Melissa Lutz Blouin

It was a normal walk down a flight of stairs, until it wasn’t. My ankle rolled in one direction and kept rolling. I flew off the second to last stair, landed with a thud.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just fine.” I tried to put weight on my right foot, but a burst of pain stopped me.

A friend drove me to the emergency room. All the way there, I thought: “I’m going to feel silly when the doctor tells me I just bruised it.”

In the ER, a tech in colorful scrubs wheeled a portable X-ray machine into the windowless room where I lay on a gurney, snapped a few images, and left. A nurse gave me pain pills to swallow. I fell asleep.

At 2 a.m., about five hours later, the physician woke me up, apologizing.

“It’s been a busy night,” she said.

She touched her hand to the blanket, the offending foot beneath the brush of her fingers.

“If you’re going to fracture your foot, this is the best kind of fracture to have,” she said. My heart sank.

She explained that I had an avulsion fracture — tendons had snapped off tiny pieces of bone when I fell. The X-ray showed I had snapped two or three places.

“I’m not sure about the third one,” she said. “You should follow up with an orthopedist this week. We’ll get you set up with crutches and a boot, and you can go home.”

That was February 2 of this year.

Having fractured my foot in four places, I had to put many things on hold. I gave up teaching the yoga class I had just started teaching a month before. I canceled a party I was hosting. I postponed a birthday dinner with family. I missed out on a new yoga membership deal. I put my YMCA membership on hold. I canceled a snowshoe in the Cascades.

I couldn’t drive for more than a month. The orthopedist said no weight bearing for two weeks. I had crutches and a boot. Snow and ice made it treacherous to go outside.

I would like to tell you I handled all this with complete equanimity, but that would be a lie.

I asked for help, and family and friends responded positively. Still, I hated asking people to give me rides to doctor’s appointments and physical therapy visits. I struggled with medical anxiety that always haunts me when anything goes wrong with my body. I enjoyed writing, reading and visiting with friends, but I missed movement and outdoor time — my favorite forms of stress relief.

I feared I might not recover to the point where I could resume all my favorite activities.

It felt hard.

It felt like a setback.

Time seemed to creep along. I listened carefully to the physical therapists. I moved my foot in all the ways that they suggested. I took pain medicine as needed. I made sure to get enough rest. Some days I made progress. Some days I didn’t.

Exactly five months after I fractured my foot, I hiked 11 miles to a lake in the North Cascades. I soaked in the sounds of Elliott Creek cascading in small falls and pools down the mountainside. I breathed in the loamy scent of cedar and fir. I drank in the deer ferns lining the trail. I found a tree to lounge against at the lake as I lunched. I admired the lake’s azure beauty and the reflection of snow-capped peaks beyond.

It felt amazing.

It felt like a triumph.

I felt proud of myself for working hard to heal my foot through physical therapy, rest, and healthy food. I wanted to feel that way forever.

Yet I know that fractured foot won’t be my last setback. The next difficulty may not feel as dramatic, but I will experience challenges again. It’s the nature of being human. I’ve had a total hip replacement, owned and used a wheelchair, and had three abdominal surgeries. I’ve been hospitalized, been on bed rest, been told by doctors I might not be able to walk someday. And while I’d like to be done with setbacks, I recognize become more frequent as we grow older.

So, while I enjoy reveling in the peak of a triumph, I also want to learn to navigate the valley of setbacks with equanimity.

For now, I’ll savor the feeling of being whole once more. And when the next challenge comes, I will try to meet myself gently wherever I am.