by Elizabeth Bingham, author of Easy-Walking Europe and Easy-Walking North Shore (Lake Superior)
Deedle-deedle-dee! Deedle-deedle-dee!
I ran through the house to catch the phone. Rounding a corner, I heard a loud POP!, and then, suddenly, I couldn’t support any weight on my left leg.
I missed the phonecall (I didn’t want an extended warranty on my car, anyway). Instead, I spent the rest of the morning processing the fact that in the blink of an eye, in that bewildering moment of POP!, I had become disabled.
There was a certain irony in that, because as a travel writer, my last couple of years have focused on researching and writing travel guides for people who are no longer as fit or as mobile as they used to be, providing tips and possible tours for the (somewhat) mobility impaired. In truth, I was writing travel guides for my mother, with her bad knees and hip, and for others like her.
Now, I had unexpectedly (and unhappily, I must note) joined my own audience. I couldn’t straighten my left leg—I could barely hobble. Worries flooded me along with pain. How was I going to get through my life like this? How bad was the surgery going to be?? Would I ever be able to hike again???
Someone brought me crutches to use, and I regained a measure of mobility, although it was a clumsy mobility. I was taken to the doctor. Had x-rays. And then the verdict came late in the day: I had a strained knee.
A strained knee?! They had to be joking! That didn’t sound nearly serious enough for the pain and immobility I was experiencing. It was excruciating! I must have at least a sprain!
Torn between relief that my injury was nothing life-altering (apparently) and offense that the diagnosis didn’t reflect the pain I felt, I turned to the Internet. What, exactly, was a strain, and why didn’t I have a sprain?
It turns out that I was offended for no reason. A sprain is when a ligament that connects two bones gets injured; a strain is when a ligament that connects a bone with a muscle gets injured. So, as we say where I’m from, same difference. (More or less.)
Now I’m on an anti-inflammatory drug and have started physical therapy, and my knee has improved greatly in the last week (although I still take a crutch with me, especially for stairs). But I’m not back to normal, and I don’t know when (or whether) I will be.
Dealing with my limited mobility has brought to mind a Harvard Health blog post I read recently, by Jennifer Crystal, “Learning to Live with a Persistent Illness.” In it, Crystal writes of how she has learned to “reframe” her thinking and “create a new normal” in the context of her illness. She does what works for her, and “that makes life a little brighter.”
As it turns out, that was well-timed advice for me. I am reframing my expectations each day, and that is helping me accept my current limitations and not do too much. There’s no point in adding insult to injury and either prolonging my condition or worsening it. I will do what I can within the context of my current abilities. (Except for my physical therapy. That is an approved pushing of the limits.)
So, when I travel to northern Minnesota with my mother next month, I will be doing so with a physical challenge I’ve never taken there before, a bum knee. That will provide me with new experiences and, I hope, new insights to share with others who are no longer as fit or mobile as they used to be.
I will experience directly what it’s like to rely on a walking stick or a crutch or a collapsible stool to take a gentle hike or walk a bumpy path to a rocky beach or make it all the way to the end of the breakwater where the lighthouse stands. As so, it will be a truer test of my most recent book (Easy-Walking North Shore—Lake Superior) than I ever expected to have.
But I am eager to try it. Because I’m confident that my proposed activities will be doable, even with my gimpy knee. I am fortunate that I’m on the road to recovery, possibly a full recovery. But it’s a comfort to know that, even if my knee never returns to normal, or if I suffer future disabilities that maybe won’t go away, I can still get out and explore the world. Just in a different way.
And so can you.
