In the end, it was a dream – plain, mundane, achingly domestic — that guided me to wholeness.
I am cooking a large pot of curried rice on the stove for a party. Absent-mindedly, I turn on the vent hood timer, and then realize my error and try to turn it off. As I hit a button, the scene suddenly shifts.
I am still at my stove, but the scene now is gray and austere, stripped down. There is no pot of rice, not even an oven, but a single burner, a single knob and a button. Upset at this altered reality, I turn the knob … and the scene shifts again.
Still a gray world with one burner, one knob and a button, but no rice. There is an oven this time, with a few dirty casserole dishes in it. I fear my rice, cooking in my usual reality, will burn. I fear that I am stuck in this gray, austere place. But I fear, too, to do the one thing I haven’t yet done: hit the button. What if the scene gets even worse? What if the button is simply the oven light? But I know that without action on my part, the scene will not change.
I swallow my fear and hit the button.
My full-color world returns, the rice cooking merrily on the stove, waiting for me to add the tomatoes.
Waking, I realized that the dream was likely a message from Brighid who, as a hearth goddess, is fond of kitchens. And I realized, too, that it was offering me a plan and solution for the serious leg injury that has dogged me for more than three months.
To get your old life back, Amhrán, you must do what you fear. Go for a run.
So I laced up my rainbow sneakers and started with a slow, painful jog up and down the driveway. The next day, I hit the elliptical. And every time, I tried to run a little further and gently persuade my quads not to buckle.
What I didn’t realize: my beloved Brighid even sent me a timeframe. I ended up making that curried rice dish for the Unitarian Universalist Thanksgiving feast.
You’ll be all better after Thanksgiving, Amhrán. Trust.
Hop ‘til you drop
So what the hell was wrong with me these past few months? And why was this injury missed until that last, belated appointment with an orthopedist when I was close to recovered?
Putting the circumstances and ortho conversation together, it turns out that I had a stress fracture in my left-side femoral shaft – the middle of the longest and strongest bone in the body. It’s an injury most often associated with military recruits and ultra-marathoners.
Occasionally, I visit the Running Injuries community on Reddit, where injured runners scream into the void about their maladies and not a soul answers. (Even me. I read Reddit on occasion for insight into our collective id, but I don’t post.) I noticed something: There were other runners with my set of symptoms, and the onset involved two factors — an overuse injury and a sudden blow, typically a fall.
The day before my final class at the ex-dojo, I had a nasty running injury – a hamstring pull that left me limping. The class was bootcamp-level hard, and I didn’t dare tell the notoriously unsympathetic instructor that I was already physically compromised. That class, of course, ended with my 10+ minute “trial” in which I was ordered to take the breakfall out of the hip-throw koshinage, which I don’t yet have the skill to do safely.
I fell badly on that already injured left side – so badly that I immediately curled myself into child’s pose and pressed my forehead into the mat. Interestingly, I felt that electric pain in my hip, which had struck the ground first – but the thigh would have thumped down almost at the same time. The hip hurt for a week, and one by one the muscle groups in my left leg began to turn off. Three weeks later, that leg failed entirely right before class at my new dojo.
It took a week to be able to walk up and down stairs again, and to regain my flexibility on that side. When I returned to the exercise bike three weeks later with the physical therapist’s okay, that leg ached. Getting up from long stillness – after sleep or car-rides or choir practice – caused a tearing pain in both the front and back of the thigh, and I ended up using my jo-staff to rise from bed. I felt that my quads were refusing to fire.
And yet … my PT evaluations showed that I was strong and should have been able to run. Frustrated, after four weeks of PT, I gave myself the “hop test,” which is exactly what it sounds like.
On my right: Happy Pogo-stick. On my left: I couldn’t even get off the ground. That, my friends, is the mark of a stress fracture.
And so was the quad inhibition – first evidenced, interestingly, during my initial PT evaluation. You know the reflex test they do with a rubber hammer on your knee? That response was inhibited on the left – which suggests that my brain was stalling the involuntary nerve response. For nearly three months, I couldn’t even imagine running because that left leg simply wouldn’t work.
Fear in the body
During one of those early driveway run-walks, I was struck by a moment of imbas forosnai.
There’s fear caught in your body, Amhrán.
As I painfully made my way to the nearest road sign, I turned over the lessons of Dr. John Sarno – whose books reportedly cured people just with the reading. I’ve written about him before in my exploration of conversion disorder: He was a medical doctor who first recognized what we would now call the biopsychosocial causes of physical suffering – in his case, back pain, in which he was an expert.
