The seventh day

Progress is doing something this week that I couldn't do this time last week. This time last week: I remember sobbing when I came back from down under anesthesia, even though I couldn't stay awake long enough to help the nurse dress me. I sobbed again as I crutched from the car to the couch before falling asleep, lulled into momentary forgetting by the opioids throughout that evening. I couldn't walk. I barely talked. Food made me nauseous; walking almost led to vomiting, twice. A bowl decorated my bedside table, meant for an unglamorous function.

Progress: today I have walked without my crutches and adjusted my immobilizer to a slightly less draconian degree. I can put on my own socks, and today I put on my own shoes. The bathroom no longer seems an ordeal, and I have weaned off Miralax for the third day now. I made my own lunch, filled the ice machine myself, scooped litter. I am a functioning adult, by all appearances. This is progress.

Mountains: Walking seems so fundamental and second nature, but the process of regaining that ability comes in minute increments. A little more quad activation means I can support more weight. Five extra degrees of flexion means I can relearn my gait, as does slightly more extension. (Sometimes it feels like I have a rubber band for an ACL, which becomes more taut as I try to straighten my knee. Other times the sensation is like having a rod in my knee. If it breaks, I've morbidly wondered, would it sound like a crack or a snap?) So every day now I do my exercises: straight-leg raises each side, heel slides, calf raises, TKEs, back kicks, and quad squeezes. Twice a day, every day.

Icing and surrounded by warmth

An aside: I love cats. Once upon a time I dismissed Sam's idea of adopting cats because, well, "what do they do?" I was ignorant. Cats are incredibly silly. They sleep on the floor and ignore the cat bed for months; then they sleep on the cat bed after I throw a burlap sack into it. They learn where we keep the toys (fourth shelf), and they learn how to contort their bodies just enough to reach at it with their paw and watch everything come tumbling now. I go pee, and they jump in my lap. Pepper hunts by sitting on top of the toy. Bowie hunts by bunny-kicking and then instantly getting bored. The other night she stalked and caught a moth, then ate it. We have thrown scratching posts all over the house, yet the couch reigns supreme as their outlet of choice. We build a fort and cover it with a blanket; they jump right into the blanket and ruin it altogether. They make us laugh, and I love them so much.

lest i sound so doom and gloom, i’m trying to be better about taking stock of life beyond. some moments:

- going to a baseball and basketball game this week and thinking how fucking weird it is that this school’s thing is white towels and sandstorm. but also, you’re in the midst of 15,000 other people practically piled above a tiny court, and the music is loud, the crowd is hungry, there’s a title on the line, and when that gamecock crowing sound goes off, it’s hard not to get swept up in the shrill and thrill.

- sometimes these moments make me feel like I’m having a second college experience. my first dates back to that one summer in Taipei when we’d hop 7-11s and end up at roxy until the sun came up and the MRT started again. and it bewilders me how I spent my college years and what I thought I was doing then.

- my last words before going to sleep are always “good night pepper, good night bowie” — and in that order so pepper knows she hasn’t been replaced as the first child. but then when she chirps in the night and wants a little love because bowie demands affection and curls up next to us, I wake up. I drop my hand out by the floor and she comes up for chin scratches, and sometimes if she wants, she circles around my leg and falls asleep there.

- a horizon of 70s in the weather: indecision in what to wear to match the transition of the seasons.

- how crispy pan jeon is, hot off the stove, delicious and salty and crunchy. what greater joy could there be on this green earth than this platter before me?

So I tore my other ACL.

I knew, I think, what it was when it happened. The telltale pop, the sudden pivoting, the instant pain: was this not more textbook than my last, when I was blissfully ignorant of what it would cost? This time, I let three people bend my knee and say they suspect the meniscus. I searched "bucket handle tear." Someone told me it was shaped like a burger patty. The orthopedic drew its crescent shape right on the thin, waxy covering of the medical exam table, and I nodded when he asked if I understood, but all I wondered was about the paper. Do they roll out a whole new length just for the next patient?

The MRI: "A complete tear of the ACL." My burger patty was intact after all.

So I tore my other ACL, and within 2 years I'll have had two surgeries on two knees. I have no other ACLs to give.

