Snap out of it

So, apparently, one of the unexpected side-effects of injury is insomnia. Never struggled with it before, but its been about six weeks since I've been able to ... you know ... sleep ... much. There's the issue of night pains, but even beyond that, there's the notion of using physical fatigue as a sleep aid. Back in the day, when I could throw down some four-hour mornings on the bike, make lunch, juggle a nine-hour stress fest at work, eat, blog, go to bed ... well ... I was always out before I hit the pillow. My co-workers may even argue I was out hours before. But now, I'm up in the morning ... I'm up late at night ... I'm up in the day ... and out of it.

I keep thinking that one of these early early mornings, I'm going to roll out of bed and be 100% fine. It's easy for me to carry this delusion because something similar happened to Geoff and his IT bands last year. Six weeks of searing pain ... and then, one day, he was just fine. I also like to tell the story of my cat, who one day hobbled home to my apartment in Idaho Falls with a huge cut on her right hind leg. The vet did a few tests (no kitty MRIs, but decent tests) and informed me that she had severed her Achilles tendon. The vet told me a $900 surgery would give her a 50-percent chance of partial recovery - granted she receive the requisite physical therapy (how do you get a cat to do physical therapy?). But in all likelihood, the vet said, she would never walk on that leg again. I struggled with the surgery decision for some time ... weighing the expense, researching the success rate, calling up specialty vets in Boise and Salt Lake, and watching my cat live a relatively happy life as a tripod. I decided against the surgery. I am a guilty pet owner.

Months went by like that. During that time, I was injured for several weeks and we were both awkwardly mobile together (something my landlord commented on constantly). Then, one day, I came home from a long weekend away - she had been inside on her own the whole time - and she was walking. Not tripoding. Not limping. She was walking. I never even saw the transition. And, to this day, I've never seen any hints of the injury. She can outsprint dogs in a heartbeat. And she's an active little kitty when she wants to be.

So the most likely scenario is that the vet misdiagnosed her and she recovered from what was probably just a bad cut with some tissue damage. But I like to think of it as a miracle cure. The way she just snapped out of it so quickly after so long ... I like to think that skill runs in the family.

Sometimes pictures reflect moods

I like the swirling storm clouds in this one. Especially since the reason I stopped to take it was that small window of sunlight in the center.

Moderation

Some days I feel despondent about injury, and some days I feel defiant. It is hard to wedge myself somewhere in the middle. But the only way to figure out how much is too much is to start somewhere near the bottom, which often feels worse than doing nothing.

I had an unsuccessful weekend of resting (although it was only resting in the physical sense. I haven't been through a whirlwind of activity like that in a while). My new plan is to slither back into cycling. And in order to not tempt myself into two-hour jaunts, I decided I was going to do that slithering at the gym. On their creaky, old, rubber-straps-for-toe-clips stationary bike. I hate that thing. Which is the perfect mindset to have when you're trying to avoid the temptation of overuse. I pedaled 20 minutes at low resistance. Mindless spinning, and in the meantime I read "Over the Hills" by David Lamb, a book written by a middle-age reporter for the Los Angeles Times who smokes and drinks and decides one day in the 90s to cross the country on a bicycle. I was reading the part where he was making his way across Arkansas and writing about all of the delicious pies he was eating. I wanted to find out more about those pies and the quirky small-town folks he met, so after my prescribed 20 minutes were up, I sauntered over to the elliptical trainer.

That's how it goes down. 45 minutes passed there. After that, enough time had passed that I had to go straight to work from the gym anyway, so I killed 20 more minutes lifting ... including the crackle-inducing leg extensions (because I read somewhere that once that crackling starts to subside, I'm good to go, so I wanted to see if it was still there. It was.) But the real drawback of all that is, when I'm popping Advil and hobbling in the evening, I have no idea whether I can blame the 20 minutes of pedaling or not.

Today my plan is to pedal my prescribed 25 minutes and nothing more, and leave my book at home so I get good and bored in that time. It really doesn't even seem worth the effort of putting on gym shorts and my knee brace, but with two months of failure and a nonsurgical diagnosis, all I have left is baby steps.

The goal is that I'll understand when it's no longer appropriate to hold back. Moderation in all things. Even moderation. (Good quote, by the way, Dave.)

