that it changed me. It aged me, made me cautious and fearful, made me say unfamiliar, foreign-sounding things like, “I don’t do well on stairs.” 

I had never been physically cautious or fearful before, despite the fact that I’d had type 1 diabetes for nearly three-quarters of my life which might have slowed another person down. But I pretty much defied all the limitations my body had ever tried to place on me through sheer force of will. I was a high school field hockey player, a college rugby player, a marathon runner, a skydiver, a once-spectacular water skier and an okay enough downhill skier. 

And then I broke my damn ankle. After I healed, I started running again. But my pain migrated, from my right ankle to my left hip and my left knee and my lower back. Finally, in March of 2022, I had that MRI and the few words in the report that were in a language I could understand jumped out at me: “chronic post-traumatic deformity.” The surgeon actually said it wasn’t as bad as it sounds (why, thank you for that small favor) but something in me decided I couldn’t run anymore.

And I stopped. I quit.

When I was telling all this to a friend recently, including that I had run only twice in an 11-month period, she said, “But that doesn’t sound like you.” And she was right. It didn’t feel like me either. But somehow I let it happen.

Not only was I not running, but I hadn’t skied since our last trip pre-Covid, in early February 2020, and I was afraid that I couldn’t do it anymore. I was afraid that I wouldn’t even like it anymore, that I would force myself on the mountain, stay the minimum required amount of time to not be a total bummer, and duck out as soon as I had the chance, returning to our rental house to work on a puzzle.

But in January, we headed out to Montana with 28 Clevelanders (really) and I geared up, stuffing myself into my snowpants and ski boots, cautious and fearful and not at all excited.

And on the little ride down the street to access the run, I skied. I skied! I mean, it was only an incline of about 35% and I wasn’t even on the mountain yet, but I lifted my poles in the air up over my head in a victory salute because I knew right away that I could do it. 

Over the next few days, I skied just fine. Nothing fancy, no risks taken; but I loved it. I loved that I could do it and I loved that I loved doing it.

And then I figured I might as well run. So I’m doing that too. Only once a week, three slow miles at a time. But I’m doing it.

All of this is supposed to be a metaphor for other things too, like the fear and hesitation that have plagued me through this process of launching a website and saying, “Hey, people, like me. Follow me. Read my writing. Share my writing.” It’s a weird thing to do, creating a site that includes people’s compliments right there on the homepage. Asking people to sign up for your newsletter. Weird.

But here I am, in the year of my 50^th birthday, with my hands over my head in a victory salute, saying no to being too old and yes to taking risks, to finally treating myself like the professional writer and speaker that I know I am, to building a website and ultimately a platform so I can get this book published and into the hands of readers where I know it deserves to be, to skiing down mountains and to running again (and remembering to stretch afterwards).

Chronic post-traumatic deformity, be damned.