Why Does My Body Keep Betraying Me?

When I was a kid I envied my classmates who broke their limbs.  They would get a cast that all the other kids, and even the teacher, would sign. Everybody made a fuss about them. My neighbour, who broke his leg falling off the monkey bars, got pulled to school in a wagon. How cool was that?! (This was in the 1960s, when most families didn’t yet have two cars.)

Of course, as a kid you don’t think about the pain and frustration that goes with broken limbs.

I didn’t have a serious injury until I was nearly 50. Now I seem to be making up for lost time. And it isn’t the fun I’d imagined as a child. If people are going to make a fuss about me, I’d far rather it was because I’d written a brilliant book than because I did something klutzy that resulted in a broken limb.

What’s especially frustrating is that I really work at trying to get and stay healthy now. Yet every time I think I’m getting somewhere, I end up getting injured. And not by doing anything outrageous.

Those of you who’ve known me for a long time are familiar with my “gardening accidents”: one that resulted in a completely severed Achilles tendon, the other that landed me with a Jones fracture of the 5th metatarsal.

Then, last year in Sweden I managed to break my leg on a simple hike, from my foot slipping on a polished stone. I have become all too familiar with casts and crutches, despite the bone density scans that show I do not have osteoporosis.

My new pattern seems to be getting injured when there’s fun travelling to be done. First there was the broken leg in Sweden that led to be being confined to a mobility scooter for nine weeks in London last summer. Then the flare-up of that supposedly healed injury in Peru that prevented me from going on the Amazon jungle trip we’d booked. And now, here we are on the stunningly beautiful Amalfi Coast in Italy, site of some of the best hiking in the world, and after one hike, I seem to have re-injured the old 5th metatarsal fracture.

I was so proud of myself on yesterday’s hike. I had prudently bought hiking poles and knee braces, which made it possible for me to do a steep descent that involved 1,800 stairs from our hillside hideaway (the lovely Villa Donna Fausta in Agerola) to the waterfront at Priano with almost no pain.

Despite some pretty sore muscles from all those stairs, I was psyched for tackling a climb to the top of one of the nearby mountains today for a spectacular view. And then, just before going to bed last night, I suddenly felt a jolt of pain at the site of my old 5th metatarsal fracture. Nah, I said to myself, it’s nothing. Just turned at a bad angle or something. No big deal. It will be fine in the morning.

Sadly, it wasn’t fine in the morning. Every time I put weight on the outside of the foot I get sharp pain. Is it broken again? I don’t know. We are in the countryside, so getting an x-ray done is not easy. I sent DH to go off and do the hike without me. I’ll see how it progresses during the day. So far it doesn’t look swollen, so maybe it isn’t broken. I sure hope not, because I’ve still got several more days in Italy and then another trip back to Stockholm ahead of me. To say nothing of the fact that my collection of crutches and aircast walking boots is back in Edmonton.
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On the positive side, if you’ve got to be housebound, it sure helps to have a stunning view like this one.