To say I felt devastated seems like simplification. Not because of an absence of a single word but also because I struggle to pinpoint what exactly was the root. That I couldn't play again: yes, the obvious one. In 2 years I've played about 4 months' worth of that I love; I've given hours and weekends of an emotional labor from the sideline, most times thankless, and while I love it in all its forms remarkably less here than I did elsewhere, it sustained me.

That it was wildly unjust: yes, that too. I put in the work at physical therapy, twice a week from 7-8am and more at the gym outside of that. I pushed a sled of 90lb weights across the turf until a rope 20 meters long stretched taut, and then I had to jog back, pick up the rope, and haul it back, length by brutal length. I did 10-20s on the resistance bike more times than I cared, failed to ever row 500 meters in 2 minutes, suffered 40 seconds of 100 meters of the Versaclimber. I gave all that it demanded of me, made that graft my own. I trusted my physical therapists wholeheartedly, and when they cleared me, I had learned to trust my knee as well. I was stronger, and I felt that in every way when I played, sweaty brace be damned. How could this - another tear, low-stakes, no defender, stupid stupid stupid - be the reward?

That inexplicably, this was inevitable: 我的命, coming from the smallest, quietest part of me, suddenly louder in the instant it happened. Yes, the science explains it: retears are likely to happen within the first 1-2 years, either in the same knee or the other ("contralateral ACL," of which the outcome of greater time spent in a medical setting results in a morbid knowledge you never wanted to gain). It matters not at all that I trusted my knee, if I had worn my brace. Muscles compensate; injuries happen. Yes, the bad luck explains it: pivoting sports lead to pivoting injuries. Isolated, I simply had two unenviable strokes of misfortune. ("If I had a nickel each time I tore my ACL, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it's happened twice...")

Mostly, the explicable part of the inexplicable thought was just - I'm unsurprised that this would ask an ever-higher price of me. That I could complete the unseen work of 10 months of PT: insufficient. That I would devote weekends to the sideline, daytime to planning, spare thought to coaching: inadequate. Each time I met the challenge, and each time the challenge grew. So why wouldn't this, too, be assured? The idea that I might one day think about my return in double-digit months, normalized? That I might, even, question if I should return at all?

So I tore my other ACL.

When others have written about their experiences with long-recovery injuries, they talk about grief, and I realize I have never framed my experience through that lens. (In that I think I remain my mother's daughter: if you have time to [fill in the blank], you have time to work.) Last time I was clear-eyed about my horizons, so perhaps there was less to mourn beyond the time I would lose. And I regained my strength and more, so the idea of grief felt even more removed. Some talk about being softer with themselves; I grew immovable in my conviction that work yielded results. Was I not the evidence? Others talk of acceptance and adjustments: ways to navigate the grief. Yet I had accepted, I had adjusted, and I had passed the test. Ever I saw the ordeal as something to overcome, and thus grief seemed like a fleeting phase.

But - "last time," I said. "Last time"! What a terror of a phrase, the implication of subsequent instances of a long-term injury. Now I wonder about grief. How I am processing, how I will.

In the meantime, my days continue with small pockets of joy and celebration. I can walk, jog, squat. I have discovered virtual media at the stationary bike at the gym and "biked" through Taroko. When we do Connections right before bed, and I immediately see "patterns of 'k' in 'potassium,' 'Kelvin,' 'okay,' and 'thousand," and we agree I have the mind of a psycho. When Pepper bunts my leg for chin scratches while I cook, and I sing her my special Pepper song. When Bowie circles in my lap and then settles in, her purring constant as the blessings I have. Later this year we will visit Portland and Alaska, and I wish, now that my time has been unshackled, to visit old friends in better cities. At night recently, I have dreamed of the people I think about when I think about paths taken and untaken.

So this thing happened to me (again), and I am a multitude of emotions (my words feel spent). It is another mountain, and I - well, once upon a time, in a land far far away, I climbed mountains just to see what I might find at the top.

new acl who dis

9122.

It’s September 1, and I am multitudes. 

I am crying right now, for reasons unknown. They come suddenly, these sweeping waves that heave my heart upward, and quietly. It is a production for nobody but myself. In my office, at home, in the car: I find myself momentarily humbled, compelled to acknowledge something at play. Whether a fullness or an emptiness, I do not know. 

