Internal Fixation
How breaking my leg and twice-daily gym habit let love in
Anyone who’s lived through a Chicago winter and its spillover into gray, 50-degree Memorial Day weekends knows the freedom and exultation of that first warm week. This story takes place in the spring of 1999, during the last week of May and that magical first week of sun and warmth. Everyone seemed to emerge at once, to bike, run, Rollerblade, play beach volleyball on the lakeshore, take the boat out and generally frolic without outerwear for the first time since early September.
My frolicking was limited, however, by a nagging running injury in my right hip. It hadn’t stopped me from working out twice a day or commuting to work by bike, but it did keep me from running. Why not just rest? Take a day or two off? Good questions. It’s taken me eight years of recovery to even start to fully see why I held on so tightly to the security blanket of exercise. For so long, the very convincing voice in my head would tell me: “Here’s one thing no one can take from you, here’s one thing you’re good at. You may not be rich or pretty or get in a sorority, or feel like you belong anywhere, but you will always be able to get up earlier than anyone else and work out the longest.” What power. What a joke. Of course, this was the biggest lie, the bait of addiction promises control and snags you with dependency.
But that week, aching to get back out there among the Midwesterners in Motion, I made a bargain. I would not go to the gym for a week. I would just walk and ride my bike to work. So I got up early that morning, didn’t even look at my top drawer of Lycra and took a shower at my apartment (a rare occurrence given my gym schedule and reliance on Lakeshore Athletic’s shower products). I put on my favorite black and floral miniskirt and electric blue t-shirt from Express (a top tier outfit at the time ). Underneath my skirt, I slipped on my favorite pair of “dancer pants,” light blue Adidas parachute-like warmups that are everywhere now and were almost nowhere in 1999. My plan was to just ride my bike the flat three miles to work. I’d get there early, write my newsletter, and impress Robert, my editor and cube mate on whom I’d had an unrequited crush for the last seven months.
Biking to work was my definition of rest.
Rest was coming for sure.
As soon as I got on my bike, a Chicago police car pulled up beside me at the intersection of Clark and Belden. Together we zoomed down Clark, meeting one another at almost every light. I’d gotten a blocks ahead of the cops, when I saw them: a series of steel plates over some road construction. There was traffic to the left of me, parked cars to the right and the steel plates in my path. I started sliding almost immediately.
This is what I remember 26 years on: My front wheel hitting the lip of a plate, me losing control, steering my handlebars toward the parked cars. My last thought as I went over the handlebars: Well, at least my hip will get some rest.
My leg hit the trunk of a parked maroon Nissan. I landed on my back and immediately tried to stand up. No doing. I fell back on the curb and started to panic. Then, I remembered the cops. They were there before a tear fell from my eye. They called 911, and one volunteered to take my bike back to the vestibule of the apartment building from which they’d seen me emerge just minutes before. My next memories are: The EMT asking me my favorite curse word (fuck), so I could scream it as she straightened my leg. The song playing in the ambulance was Sublime’s “I’ve seen better days.” You bet I made a joke about it. Someone cutting my dancer pants. The ER nurse telling me my right leg was broken and I was headed for surgery for internal fixation — in which a titanium rod would be placed in my broken femur by going through my posterior hip muscles to reach the head of the femur. (I wasn’t a massage therapist yet. This is likely a big part of why I became one.) They asked if they could call anyone. I told them to call my mom and to call work, ask for Robert and tell him I wouldn’t be there. I remember wildly gesticulating at my backpack, saying: my insurance card is in there!
When I got out of surgery, my mom and aunt were there, having both left the classrooms they taught in 300 miles away to fly from Louisville to Chicago. My mom wastes little time in telling me that there’s a cute boy in the waiting room with a stuffed animal. That cute boy was Robert, my editor, my crush, and now, my husband.
I was not an easy person to love right after that break. I rallied for about a week, getting used to my crutches and the attention. The Walgreen’s cashier, my buddy Dudley, would carry my basket as I shopped. My mom stayed for a week, driving me around in my roommate’s car. Fuck you Larry Ellison, but also thank you for employing Nicole and sending her on so many business trips back then. Because she was on one when I crashed, Mom had her bed and we had a car to make it to follow-up ortho appointments. We even drove to Sports Authority, so I could have some hand weights and some semblance of a work out. But, I was going through serious withdrawal. I had no control over my body. I was sickeningly pleased with the weight I’d lost in the three-day hospital stay, but most of it was from my butt and leg muscles, the ones I’d need to heal. But I was so jealous of everyone outside playing. I know this is messed up. I feel shame just recalling my privilege of movement and health, despite the real damage I’d been doing through overexercise and binging and purging. I recall having a hissy fit sitting in Nicole’s car, in the parking lot of the Jewel, while Mom shopped for food I didn’t want to eat.
I snapped out of it. Or more accurately, I got used to it. Exercise, like sugar, is a habit. After about another week of not going to the gym for stupid amounts of time every day, I noticed I was OK. I was still me, still funny, still able to write. I hadn’t blew up like a balloon. None of my friends had evaporated. I could put on music and dance from the waist up. I had time on Saturday mornings to sit at the animal adoption events I’d long said I would volunteer for. I had time to spend with myself and with people who don’t consider the stair climber a meet-cute spot. Robert offered to drive me home after work. Despite us working on Michigan Avenue, he’d somehow snagged one of two parking spots on Lower Wacker under our building. His washing machine conveniently broke that summer. Twice a week, when I’d normally be at the gym, he’d come over after work with a roll of quarters. We’d watch “Law and Order” on the couch, never touching, but getting closer with solve.
As I started PT and was able to ride my bike again, I never went back to the gym after work. I’d swim or get on the elliptical in the morning, grateful for every drop of sweat and greater range of motion. At lunch time, Robert and I would go on errands — to Crate and Barrel to buy wedding presents for his friends or Marshall Fields to get him new shoes. When the dapper, older salesman kept asking my opinion of his shoes, I did not disabuse him of the assumption that we were a couple. After work, he’d do laundry at my place or I’d ask him to take me on some important errand — like to treat him to a burger in the beer garden I used to live above and work weekends in (RIP Southport City Saloon).
Because we were still colleagues, Robert never made a move that entire summer. One night when the laundry went too late and Nicole was out of town, I told him he could just stay over on the couch. He stayed on the couch. I now know that he awoke in the middle of the night and almost came into my room. I too ventured half-way down the hall before chickening out.
It was effervescent, that summer. No longer waking up longing to get to the gym, I’d look forward to seeing Robert and sharing yet another story idea for our newsletter. The improv classes I was taking at Second City seemed so much more fun, even on crutches there for awhile, when I wasn’t racing to get there from a workout or limping around on stage with this ache or that. I was still exercising, but it wasn’t the main event of my life.
By the end of the summer, I could run again, but I didn’t push it. Robert got a job in D.C. at a dot.com, and told me about it and that he was falling in love with me all in the same breath. I told him to hurry up, because I’d fallen a long time ago. I started searching journalismjobs.com a week later for gigs in Virginia. The one run I remember vividly is from Robert’s apartment to mine, one early, late-summer morning after I finally spent the night at his house. We didn’t do any laundry.
A top tier outfit, indeed.
Sweet and hopeful!