Running on Empty

The cast is gone, and this week I was rid of the boot. I walk unencumbered, though with a bit of a limp, the latter a result of muscles severely tightened and resistant to flex. I have exercises, and I go to physical therapy three times each week. I don’t know how long that continues—as most good therapists, mine urges me to continue without end. Why not?

The issue now is how to move on. I have to reenter the life I lived before this event occurred. I intend to return to running, sooner rather than later, but later rather than sooner. I intend to get my own cups of coffee, though it was so pleasant to be so well served. I will no longer be focused on the damaged ankle, and hope to begin to focus on other activities and priorities. I want to return with energy to my scholarly, intellectual and academic life. I have begun to study again in the early morning hours.

But I had broken my ankle—lately I like to say that the ankle was fractured—if it was truly broken then it must also be beyond repair. Yet I am now walking evidence that whatever occurred is now restored. Unlike my mother’s vase, my leg is knit almost perfectly. Indeed, my doctor tells me, for a while the bone will even be stronger than it was before I fractured it. And since I had broken it, I can never again be a person who has not had a broken ankle. Every step I now take presses on the ankle that was broken. Every step I take reminds me that once I couldn’t walk.

I have rested, as it were, for six weeks. I, of course, had discovered that I was vulnerable, as if I needed the ankle to remind me of that frailty. But indeed, that had been the case: I have been relatively healthy and unfractured for most of my life. While laid up with the fractured ankle, I could not recall another time when I was ever so incapacitated. In the last thirty years I have not missed running more than four days running, and that when I had undergone a hemerrhoidectomy, and, as a patient etherized upon a table, had had some anal fissures fused.

I discovered that I could rest, and that the world would not fall apart if I could not run. Nor would I gain seven hundred pounds and sink into the comfy chair never to arise again. I didn’t get any more read, but neither did I read any less. I had no more or less profound thoughts, though, as with Prospero, every third thought was of the grave.