Tonight it was a cookbook of Shanghainese dishes. I came across the recipe for hongshaorou, I saw the photo, and in that second it unearthed me. It made me think of Jianguo 328, and that precedes a richness of memories that I have. Have circled, have made peace with, have settled, have unsettled. Have carried, to be carried. 

The next recipe: big wontons 大馄饨. A separate vein of recollections, the same incandescent feeling of possibility. Our first night in a big city, counting bills and too poor to sensibly afford the low-budget meal we wanted. Yet there we were, wide smiles over a steaming bowl of freshly made wontons. 

I say possibility, yet it is the impossibility of that time, of that entirely distinct existence, that astounds me now. 

I am content, and I am not. Oh, the conventional markers of success. The material things we buy with our immaterial money, made valuable because they root us here, there, within systems. Once upon a time, I boarded a plane every three months; I lived on a rock in the ocean in this vast, vast world; and so I find myself curious, furious about the walls of this bubble. That the walls are there at all, self-made or otherwise. 

What grounds me here, though, are very real sources of contentment. (Here I wryly note the name of my blog: did I not, twelve years ago, find this phrase worthy of remembering?) I have an abiding love, a constant, a steadiness. I am sheltered, warm, comfortable. I indulged in an ice cream bar when I started writing this. 

And yet, and yet. I feel what I feel. A restlessness stirs. 

I am hurting, but I am whole. I had long ago accepted that I would pay whatever price this passion would demand. Over the years it has meant hamstring pulls, scars and cuts, ankle sprains, concussions, my time. Now it is my knee, and I have ceded it. Accepted: though this is always said with the naïveté of youth. Even now. I cannot know what it means for me much later. For now, I still choose to chase what brings me joy. 

I am in awe. This blog turns 12, and it is still here, this corner of comfort, even if occasional. My original posts mostly recounted my life in a foreign place for friends back home, and since then it has evolved. At times it is a place for more pensive writings, at times to dump my favorite song of the moment, at times other purposes. No matter. The crucial thing is that it has lasted for another year, another September, and still I write.

Someone once told me I lived like I had a chip on my shoulder. I think about that sometimes.

I distinctly remember sitting with Robin after a hike, the two of us waiting for the bus against the dying glow of a golden afternoon. We were taking a break from Ratslap, and somehow the question came up: what has been the most defining moment of your life so far? He went first. Then I did. Mine was more recent. It was 2011, my boyfriend had ended things near the end of my winter trip home, citing the distance, and it had devastated me. I sat on the trunk of our old family Honda, gazing at the house across the street. Looking at nothing, thinking about everything. I was 21, and I thought my life had reduced to two choices: should I go back, or should I stay for the hope of something? Staying meant abandoning my MA program, but I could care less.

“And I don’t know, I chose to came back. Obviously - I’m here now.” I paused, added, “Hardest decision I’ve had to make.” The solemnity of the moment passed. We went back to playing cards, waiting for the bus, sitting on the rock. Back to Taipei.

You know what I read once about memories? That every time you revisit a memory, you’re actually not revisiting the memory itself but the last time you conjured it. Thus the haziness.

So ask me again, and I’ll tell you that I’m sure that moment happened, both the contemplation on the trunk of a car and the retelling on the rock. But they became intertwined, so much that I often remember the first moment through the lens of the second. And because I had said that thing aloud, I had made it real. It was the hardest decision. I did come back after all, for reasons unknown to be known. I clung to that, made it fundamental to my self-narrative.

Made it so I’d never misremember.

I also could’ve sworn it happened in January, ten years ago. The car part. But when I looked through my archives, searching for validation, it turns out I was wrong.

Affection came scarce around the house. Tell us you love us, we’d demand, like the other parents do. Instead, they fed us seconds and marched us to piano lessons. Give us a kiss, we’d ask, like the other parents do. They waved us off, as if to swat away the inanity of that request. Then came BB. His chubby fingers and roly-poly figure disarmed them, nudged them toward a foreign landscape of expression. Now they punctuate with emojis, exclamations, and hyperboles. “Handsome boy!” “Baby of 2020!” Most times though, they ask simply to show they care: “How’s BB today?”