An Epic Shiner

I get injured in the stupidest ways.

Legend has it that when I was two, I ran pell-mell into a church and tripped over the threshold, breaking my leg--even though two-year-olds have bones made of rubber. I have the doll-sized cast stickered with Sesame Street bandaids to prove it.

When I was 24 I tried to mount my bike on the front of a bus--as I did every workday--and slipped off the curb, breaking my foot. A month later, I left for a mission trip. On crutches.

That nasty-looking burn at the base of my thumb? I was checking over rotisserie chickens at the grocery store and nudged the heat lamp for a fraction of a second.

So. Picture this. The first serious cold front finally arrived here in sweltering Houston. Sergey was thrilled and planned a hiking trip every week for as long as this lasts. We woke up at 8, breakfasted, loaded a backpack up with water and a few sundries, and drove about an hour and a half out to Little Lake Creek Loop Trail. I spent the car ride reading Sergey our current out-loud title (which happens to be Case For The Real Jesus by Lee Strobel).

Little Lake Creek Loop trail is roughly 13 miles of hiking which we can complete in between 4.5 and 5.5 hours, depending on how good our pace is. You have to cross several streams, which necessitates a few steep up and down sections, but beyond that it's mostly level trail crisscrossed by roots.

I should talk about the roots. There's two kinds, the kind that run in lines that are parallel to the ground, pointing in any direction, and the kind that probably used to be a tiny tree because a nub sticks up from the ground in a vicious, vindictive, boot-grabbing hook.

Can you tell where I'm going, yet?

While the first couple of times on a trail are always magical for me, I quickly get tired of the same surroundings. From my third use of a trail and onward, I tend to use the time to muse over writing problems or sort out things that are bothering me.

On this particular hike, having already spent a couple of hours imagining another arc for The Remara Phenomenon, I switched to practicing Japanese. I had just learned how to express X-years-old and X-o'clock (with minutes). These number words have odd rules, so I retreated to my thoughts and started counting minutes, one to sixty, in Japanese. Having successfully maneuvered through that, I thought I would practice numbers in general and count from one to one hundred.

Ichi. Ni. San. Yon.

A fraction of my brain monitored how far ahead of me Sergey was, making sure I never fell too far behind.

Sanjuroku. Sanjunana. Sanjuhachi.

A fraction of my brain made sure I didn't steer straight into trees and did a reasonable job at picking up my feet. In retrospect, I feel like the RAM allocated to my vision was running super low, due to my attempts to visualize the numbers as I spoke.

Nanajuichi. Nanajuni. Nanajusan.

With much difficulty and careful recall, I got up to seventy-something when my foot-caught-face-slammed.

That's how fast it was. There was no intervening "Going Down!" alarm. My boot caught that bitterly hooked root and the momentum from where the other leg kept moving me forward rocketed me extra hard face-first--not just into the ground, but into a perfectly placed wooden plank that someone with the best of intentions had placed there to shore up the trail.

"Ohhhh Goooooood," I started sobbing. I heard boots hitting the ground. A second later Sergey was right there and the babbling started. Mine, that is--Sergey was absolutely quiet as I motor-mouthed my panic.

It didn't hurt yet, but I knew it would and was supposed to. My head sounded like a replay of the Pixar movie Inside Out if the entire emotion control room was staffed by Fear.

How do you X-ray a face?

My glasses cracked from the impact, that means my cheekbone has to be broken.

This is going to look so bad, how do I convince the doctor that I really did this to myself?

I can't let go of my face.

My hand hurts too.

I had my hands cupped over my cheek and I was terrified of letting go. Somewhere in the middle of all my panic I managed to say, "I know I'm going to be okay but I think I just need to lie here until this passes."

So I lay there, facedown on the trail, while Sergey rubbed my shoulder silently.

After a while, the storm mostly spent itself and the shock dialed down enough for me to very cautiously sit up. Sergey helped me remove the backpack and gave me two tablets of Alleve, which we had just incorporated into our backpack supplies. I downed them with water, then asked for some trail mix. The shaky crying died down further. At this point, we discovered that my glasses were not actually cracked, they just looked that way because of a perfect line of sob-snot trailing across a lens.

We were almost at the halfway point of the hike. We were very near one of the four parking lots situated along the trail, so it was an option for me to go wait at one while Sergey backtracked and brought the car around to get me, but that would take a couple of hours.

I thought about the last two times I ran from situations where I was "not okay." There was my first attempt at skiing, which went very poorly and triggered enough panic that I couldn't face a second day of it. That was almost four years ago and I still don't want to try again. Then there was the time when I took Krav Maga classes for about a year. I broke my little toe doing a warmup exercise, then never came back to class once it healed.

One of the conglomerate ideas I've been internalizing from Jordan Peterson goes approximately like this: backing down from a situation produces more backing down in all situations. Also, you can often choose the framework (or narrative) that you use to craft your story, and that can change the entire event.

The side of my face felt tight and puffy and my right hand hurt, but my legs were fine. I passed the backpack off to Sergey early and said I wanted to go as far as I could, and that if my legs started giving me trouble, then I'd bail.

The further along I got, the better I felt. I started laughing about some of the ridiculous aspects of the situation. I checked with Sergey about some of my more neurotic-sounding concerns, to see if they were warranted. I could already tell, as I pressed on in the hike, that the story that was coming together was less about how I suffered this terrible injury that was super scary and more about my hiking war-wound, garnered when I wasn't paying enough attention. It was the sort of story I was going to look back on and laugh about, partly because I stood up and kept going.

We made it all the way to the end--an hour behind schedule, but we made it. We went to a restaurant and feasted ourselves. Later, I treated myself to a lovely, scented bath to soothe my aching muscles.

That was yesterday. Today my cheek is still chipmunk-swollen and has a couple of nasty scrape marks. I'm still waiting on the painter's palette effect to break out, but I can smile without it hurting and my jaw opens all the way.

Tomorrow, we're going to hit the trail one more time before this cold front switches on us. I think I'll leave my Japanese practice behind, but I'll definitely pack my sense of humor and my pick-up-and-keep-on. I've come this far in personal growth and exercise, can't let a few injuries stop me now.