Weekend in the city

Flying is a strange experience. It's similar to an endurance event in a lot of ways. I usually spend my day wrapped in varying levels of anxiety, subsisting on Power Bars and Advil and copious amounts of caffeine. And just when I'm locked in the most uncomfortable position, head spinning as cramps crawl up my legs, I look out the window and see views like this - a crisp moment of clarity that convinces me it's time to just quit my job and toss my Advil and devote my life to mountaineering.

Of course, it's too easy to feel this way from the seat of a plane, even cramping and a little bit airsick, I'm still in a bubble of relative safety, warm and dry. This is similar to the work conference I attended this weekend, in a lot of ways. It was the Alaska Press Club conference, or "J-Week (J for journalism)" to the wide-eyed reporters who attend. It's a rallying cry for those of us who are trying to convince ourselves the newspaper industry isn't dying. We talk about ethics and community responsibility. We give ourselves awards and cheer on the work we do for the greater good. It's easy for us to believe in the comfort and safety of our conference group, and it feels great to do so, but the knowledge feels different when I step out onto the terrifyingly unnavigable one-way streets of life ... or downtown Anchorage.

Because I live in a small town on the outskirts of Alaska, I always have this sense of the smallness of civilization versus the hugeness of wilderness. But in Anchorage, a small city by most standards, the opposite feels true - civilization is bearing down and the wilderness is slipping further away. I had a whirlwind weekend trying to connect with everyone I know in the city. It seemed like one second I was meeting old names but new faces at a slide show in the Mat-Su Valley and the next I was at a random Anchorage watering hole, lapping up the gossip of a place I no longer live with a boss I no longer work for. I slept about four hours total each night and didn't work out for three days. That's right. Three days rest. By day three, I don't know that my gimp knee ever felt worse.

I'm not quite sure what to think about that. I have this theory about sitting in chairs and cars, and the way that can keep my knee at bad angles, generating fluids and other such waste products that just sit there, festering and swelling. But I don't think that theory has any medical backing. I finally got out for a hike this morning with two hardcore adventure-race types/Ultrasport veteran cyclists who are coincidentally also dealing with knee problems right now. (I won't mention names, because there seemed to be some concern about Internet anonymity :-) We went on a "gimp hike" somewhere in the front range. I didn't pack any clothing for outdoor activity, so when I took this picture, it was about 40 degrees with 30 mph-wind gusts, and all I was wearing was a single layer with a cotton hoodie pulled over my ears. I didn't even have gloves. It felt great. Like I was draining out all of the gunk - not that that's a real treatment ... and it probably did help that I was coming out of three days of terrible nutrition, sloth and sleeplessness that probably needed its own share of draining.

Now I'm back. It feels like a crazy long time lapse, when in fact it's only been a few days. I was surprised to come home and see some snow on the ground still. It seems like weeks should have passed. But I think all I need is some sleep and a good long day in grayness to snap me back to reality.

MRI results

So what I actually have is chomdromalacia patella. ("Runners Knee," as opposed to "Jumper's Knee.") Softening and swelling of cartilage between the knee cap and femur. I also have a fairly large Baker cyst as a result of fluid buildup. This is good news, actually, on all sides. It nearly always is recoverable without surgery. Should be better by now than it is, but I have not been known to rest well. I have been told to REST WELL, but overuse only prolongs recovery; it does not usually do further damage.

I am headed out to Anchorage for a work conference and it may be a few days before I post again. I just wanted to leave on a happy note with another picture of sunshine in Juneau, because it may not look like this again for weeks. Have a great weekend all, and Ride Well.

Light torture

I stumbled into radiology at 7:15 this morning. I know that doesn't sound all that early, but with my work schedule and habits, 7:15 a.m. to me is like 5:15 a.m. to most people. They directed me to strip down and then steered me still crusty-eyed and wobbly-legged into a strange, silent room - large and empty with the exception of a single MRI imaging tube. I've heard that these tests are to be feared, but only by the claustrophobic, so I wasn't feeling too anxious. I laid on my back and the radiologist asked me if I wanted to listen to the radio. I just stared up at her, trying to coax my sleep-addled brain to turn on. Radio? What's that? I nodded weakly. "What station?" Station? What's a station? I mumbled something about NPR. She nodded and wrapped my leg, then left me alone in the room while the platform slid ominously into that alien tube.

