On Being Crippled Me

During my senior year of high-school, our AP English teacher – Mr. Menard – gave us the traditional writing assignment of describing something that identified us. For example, a red-headed buddy of mine, Joe Griffin, titled his piece "On Being Ginger Me," and wrote about the undoubtedly profound ups and downs of having red hair in today's world (I know this because he wrote his essay right before class on notebook paper, and I somehow ended up with it, vowing to gift it to him at his wedding. Joe, if you're reading this, I still have it, and plan on carrying through with my plan!) Anyway, amidst the identity crisis that is adolescence, I was stumped. My solution was to turn to another "crisis" in my life at that time. It was the beginning of my senior year, and I had a stress fracture in my left foot (cue Daniel Day-Lewis), sitting me out for essentially all of my senior year. So in arrogantly dramatic fashion befitting only a teen athlete whose life is sports, I titled my piece "On Being Crippled Me" and described the subtle depression creeping into my life as I was ending my high school career on the sidelines. But the truth is, while my various instances on crutches have indeed been the darker moments of my life, they are probably the reason why I consider myself a pretty positive person. Because in the end, feeling sorry for yourself isn't going to make things better. That, and someone else has always got it worse, so count your blessings, suck it up, rub some dirt on it, etc. Ultimately, I concluded my masterpiece writing assignment by claiming that temporary immobility did not, in fact, define who I was as a person, and that the other advantages - dare I say blessings - in my life at that point were near innumerable.

Well, that got melodramatic real quick. Don't feel bad if you rolled your eyes or even skipped that part. The intended segue is that I was back on crutches again this past week. And, like most stories ending in crutches, it's not a glorious memory like parkour gone wrong or an accident with a rusty bear trap would be. I was playing soccer with Alex and some of his friends from high school, and we had just agreed to add ten more minutes to the second half. Not because we were young, spry, and energetic, but because the opportunity to play on a full sized field in a huge city is a privilege that doesn't come often. My team was on the attack, and I was racing a crowd towards the loose ball in the box. Another in on the chase was a hefty teammate approaching two hundred pounds. He attempted to slide tackle the ball to just tap it in while I got a nice shove into his legs from the goalie in his own attempt to stop the ball. I ended up tripping over my leviathanic teammate after his tree trunk legs slid into my feet, in a graceful sequence I'm sure rivaled the beauty of a swan's dance. My first two thoughts after pathetically crumpling in a dog pile of has-beens on the field were a) confusion as to why this mammoth decided to launch himself at the ball given his size and proximity to other forms of life, as well as b) wow, my foot hurts. After the game, I gave up going out for drinks with the guys, which should give those who know me best a good measure of how much my foot was hurting.

The dream team.

I couldn't be sure what exactly happened, but seeing as I'd broken that foot before, I wanted to be. The next day I headed to La Clinica Santa Fe, one of the best hospitals in the city, with Brother Jorge, the monastery medic. They took X-Rays, which determined that my left foot had merely suffered a bad sprain. They wrapped it in a soft cast, which was basically every layer of a normal cast except for the hardened shell. My instructions from the signed hospital documents told me I couldn't take the cast off for a week. The next sentence proceeded to direct me to ice my foot every six hours. Faced with such contradictory remedies, I looked to Jorge, who was shaking his head and holding back from laughing as if to say, Welcome to Colombian healthcare. It was then that St. Cloud Orthopedics crossed my mind. I've seen worse, I thought to myself.

I wasn't strictly told to keep all weight off during that week. But, given my unease with the hospital's diagnosis (I say hospital instead of doctor since I talked with around five different people) and considering I couldn't fit any shoe on over the cast, I decided to play it safe and just crutch it for the week.

Getting picked on, as always. 2011, foot.

If you've never experienced the joys of using crutches to walk, imagine needing to use your shoulders and arms to walk instead of your much stronger legs, which makes every short walk a workout that leaves you panting and sweating upon arrival. Also, depending on the quality of the padding on your crutches, you could end up with blisters on your hands and bruises on your sides. Besides blisters and aches, walking on crutches gets you two other things I despise: attention and pity. The sequence of what people do when they see someone they know on crutches is comically predictable. As soon as their eyes slot machine their way up from assessing the the situation with a level of scrutiny no doubt challenging that of Gregory House, they invariably ask how it happened. You then end up spending a majority of your waking hours recounting the ever so glorious tale of maimery until the majority of those you see on the day-to-day are familiar with your riveting memoir. I sound spiteful when, in reality, people are just trying to be nice.

Another way people show their kindness is in their pity. Holding doors, patiently waiting at the top of the stairs, or plastering themselves against hallway walls to leave you space, the fun really never ends. As nice as it is to not have to worry about spilling an aluminum lunch tray with cafeteria food carried by a dude who looks like cafeteria food as he tries to balance on two aluminum sticks, the level of helplessness and ineptitude reaches heights normally reserved for infants. Again, my complaints are not at others’ kindness, but rather at my own situation in those moments.

Adorable puppies help anything. 2013, knee.

Working with kids helps alleviate the self-pity and attention, mostly because they are so into their own lives and dramas that they don’t care. Some of the younger ones are also so unaware of personal space to begin with that it becomes comical when I need more of it to simply maneuver essentially four legs. It should be known that I get mobbed by 10 year olds every morning, asking questions they should know the answers to, asking others they shouldn’t know the answers to. Frequently, I simply weave my way through them while firing some sassy remarks back and forth. But ‘weave’ is not in a crutch’s vocabulary, so I end up standing there and enjoying the kids’ faces as they realize I can’t get past without a Mosesian parting of these tiny Colombian seas.

Overall, crutches suck. I don’t like the attention or pity that comes with physical ineptitude, preferring my more clandestine and numerous mental ineptitudes. It made for a long week, especially trying to command forty kids’ attention when my mobility was limited. But I am now off the crutches, walking almost normally, with some in-house physical therapy to keep me on my toes (HA).

"Hey, we won our basketball game today.
No thanks to you!" 2016, foot.

I’d like to think that Colombian sass had a lot to do with my positive spirits this time around. What followed the “How did it happen” question was usually another comment that was more along the lines of, “So, when are we going dancing?” or “I’ll race you to lunch!” Of particular mirth to my coworkers, since they’ve now seen me dance on multiple occasions, was to sarcastically claim that I’d already learned to dance the Patacumbia, which is a kind of Cumbia dance that essentially does look like you have hurt one foot and are hopping around on the other. Such wry, sometimes cruel humor is a favorite of mine, and is much preferred to the babying often received, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Even the kids got in on it. As I was leaving the school one day, scampering through the light rain that was beginning, the kids on the basketball team yelled after me, “Corre, Forrest!!"

Spanish word of the day: Medical terminology! Yeso means 'cast', while hueso means 'bone'. Also, muleta means 'crutch', not to be confused with maleta, meaning 'bag' or baggage. Spanish continues to fascinate me.

Song in my head lately: Carlos Vives wrote La Tierra del Olvido a while back, but recently collaborated with most of Colombia's other famous singing corps to create this phenomenal collaboration video. While I haven't been to a lot of the locations shown, this will probably always remind me of Colombia and its awesome people.