What Goes Up Must Come Down

 

How it Happened and How I Dealt with It - Day One

I’m not going to even begin to claim I have superpowers, although, I feel super stupidity may be close to it.  That being said, at 40, I did some shit I could do way better in my younger years and have most likely torn either my ACL, MCL, or both.  Fun stuff.

Through that super stupidity, I can say I just might be a bit of bad ass – or at least more bad ass than I realized (also I might be way stupider than I realized too, one can never tell).  Upon my crash, I felt things move in my knee in a very uncomfortable manner accompanied by a snap that made me clutch my knee and wiggle my toes.  Everything seemed in working order and my piggies were wiggling.  Then I stood up.  No real issue there.  I could put weight on the left leg – the affected knee – albeit very gingerly.  I took a step.  Everything seemed as ship shape as it was going to get considering my swift fall from grace.  Obviously, I had fallen hard, and things hurt, and were going to take time, a couple of days, to get everything feeling fine again.

Then I opened my car door and sat down in my driver’s seat.  While it wasn’t excruciating pain, it was hands down the worst, grossest, most vomit-inducing-feeling I had ever felt in my entire life.  I felt my knee sway side-to-side in a very rubber-leg, Gumby kind of way.  It made me grab my knee and check to make sure that my kneecap was still in place and not on the outside of my leg as previously felt.  Finding my kneecap was indeed in place, I promptly began to freak out.  As a former gymnast and current runner, I’m all too familiar with the ACL.  Until turning 40 though, I’ve been fortunate enough to have had healthy knees with a good amount of mobility despite the pounding they have endured during my four decades of life.

Needless to say, I freaked.  I feel it was pretty rightly warranted – I mean, your knee is a hinge-joint that goes only forward and back.  Feeling it sway side-to-side like it was on a roller-coaster is cause for more than a little concern!  With panic creeping in, I sat in my car, dialing my mother over and over until she answered – on the fourth call. 

I can only imagine her sitting down at the country club for dinner with her friends while her crazed, panicked daughter is on the phone screaming, “MOM, I TORE MY ACL, I TORE MY ACL, I TORE MY FUCKING ACL.”

“Erin, calm down, calm down.  How do you know it’s torn?”

“Well, mom, your knee isn’t supposed to move side-to-side.”

She started relaying some of the message to one of her friends who was a physician’s assistant.  Ice and elevation was what I was told.  She also told my mom one of the orthopedic offices had a Saturday urgent care, and then she pledged to pick me up at 8:30 in the morning so we would be there before they opened.

With that phone call over, I gimped into the restaurant I called 15 minutes earlier for my take-out, then sat down in the car, and I started panicking again.  How I was going to get into my house with my two huge dogs – gorgeous, loving, very excited-to-see-me Rhodesian Ridgebacks?  I easily saw myself bowled over with my food in my hand.  In that vision, sprawled on the kitchen floor, my Massaman curry now spilled all that same floor as well as myself was quickly getting lapped up by the same dogs who very lovingly knocked me to the ground while my hubby slept through my screams for probably a good 20 minutes.

Yogi (left) and Maris (right)

 

That vision sent me to call Chris over and over until he answered – I think he answered also on the 4^th ring as well – to help me into the house that I had torn my fucking ACL.  I got home, and Chris met me outside.  He offered me a shoulder to gimp into the house on, but I declined and asked him to make sure my food got inside.  Once we got into the house, he did a great job tempering the dogs’ enthusiasm before going back to bed.  Chris gets to work at 2:30 in the morning and after 7 in the evening, I roused him after a good two hours of sleep already.

That first night, I’m not going to lie, there was a lot of pain, a lot of embarrassment, a lot “what fucking is wrong with you…”  The only thing there wasn’t a lot of was sleep.  Chris wanted me in the bed, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to sleep completely in my back and that I would be awoken by the same grotesque feeling I felt earlier in the car.  I tried to sleep on the couch, but it’s not easy to sleep with 150 pounds of dog on you.  Disclaimer: my dogs are very spoiled and have been led to believe (by me) that they are lap dogs and need to be on top of my every minute I’m home.

Unable to sleep, I moved to our loveseat with a big ottoman footstool out in front.  I was dozing when I heard Yogi’s name tags start moving.  Still a puppy, I called his name to get over to me.  The last thing I wanted to do was let him outside or have to chase him out of the kitchen.  He curled up on me and we dozed for about 2 hours.  Around 12:30 in the morning, I was awake again, now chased from the ottoman by Yogi stretching all over me and French Fry, our cat, now decided I was a particular comfortable chaise lounge for him to cat nap on.  Back to the couch and my other dog, Maris, my nearly-8-year-old good as platinum gold, girl.  I finally heard Chris’s alarm go off, heard him go outside to let his car run and get warm, then come back inside. 

Deciding I had to pee and that I might be better off in the bed, I got up, gimped to the restroom, then gimped into the bed.  I was able to jump backwards onto my bottom to get into the bed.  Chris and I talked a bit as the dogs joined us in the bed, then he was off for work, and I turned on The Office to rock myself back to sleep.  All told, I was lucky to get five hours that night.

In all those minutes between 9:30 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. there were a lot of negative thoughts.  I have a lot of Type A traits, so I was very disappointed in myself that I let this happen.  While I can’t predict the future, I felt like I should’ve known better, I should’ve been better.  Those thoughts led to embarrassment – which even four days later, I’m still grappling with as I type this.  As someone who strives for perfection in everything she does, a fall of this magnitude is crippling – double entendre intended.  Mix in that I’ve been raised to be self-sufficient and to never ask for help, and I could definitely be in a hell of place mentally.  Lucky for us all, my acerbic wit extends to self-deprecation that I love to use to make people laugh.  Hopefully there will be a sense of hope come through mixed with my brand of sarcasm that will be as cathartic for someone else as it is for me to get these thoughts out into print.