I had been instructed NOT TO MOVE, and to NOT TAKE DEEP BREATHS, and my concentration on that made me not only twitch involuntarily, but breathe at a rate I usually reserve for sprinting up hills. I tried to slow my breathing but NOT TAKE DEEP BREATHS, and I thought about the beach, swimming, cycling ... but for some reason my thoughts kept returning to sitting on a plane. Twitch.

The radio switched on to mumbling static, and then the radiologist said something about 15 seconds and URRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMM ... loud buzzing jolted me out of my airline fantasy and into a state that I'd have to describe as light panic. It sounds like an extreme reaction to a very minor thing, and it was. But I couldn't shake the thought that the loud buzzing was the sound of an alien machine shooting waves of magnetic resonance or radiation or whatever they use, directly into my body. The radio only made it worse. When the machine wasn't buzzing, static voices rattled off the morning's news. URRRRRRMMMMMMMMM ... sccct scct "170 sccct died today in bombings around Baghdad" .... URRRRRRRRMMMMM URRRMMMMMM ... "Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui said in a video sccct sccct ... URRRRRRMMMMMMM."

The minutes ticked on. My muscles were so tense that I felt like I was going to roll right off the platform. Thinking about breathing wasn't helping, so I did something I haven't done since I white-knuckled the passenger's seat of a turboprop plane making its way up to 15,000 feet to outrun a big storm in southern Montana ... I started chanting the Lord's Prayer. You know "Our farther, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." It's not even my religious background, but for some reason, it relaxes me. Yeah. I'm a nut.

But that's my MRI story. I've never dealt that well with anything medical. My sister's a registered nurse and I'm the type that gets lightheaded at the sight of blood. I'm also a bit of a technophobe. Combining the two is about guaranteed to send me into a mild psychotic episode. Especially when I'm directing all of my focus into NOT MOVING.

After my appointment, with the sun out and 50-degree clear weather, I thought I deserved to spend a better part of the afternoon relaxing on the beach and barbecuing Not Dogs with Geoff. Now I'm back to sane. Mostly.

Really warm

(This is the Douglas Island bridge. I realized that of all the pictures I post here, very few of them are actually of Juneau as a city. So I'm adding this to my "urban" series.)

It hit 50 degrees today. It may not be the first time we've climbed out of the 40-degree range this year, but it definitely seemed to be the most sustained and noticeable duration of warm weather yet. My neighbors were out in droves - laughing, jogging, riding their bikes. I was having a generally bad day. Early doctor's visit. Left my jacket there, with my camera inside the pocket. May or may not get that back. Reality-check call to my health insurance company. Bad run on a treadmill. Tight deadlines at work. Had to run a bunch of errands with my car. Every time I climbed inside, the sticky heat of the interior stoked my grump. The most beautiful day of the year, and I was stewing in my own bad mood. Well, that and a cloud of stagnant moisture that is finally evaporating after a winter of ice buildup. I opened the window because I thought the cool, salty breeze and sunlight would make me feel better. But it doesn't really work that way, does it? Bad moods definitely want to go and hang for a while in the dark.

Not that it was that bad. Everyone has bad days. Everyone. All the time. They're good for the soul, in the long term. I think some of my mood today stemmed from a doctor-scheduled appointment to get an MRI tomorrow. This can only be a bad thing, and here's why: If they find nothing, then I'm no better off than I am now, except for I'll never know what's wrong with me. I could just be a massive hypochondriac. And how do you recover from that? But if they find something, then that will confirm another fear of mine - well, two fears - fear of surgery and fear of the implication of wasting two whole months and then losing an entire summer. How will I forgive my lazy self? And if their findings are inconclusive, which is the most likely scenario, then not only have I wasted two whole months, and who knows how many hundreds of dollars, but I'll likely have to go on believing I'm a hypochondriac until I can plunk down a few thou for a specialist in Seattle. Wow. Getting old is fun.

So no, I'm not real excited to get an MRI. I can't make myself believe that anything that can come out of it will be good news. Why get it at all? Because life never changes through inaction.