I’ve since ordered one of his books, although I haven’t read it yet; it’s been caught in the holiday postal crunch. But going by what I’ve read about him through the years, this is his main contention: Back pain is how many people experience and process emotional pain. He theorized that swallowed rage was the cause of much of this, prompting the body to reduce function and produce pain-loops in otherwise healthy tissue.
But Brighid, I prayed one recent day, the X-ray and the ortho indicated that a stress fracture may be the cause. How can it be a feeling?
She shook her head and smiled, insistent. There’s fear caught in your body, Amhrán, she repeated.
I think Dr. Sarno was right on the broad strokes, although we’ll see once the book arrives. As it happens, I’m pretty good about expressing anger, rage and even resentment, so as to move them out of myself and into the realm of change. Fear, however, is something I don’t know how to express in a healthy manner; I freeze to the ground, I run, I placate. During my halting short jogs, I turned over the scenario in my mind: how similar these symptoms were in some ways to the “noodle legs” I experience during phobia episodes.
And I wondered if fear – so often denied and hidden by anger, especially in men – was the real emotion twisting the backs of Dr. Sarno’s patients, too.
Muscle inhibition and compensation patterns begin in the brain, although this doesn’t mean that they’re “fake” or histrionic; they are real symptoms, often with an initial biological trigger.
In the case of damaged tissue – a surgery, a broken bone – your brain turns off the juice to your muscles as a protective mechanism. Pain, too, is created in the brain as a protective mechanism: The affected part needs rest to heal, and pain keeps you off it. The problem? It takes a lot longer to turn that juice back on and to allow the pain loops to diminish than it did to power down.
In essence, this is the biological root of fear-in-the-body: It’s there for good reason. To heal, you must remember what it is like to be whole and act accordingly – which is, sometimes, easier said than done.
Like most runners, I am not particularly fearful of pain – but I was taken aback by the lack of function. Just like the dream, I feared making an already bad situation worse.
Stress fractures, by their nature, take a set period of time to heal. For tibial stress fractures – I had three bouts of these in high school and college – that means nearly two months off running, although you can bike relatively painlessly. Femoral stress fractures take at least three months since it’s a bigger bone – and, alas, even biking will be out for a good chunk of that because the mechanics are different for your thigh than your lower leg.
By the time I got the MRI last week, I was past that 3-month mark and the bone was perfectly healthy. That means the remaining inhibition is a brain condition – and the pain I feel in that leg isn’t something to worry about. As I unfortunately learned in high school, stress fractures can hurt for some weeks even after you’ve officially healed; just ignore it and try not to gimp.
As I followed Brighid’s advice, I stopped trying to protect myself and let the tension drain from those fearful muscles. That femur ached in the night for a few days then subsided. Rising after long stillness is still a problem, but it appears to be fading by inches.
Step by step (repeat for four miles)
The day before my ortho appointment, I went for my first four-mile run since September. “Might as well get my money’s worth,” I joked to Shoshen.
I ended up running and walking in equal measure, gently encouraging my muscles to remember their wholeness. With each step, I improved even as I ached. The next day, after the appointment, I went on the elliptical and completed four miles, followed by two days of complete rest related to a colonoscopy.
After aikido on Saturday, I practiced some breakfalls on the big mat – and was able to perform them in my old vigorous way. In the changing room, I performed several low hops in a row on that left leg. I came out and demonstrated some more hops to Shoshen.
“See? Aikido is a healing modality,” I quipped.
When I ran another 4 miles this past Sunday, I was slow – but ended up running more than walking the longer I went on. Today, I did another 4 miles – and ran every step, although I did take pauses from time to time, ran on the grass when my leg needed a break from the impact, and didn’t worry about pace.
The older gents I typically see during my morning runs had missed me, and offered smiles and welcomes. I stopped to chat with one who asked where I’d been, and who had noticed that my running stride was still a little tentative on the left — although I’m slowly working through that, too.
During the last mile, I thought about the love I felt from and for those familiar strangers on their morning walk. Given my past, my experience at the ex-dojo – the brutality and the betrayal, the bystander effect — could so easily have embittered me and uprooted every sapling in the orchard of love and human trust. I could have given up on the art, on the idea of friendship and care, on agape.
Yes, some people are hungry ghosts, and they will act out of their own hurt and guarded weakness to harm you or let harm come to you. But love is all around you, offered freely: You just need to open yourself to the possibility like a window and not guard yourself, because love isn’t a fan of stuffy closed spaces.
Love is the bluejay braying from the branch, the white flash of a junco’s tail through the sumac. Love sends you dreams and eats your curried rice at Thanksgiving while giving useful tips on microwave repair. Love takes your hand and leads you through fear.
Love is the stranger who welcomes you home.
White Cat Grove 
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