Spiral

I knew it was broken right off the bat. But it couldn’t be. Not here. Not now. I was sprawled haphazardly on the ground, my right leg caught between two rocks that had slid along with me in an awful version of a baseball slide. Right into first base, I guess. I had been hurrying, which I did a lot those days, trying to catch up to the rest of the group; jumping from rock to rock like I had done so nimbly in my twenties.

I was in rehab. Well, we all called it that off hand. Really it was a shamanistic treatment center for PTSD and other intense life events. Instead of AA meetings and lounging by the pool, we had yoga and meditations in the morning, gluten-free and vegetarian meals, and daily meetings with various shamans to cleanse our chakras and energy fields. One bright morning we had been whisked away to a beautiful location somewhere near Sedona to bask in the stunning glory of nature and rid our souls of the demons that had doggedly tormented us for the majority of our lives. Evidently they did this every week. It was my third day there.

It wasn’t broken.

Still on the ground, I tried to pivot the leg to a normal position. That hurt. I had been in pain before. I had flown over the handlebars of a bike, helmetless and at top speed, straight onto pavement and then blackberry bushes. I had been beat up, kicked in the dirt, and pushed down flights of stairs onto icy concrete. Once I had even been hit by a slow moving car. Nothing compared to this. There was an intense feeling of permanence to the pain. I knew it wasn’t going to go away. It just couldn’t be. I was here to heal. It couldn’t be broken. I couldn’t be broken. I refused to accept it.

I tried to stand. I had never seriously injured either of my legs before. I had always assumed my lower half was indestructible. No sprained ankles, no plantar fasciitis, nothing aside from a few broken toes. So, when I instinctively tried to put weight on both legs at once to rise up, my right immediately screamed in protest, and back down to the uncharitable rock I went. Oddly enough, all I felt was shame.

I looked over my left shoulder and saw two older women standing on the rise I had just left. They were looking right at me and pointing. I waved and tried to call for help. I had never done this before in my life. I was an immutable force of nature, bound only by my own self-imposed limitations. I needed nothing and nobody. Everything was someone else’s fault and I was separate from karma, society, and the world at large. I was above it all. My first attempt was hoarse. Barely audible. The shame crept up and bubbled at my voice box, infusing my cry with furtiveness and grief. I tried again, louder this time. And again, even louder. The tourists kept staring. I could see their fear. Of what, I have no idea. They fled from the rise. In the other direction.

Well then.

The enormity of the situation suddenly hit me with the force of a meteor hitting a mountaintop. I was caught. I could no longer deny that I was human; that I could be mortally wounded. I could literally and figuratively not stand on my own. I would either call for help or I would die in agony, pinned to a rock no one would find for days.

“Help!”

Over and over, again and again.

“HELP!”

I cried. In shame, in anguish, in fear of what I knew I had to become. Of what I knew I had to let go of. My marriage was over. My business, family, and friends were gone. My identity was dead. Who was I now? What would I do with my life? What was going to be my purpose? How can I possibly let it all go? How was I going to survive this?

“…help…”

And suddenly everything shifted. My ego and survival instincts came back in a flood. No, a biblical torrent. A tsunami five hundred feet high. I had survived worse than this. I had fought life to a ragged and bloody standstill on dozens of occasions. Others had tried to murder me, poison me, beguile and rob me. And I had always walked out on my own two feet. If anything, I had always proven that I could do it on my own. I grabbed an inch wide stick next to the ever-so-generous boulder and jammed it between my teeth. Then I firmly planted my right leg and stood.

Pain lanced through my leg, a caustic mix of electricity and fire threatening to burn through every synapse of my lower body. I bit clean through the stick and into my tongue. No matter. There was one way out and that was down this trail of fire. I started to walk.

Every step was… here English fails. There are no words for that level of pain. It’s like trying to describe a supernova caught inside of a snowflake at dawn, surrounded by a cadre of ephemeral ghosts chanting in a language nobody understands. Every single cell of my body was furious with me. I could feel my eyes bulging, as if trying to eject from this hellacious existence.

I can’t remember how far I made it before they came. Maybe a tenth of a mile, maybe a thousand. No matter. They came. My new friends, racing up the trail, panic in their eyes. I could barely speak.

“What’s wrong?” One of them asked amidst a flood of questions. Three men I had met days earlier, yet I seemed to have known my entire life.

“Sprained. My. Ankle.” I choked. Their eyes slid down to my leg and back up. Then I fell.

Hands were around me in a flash. Pulling, hefting, lifting. I was adrift on the muscles of others. I still tried to hop along, resolute that I was somehow still in control. The path was narrow, winding, and there were more boulders to dodge. These men didn’t give me an inch, clutching my weight as if they were clinging to the side of a mountaintop. Maybe they were.

When we finally reached the bottom of the slope where the trail widened, the adrenaline had kicked in. I could feel my ankle swelling and pulsing, already pushing my boots past the breaking point of their seams. People were everywhere. I was delirious with pain, fear, and pretense. When a child would pass, gawking and trembling, I would let go of my friends and walk on my own two feet.

“It’s OK, little one. Just a bump. Don’t be afraid.” I would say. Little did I know that it was probably the rabid insanity in my eyes and the twigs in my hair that were scaring them. No matter. They would pass and I would clutch the hovering arms again. I was hopping now, desperately trying to force the world to acknowledge the grim reality that I was indestructible. That I was unassailable. That I was righteous on my path and that I would never succumb to the frailty of man. It hurt worse with every step.

When we got back to the van, I was met with a mixture of pity, contempt, and irritation. Something about that made me call my wife. To her credit, she actually managed to pretend she cared. She had already moved on, something I didn’t come to realize till much later, but I couldn’t imagine then. The only thing I could focus on at that time was the hellbent desperation of launching myself at my problems. As if that could make any difference. In reality, I could only be responsible for half of the relationship. But then I assumed that I could deadlift both of us into transcendence; that I could pull a serene rabbit out of a fox den.

It wasn’t broken.

The next thirty-six hours were agony. I fashioned a cane out of a wizened old branch and hobbled from yoga, to lunch, to reiki, to the PTSD group… sharp needles of shock and torture shooting up my leg with every pebble or slight rise. My ankle was five times its normal size, already a dizzying array of purples, yellows, reds and blues.

By evening on the second day, laid out on a yoga pad for Sound Healing, the head honcho had come to talk, and the entire community finally convinced me to head to the hospital in the morning. I was resolute but something deep inside finally relaxed when I made the decision. I could see them all worrying, shaking their heads, whispering and clucking as I slowly hobbled away. I still felt the shame, the powerlessness, the atrophy of grace and trust. It might be broken.

It was.

A counselor had driven me into the hospital, where a nurse was already outside tapping her foot in obvious impatience. I was in the x-ray room three minutes later. The man came around the corner and shook his head as he smiled.

“I’m just the tech, mind you, so I have no business telling you this, but that thing is BROKEN, my man. You’re lucky it didn’t shatter.”

And with that, he was gone.

The rest of the appointment was a blur. The doctor drew his finger over the images, detailing the spiral crack that danced mischievously up my fibula. Something about all of the ligaments… or was it tendons?... or something or other… being torn. All of them? All of them. Just partially mind you, which meant it was going to hurt. 

Did I want pain meds? Nope. Who was my emergency contact? Don’t worry about it. You know you’re not going to be able to drive back home, right? There is no home. 

It was broken. And me along with it. There was no going back.