I was sitting on our back patio with my daughter and her friend, helping them make keychains for a class project. My phone rang. It was my orthopedist’s medical assistant. “Because it’s going to be so long until the MRI,” he said, “Dr. Smith [not his real name] thinks you should use crutches until then.” I hung up and looked at my watch to remember the date. January 30. The MRI wasn’t until February 17. And if the MRI confirmed his diagnosis of a stress fracture in my heel, I might be on crutches even longer.
In October of last year, I was training for a 5K. I hadn’t done any speedwork or intense mileage out of fear of injuring myself (which had happened a year before). And yet somehow, my foot was bothering me—it felt like plantar fasciitis (PF), which I’ve struggled with before. I ran the race, and then I took a break. First I stopped running. I figured maybe in a couple weeks, if I did some stretching and strengthening, I could build back up again. But in two weeks it was still not much better. So I also stopped going for walks around our neighborhood. My activity was limited to my daily activity, which is not nothing (some days I still get 10,000 steps even without exercising). The arch pain I’d been experiencing did eventually fade, but I was still having pain in my heel. I still thought it was PF. Christmas came and went. I think I kept downplaying it in my mind. Sure, I couldn’t walk on our hardwood floors downstairs barefoot without intense pain in my right foot, but maybe that was normal? I couldn’t bear weight on that foot in the shower when I was trying to shave my left leg, but probably everything was fine.
Finally, I got it through my thick head that I should probably see the doctor. I called the orthopedist I had seen last year for a quad injury and made an appointment with him.
“I don’t think it’s plantar fasciitis,” he said, “I suspect it’s a heel bruise, or possibly even a stress fracture. The pain in your calf is at the insertion point of your hamstring and your calf muscle, and your right leg is much tighter than your left. When you were running, this tightness would have made you strike with your heel much harder, leading to whatever is going on with your heel.”
He scheduled an MRI, made a referral for physical therapy, and wrote me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory. He said I didn’t need to stay off of it, because we could wait and see what the MRI said. But then, with the delayed MRI, he changed his recommendation.
So here I am. It’s been a week since I borrowed crutches from a neighbor and began the exhausting work of not being able to use my right leg for anything helpful.
The good news is that my foot is hurting a lot less because I’m not putting any weight on it like I have been for the past three months.
The bad news (or maybe, in God’s providence, the other good news) is that my heart is being revealed to be kind of a mess. I knew this, of course, but sometimes I forget and it takes a truly painful experience for the Lord to open my eyes to see it again.
Here are some things that are true:
I’m really good at managing our home.
I cook dinner for my family at home 95% of the time for both health reasons and financial reasons.
My mental health is greatly helped when our house is neat and tidy.
Here are some other things that are true:
We have stairs in our house.
It is impossible to carry most things when you’re on crutches.
Crawling on my knees is possible, up to the point at which my knees start hurting because I’m not a 7-month old baby.
What all these true things mean is that it’s at best extremely difficult and at worst impossible to do 95% of the things I do on a daily basis. So far I can do the following: get the kids up and fed breakfast and get them to school, get up and down the stairs, drive the car, fold laundry while sitting on our bed. And even the getting out the door in the morning part is exhausting.
I can’t take things up and down the stairs unless I can always hold the crutches (I have been using a backpack to transport some things). I can’t do any real cleaning. I can’t even get laundry started. I can cook dinner if I sit on a bar stool and have one of the kids bring me everything I need like a butler. Thankfully, they have been so patient and helpful. However, it requires me to mentally think through all the steps of everything I do and then verbalize them to people with underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes.
This sure sounds a lot like complaining. It is. I hear the Lord’s Word telling me I’m supposed to do everything without complaining. Everything? Really? It feels impossible.
What is easier is to spend the day when the kids are at school lamenting my situation and then taking it all out on them in the afternoons when they are just trying to be normal people and have a snack.
What is easier is to refuse to ask Christian for help because he has enough on his plate (I determine), and then when I get super frustrated and he asks me why I am not asking for help, to get angry at him.
What is easier is to smile and nod at a sweet friend’s offer to help with meals or cleaning but never really ask her outright because it feels too shameful.
Now, at last, we’re at the heart of it. Why do I feel ashamed to be on crutches? Because I should have been more competent when running last fall so as not to injure myself? Because I’m a burden to my family? Because I need other people to do what feel like extremely minor tasks for me?
I haven’t figured out the answer yet. What I do know is that this situation is exposing my belief that the only person I can really rely on is myself. I’m the only one who can do things the right way and get them done. And if things within my purview don’t get done, then it must mean I’m doing a really bad job and I’m a terrible person. I act like it’s my job to build up my little kingdom here in our little house, and now that I can’t do that very well, probably the whole world is going to end. I presume to be God and think that if I were God, I would not have chosen for me to be on crutches, because this Very Much Sucks.
If you could get in a school bus and have your teacher transform you into a very tiny school bus that could go inside my body (IYKYK), and you went very deep down, you’d find a tiny little hamster on a tiny little hamster wheel. And if you leaned in and could hear what the hamster keeps breathlessly muttering to itself as it moves its little legs as fast as it can, you’d hear, “I’m not a bad person, I’m not a bad person, I’m not a bad person.”
I can ask for all the help in the world and confess my weakness to my husband and kids and friends. I can stop complaining about how crappy it is to be on crutches. I can ask the Lord to please give me contentment.
But at the end of the day, that little hamster is still running, and it isn’t able to process how loved I am. It thinks the only way to not be a bad person is to keep going. To keep running. Even when the running doesn’t make any sense and you’re not getting anywhere.
How do we get the hamster off the wheel?
I haven’t figured it out yet. All I know to do for now is to keep trying to tell it that actually, I am a bad person, but because of what Jesus has done for me, I’m also a loved person. I keep trying to tell it what Jesus actually thinks about me.
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1, ESV)
Mostly what God does is love you. (Ephesians 5:1, MSG)
I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”(Jeremiah 31:3, ESV)
The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)
I keep telling myself other things that are true. I’m allowed to have an injured foot. I’m allowed to not be required to walk on an injured foot. I’m allowed to be helped by other people. There are so many people in my life who love me and who want to help me, if I’ll only let them. And they don’t think I’m a bad person for needing help.
And so today I took my friend K up on her offer to set up a meal train and clean my bathrooms. I asked my friend H if she could run into the store for one thing I needed. I asked my husband to do a couple little things that aren’t hugely important but that I really needed to be done.
The truth is, I’ve always been dependent on the Lord and other people. I just like to pretend I’m not. May the Lord keep using this to keep my eyes open to the truth about myself, and may the truth cause me to lean even more on Jesus. And maybe, by the end of this, that little hamster will be able to take a break (and maybe find a new home? I don’t know. The analogy breaks down at this point).