Me and Dean. NOT at a work event. Just a Sox game.

Almost four weeks ago, Dean invited me to go to his employee picnic. It was to take place outdoors in a park and it was the first time that his vaccinated coworkers were going to be seeing each other in person since the pandemic began. Spouses were invited.

For most of our relationship and all of our marriage, Dean has worked in government jobs where any celebration or gathering is limited to employees only, so I was interested to see what one of these gatherings was like. We were told to ‘dress to move’ and that there might be kickball. Kickball sounded fun to me and it seemed like a good enough activity to do with people you don’t really know as an ice breaker.

What I don’t think anyone was prepared for was the myriad of other field day type games that were trotted out for everyone to participate in. There were sack races, egg races and three legged races, all of the implements of which seemed to have been purchased with the intent that children use them. This isn’t really surprising, and for the most part, it all worked well enough. I tried to participate in the events that Dean was participating in to be a good sport, but there were many, many people sitting it out.

All was going well in a scene-from-The-Office kind of way when the lady in charge pulled out another box and said that everyone had to play the next game. She then proceeded to unearth the smallest tug-o-war rope in existence. There ended up only being enough room for four people on each side and I ended up being on one side behind Dean with two other ladies behind me.

I don’t have any pictures, but I imagine this is what I must have looked like. Only not lying on a nice blanket.

I’m not sure how it happened, but our side was so outmatched that we were instantly yanked forward. Dean managed to walk forward with the rope, I fell down with one legged frogged out to the side, the ladies behind me fell right on top of my bent leg and hip. It hurt.

Dean and one of his co-workers peeled me off of the ground. I couldn’t put weight on my right leg without shooting pains up the outside of my right knee anytime I tried to stand on it. We had to leave the gathering. I went home and took massive amounts of Advil and spent about an hour trying to roll out my hip. I had to cancel my kickboxing class the following morning because I couldn’t get anyone to sub for me and I was unable to even walk down the block. I was scared and pissed off that I might have hurt myself doing something so dumb.

The next day, I just tested out walking, I had to do some weight training exercises without weights. The following days, I took it slow. Gradually returning to slow running and gradually increasing my distance again. I was happy to be feeling fully functional by the time June started and began to pick up the pace. Suddenly, this week, my adductors (upper inner thigh) decided they weren’t going to do it any longer. I couldn’t run. I was limping when I walked. I made an appointment with a physical therapist to finally assess the damage.

For the last three days, I’ve been biking instead of running, gazing mournfully at the beautiful dawn sunrises, cursing my luck to always get injured and put out of running this time of year when the sun rises so early and the early running is so perfect. I grieved over the fact that I was probably out of running for at least a month. I’m currently halfway through a sugar cleanse and was looking forward to the end and grumpily decided I should probably keep it going longer if I wasn’t going to be able to run off my normal caloric intake.

I began to do the doomed Google searches with my symptoms, trying to determine what could be wrong. The worst case scenario was a labral tear. This would necessitate several months in physical therapy and a lot of time off running at best and surgery with weeks on crutches prior to the months of therapy at worst. I got hung up on this idea and began to try and plan for it.

Cloud always waits in this window until I get back from my run.

I decided that I should just go ahead and get the surgery if I needed it. I could cut my calories and try and find other things to do. Maybe this would be good, I could get heavily into weight training. I’d find a way to keep my classes. My brain went into overdrive. I got sad and sulky and the pain in my hip was bothering me more because of the mental anguish I was putting myself through.

Finally, while doom scrolling, I found an entry on Reddit where the original poster wanted to know what a torn labrum felt like because that’s what he thought he had. He had an appointment with a therapist but was trying to prepare himself. A physical therapist responded and told him not to put too much weight into other people’s experiences and not to try and match his symptoms until he had talked to his therapist. He said you didn’t want to influence anyone one way or the other and gave some examples from his own experience where all signs pointed one way, except for maybe one, and the issue actually turned out to be much simpler. It was exactly what I needed to read.

Although I was still prepared for the worst, I stopped researching and tried to imagine potential better scenarios. Immediately I was reminded of when I had been hit by a truck while riding my bike a month before I was supposed to run the Chicago Marathon. I had been in physical therapy for my shoulder, but most of my other injuries (thankfully) had been superficial. Suddenly, with two weeks to go before the marathon, I couldn’t run. I limped into my physical therapist's office, panicking. She did an evaluation and determined that I had strained my gluteus medius, one of the muscles that had hit the ground and been deeply bruised, and that I would be fine after a few weeks of therapy and taking it easy. I ended up taking two weeks completely off of running and finishing the marathon with a respectable time of 4:07.45. (My therapist had not advised me to run the marathon and I started it assuming that I would need to drop out. I was elated when I didn’t have to.)

After running through this memory, I began hoping that maybe this was just a delayed strain and that I would just have to baby the leg for a while.

As of this writing, I have had my first therapy session.

She pronounced my mobility ‘excellent’ and said that she found no evidence of a tear and only a little hip weakness. She said with some dedication to a few exercises that we went over, we could probably be done with therapy quickly and I could be running again in a few weeks. She even cleared me to run/walk as soon as I felt able to do so.

It was such a relief and I am so elated. The wormhole that I slid into when faced with what I was sure was another long term injury was a dark place. As much as I tried to look at it as a ‘change’ instead of a ‘setback’ I really caused myself some mental anguish.

So I’ve written this long note to myself, and my disaster planner friends, to remind us of two things:

Be careful with your body and enjoy the movement that you have. It’s not a guarantee for life.
The worst case scenario is not always the one you end up living. There’s no reason to pay in advance for misery you may not end up with.

Worst Case Scenario