I can’t run anymore. At this point, I’m not even sure I remember how. It’s been so long since I’ve tried, I’m scared my bones would crumble like a pie crust. I’m the perfect friend to invite backpacking through bear country – you’ll certainly outrun me.
In August 2011, I fell thirty feet from a deer stand when a frayed strap gave way. With no gymnastics or high-dive training, I still managed to stick the landing. In fact, it was so perfect my right heel bone didn’t see a use for it anymore and decided to break up with the rest of my foot. Apparently, heel bones hold quite a grudge from a lifetime of being stepped on. Not only did it shatter to pieces, but it also caused about as much pain as a nasty divorce.
Six months, eleven screws, and 3,259 marbles picked up and placed into a bucket with my toes later, I could walk again, which also meant I could now walk to the pantry and get my own Reese’s Cups. Chocolate seemed to help ease the withdrawal symptoms from Pfizer. But all the catering and being waited on days while in recovery were over.
It was a decade before I visited the doctor who performed the surgery.
“What are you whining about now, Oscar?” Christina – a radiology nurse in her early 40’s, small and quick-witted – sarcastically asks me while she prepped the x-ray machine. “You’re always whining. Girls don’t want to be with a guy who whines.”
“Girls? What do girls have to do with anything?” I said. “And I’m not whining!” I tried to defend myself, embarrassed she called me out. “I’m just saying, I don’t understand it. Why haven’t they invented the heel replacement?” Standing on a stoop, I continued my stump speech. “They got hip replacements, knee replacement, even… you know… private replacements. So what do they have against the heel?”
She shakes her head, rolls her eyes, and snaps the first photo. She walks up to adjust some fancy measurement plate she had me standing on, moves my foot into position, and decides to pinch the hell out of me where the heel joins the Achilles tendon… “Ouch!”
“Oh, you felt that, huh?”
“Uh, yea. It freaking hurt. Look at those nails!”
“You know why it hurt? Because it’s your real foot. 11 screws are better than not having a foot. You big baby. Quit whining.”
A shattered heel bone (calcaneal fracture, the white coats call it) hurts. Every day the arthritis gets a little more noticeable. So unless Elon starts inventing artificial heel bones, I’ll need some confusing terminology type of fusion surgery in the next decade or two. And even then, the help it provides is questionable. But I’m lucky.
The mentality brought on by physical pain is the hardest to heal. The constant learning of who you are now versus who you were then, takes a toll. The physical stuff just takes good insurance, a lot of toe-marble-bucket therapy, and plenty of help from Pfizer.
Maybe it’s all a wild coincidence. Dirt being a Blue Heeler, I have a heel injury, and Mud teaches us how to heal. But maybe not. When we assume life happens by coincidence, we negate the possibility of it being the world offering us a hand in creating a beautiful intersection.
We can't allow the things in life that happen to us, to define us.
I can’t say for certain I would’ve ever gotten a Heeler if I hadn’t shattered my heel. I certainly wouldn’t have ever realized I needed to heal if Mud hadn’t shown up on Good Hope Road. And I dang sure would’ve never thought it would all go down in small town called Cope.
I never liked running anyway. But Dirt, well, he makes up for it. Coincidence?
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