Silver Lining

It was March of 2013. I was gearing up for my third half-marathon the following week. In addition to running my new fitness studio and teaching seven classes a week. I felt fit and strong like I could tackle anything. A few days later, I came down with what I thought was the flu. Determined to push through, I tried to teach my Thursday evening row class and nearly passed out, so my business partner subbed in for my next class, and I went home to rest.

It was around 10 pm when the pain first snaked from my left knee, up my IT band, and into my hip, and that definitely wasn’t on the flu menu. Hour by hour, the pain in my leg increased. By morning I was weak from vomiting, bouts of fever and complete lack of sleep. The pain was so bad that I couldn’t walk, so I crawled into the car, and my parents drove me to the hospital.

I was tachycardic, my heart racing. I was in kidney failure and septic shock. My white blood count was sky-high. The first doctor was brusque, authoritative, and completely wrong in his diagnosis of bacterial gastroenteritis, which even I knew made no sense, given the amount of pain in my leg. That, he told me, was probably a pulled muscle from running. He said my CT scan looked okay and I’d be home in a couple of days.

Later that afternoon, another doctor came to see me, mad-scientist-like, running in and out of my room, asking questions. He zoned in on my leg. Had I been out of the country? In any strange bodies of water? Did I, no judgment here, use any recreational drugs involving needles? I answered no, over and over, while the gears turned in his head.

It was about then that I started asking my mom, my dad, the med student who came by to study me, and really, anyone in the vicinity if I would still be able to run the half marathon on Sunday. They sent me in for an MRI. The CT scan only looked okay because I was in kidney failure so they couldn’t use contrast dye. They later said that when the MRI images came through, my leg was lit up like a Christmas tree.

There are moments in life when everything goes in slow motion, even as it’s happening. Doctors and nurses flooded into the room. Someone asked me if I had a living will, did I want extraordinary measures? I signed over the power of attorney to my father. When he looked at me, the usual smile crinkles at the corners of his eyes were gone, replaced by a haunted look. It scared me more than all the needles, the pain, and the paperwork put together. It told me what no one had said to me in so many words, you could die.

Someone, a nurse, I think, hugged me. The chief resident and another doctor tried to stab a central line in my neck. While my head was turned sideways, and they held pressure on their failed attempt, an orthopedic trauma surgeon sat down in my field of vision and told me what was really wrong.

Necrotizing Fasciitis. It definitely sounded bad, and it was. Bacteria, strep A, I would later learn, had found its way into my healthy body. Through a bug bite, maybe a scratch, I’ll never really know. Once in my bloodstream, it found a happy place to settle in my left hip and leg and went to work - eating connective tissue, sucking up fluid from muscles, leeching nutrients, in effect, killing the host it was trying to feed off of. If it isn’t caught and treated in time, necrotizing fasciitis is always fatal.

Amputations are common. They would have to cut me open from hip to knee. When I went under for the first time, I didn’t know if I would wake up with a leg or not. I didn’t know if I would wake up at all.

I did, of course, but that was just the start of the fight. I had two wound vacs to suck fluid from my open wound, first a big one at the foot of my hospital bed and then, later, a portable one I carried around at home like a purse. They ran four different kinds of antibiotics into my bloodstream before they narrowed on the right bacteria. It was nine days before I could stand, assisted. I had eleven surgeries in five weeks, one about every third day, because the only way to beat Necrotizing fasciitis is to cut it out of you and keep it out while you heal. It was seventeen days before I took my first painful steps across the hospital room on crutches. I spent 21 days in the hospital. And it was six weeks before I took a real shower. My body had waged a war while barely moving. But I was alive, and I had my leg. And then the real work began.

My physical therapist told me to not to think about my rehab in days and weeks and start thinking about it in seasons. In summer, I moved from crutches to a cane and taught myself how to walk upstairs again. In the fall, I built up tiny new muscles along my left leg where they all had been severed and sewn back together. In Winter, I returned to my studio - teaching a few classes a week. I could empathize in new ways when class was challenging for my clients because of illness, injury, or lack of physical fitness. They would tell me I inspired them to try harder, which was enough to get me there on my toughest days. It’s been 11 years. I still have pain or discomfort daily. Once in a while, I try to run again. Then I remember why I shouldn’t. But I push through in other ways to challenge my level of fitness and to stay active and strong. I try, not always successfully, to embrace the discomfort.

During those first days in the hospital, when I was lying in a bed in the ICU with a wide-open leg and a zillion wires and tubes attached to me, someone handed me a card. The front of it read, “One day at a time, one step at a time, you can make it.”

I don’t teach fitness anymore, but I deeply appreciate those who do. One of my Peloton instructors recently said victory is always sweeter when you’ve done the hard thing. Another one often says we do the work because we get to, not because we have to.

My recovery has been and still is a journey—one that I almost didn’t get the chance to have. A year after my illness, I walked half of the race I was supposed to run when I was in the hospital, in a relay with my business partner. I was slow, and it hurt, and I ended the race in some sort of weird, awkward trot because I was determined to run across the finish line. And the victory was sweet.

When you think you are done with a challenge, physical or mental, there will always be another one. That’s the nature of life. This wasn’t even my first big one and not even close to my last. So speaking from my own experiences, here’s what I know. Do the hard thing, our bodies and our minds are made to do them. Sometimes it will feel impossible. But do it even if you have to do it slowly, a step at a time. Even if it takes seasons instead of the days, or the weeks you were hoping for, put the effort in. And do it not because you have to but because you get to.