The Garden of Arcane Delights

So, as I wrote, only three days after being out of the boot, I ruptured my Achilles tendon, went back into surgery, and was soon back in bed with an enormous cast on my leg.

Every time I go down for the count like this, I tell myself that I will be productive.  For a while, I was.  I did a rewrite of that novel I have been planning on publishing.  I worked on that for about three feverish weeks, where I got in the zone again, writing from sunrise to sunset.  But when I was done, that stupor resumed again.  Maybe you know what I am talking about.  Maybe you don't.  When you are down, watching movies, reading books - it's all fun for about three days, and then the boredom settles in.  Many times, everyone is gone from the house, and I am left to sit and think - think about my health issues, think about how I don't have a job right now, can't even walk, think about my painful divorce, relive every mistake, catalog everything that went wrong, and evaluate yourself under the kind of self-scrutiny that comes through isolation.

My "Zipper Leg"

After a couple of weeks, the cast came off, and then the staples.  My kids observed that it looked like I had a zipper on the back of my leg.  The boot went back on, and I still walked on crutches.

It was during this time that I started taking oxycodone.  Yes, there was pain at first.  I took the medication for pain for only a few days that I really needed it.  But they prescribed me seventy pills - seventy!  Right away, I noticed that the pills made me feel indescribably happy - blissfully happy.  Two pills, and I forgot my unhappiness, forgot that I was trapped on a bed.  For a few hours, I would sit and bask in the sublime glow of chemical serenity.  I stopped taking them for pain and started taking them as something to mask my emotional pain.  Quickly, I learned that I got the best result not taking them every day, but by spacing them apart every few days.  If I took them every day, all that happened was that I got lost in a swoon of dizziness.  But every few days, I experienced pseudo-happiness.  I can see why people get addicted.  I was almost relieved when  my seventy pills ran out.

Being down this way, my metabolism changed.  I was limited in the exercising that I could do, but I was eating the same amount, maybe more.  I started gaining weight and feeling exhausted all the time.  Diabetes, I'm sure.  A good friend of mine from my hometown wrote to me and expressed concern about my health.  He suggested that I go vegan.

So both Martha and I decided to go raw vegan.  She blended green drinks for breakfast and dinner, with a huge salad for lunch.  For snacks, we ate strawberries, or apples with raw nuts.  For a while, I felt better.  But after a week, I started to lose vision in my eyes.  Noticeably.  I could no longer read books.  I couldn't even read my phone any longer.  I researched it and learned that protein is essential for eye health.  Also, diabetics like me require more protein that most people.  I started adding whey powder to my drinks to supplement my protein.  My eye sight actually went back to normal within three days.

After two weeks, we abandoned the raw vegan diet in favor of a more balanced diet.  Economics played a huge factor in this, especially since we have so many kids.  A raw vegetable diet was expensive, more than our budget could afford.  So Martha and I would take green drinks for breakfast and sometimes lunch.  Then we would eat for dinner what everyone else in the family had.  It was a bit of a compromise, but I did feel much healthier.

At the end of May, the boot finally came off.  After six months of being off my feet, I was able to walk again.  I was referred to a physical therapist, which really helped.  The best description I could give was - going to the gym with a bunch of old people.  It didn't hurt that my therapist was quite good-looking.

Martha and the kids planting seeds in May

Around this time, the chance came up for us to buy the property we were living on.  Previously, we had only lived there to take care of the place for the owners.  But they put it up on the market, and we were able to purchase the place.  It included eighteen acres, and three homes - all of them needing repairs.  It included a couple of gardens, including a vegetable garden and a greenhouse.  The boot came off, and I started working on planting.

What I wanted was healing, and there was nothing more healing than working outside.  My mornings started at 5AM.  I would get up and water all of the trees and the garden.  Sometimes I would listen to music, but mostly I would enjoy the cool air, the quiet serenity of my property, and then satisfying feeling of working with soil, with water, with plants.  When that was done, I would work on some sort of landscaping or gardening project, mainly weeding.  I would go in for lunch, and then take a nap.  Then I would start the evening watering cycle.

It was therapeutic, and I felt the first peace I have felt in a long time.  I was working outside so much that I lost some weight and got a nice tan.  People told me that I looked better than I had for a long time.  I was outside so much that I didn't have time to write.  I didn't have time for Facebook.  But mostly I didn't have time to feel sorry for myself anymore.  I called my garden my "garden of arcane delights" - to evoke Dead Can Dance, one of my favorite bands.

Izzy on our rock garden in progress

As soon as the monsoons started, I stopped working outside so much.  The daily rains were doing my job, and the gardens flourished.  So did the weeds.  As I write, we are still enjoying zucchini, cucumbers, and chilies from our garden.

The physical therapy ended, and I went in for surgery for the right foot, the same one done for my left leg.  The procedure went well, but, when I got home and got out of the car, even though I was using crutches, I was very surprised at how weak my left leg was.  After all of he surgeries, in spite of the physical therapy, I was amazed at how weak my leg was.  It was wobbly and could barely support the weight of my body.  Getting between the bed and the toilet was a struggle.  Luckily, it did not last more than a few days.  My leg strengthened very quickly, and now I am shuffling around with apparent ease.

Healing from this surgery has been a lot easier.  First of all, I am not suffering from depression like I did the previous procedures this year.  I am stronger, more upbeat. eating healthier, and not dosing myself with narcotics.  I am seeing the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

It amazes me - it is now September.  I have spent most of the past nine months on crutches.  2013 is the Year of the Crutch.  I am itching to get started on the gardening.  As I write, I have three more weeks on crutches, and then another three weeks in the boot.  Then probably another two months of physical therapy.  As soon as the boot comes off, I will start some more landscaping projects, including pruning all of the trees.

But more importantly, I will start walking again.  As soon as I am strong enough, I have every intention of hitting the highway and thumbing it wherever God takes me...

Achilles Explosion

As I mentioned earlier, I had surgery to lengthen my Achilles tendon this past January.  That kept me off of my feet for about seven weeks.  Finally, when it was all healed, I took the boot off.  I literally had to learn to walk again.  Since the tendon was lengthened, my foot literally hung off my leg at a different angle.  When I walked, it felt like I was walking downhill with one foot.  I looked like a 270 pound toddler, walking with my arms flailing about for balance, grabbing onto furniture for support.

A few days after I got the boot off, I was woken up at 2AM by a blizzard.  I could hear the wind howling outside.  But more than that, I could hear my windmill whizzing in the high wind.  There is always a chance of burning out the windmill generator, and, since we live off grid and depend on wind and solar power, I did not want to be without a windmill.  I slipped on my house shoes and ran outside.  I was pelted with sheets of wind-driven snow.  There were already a couple of inches on the ground.  It took me a second to grab the cord that was flapping in the gale.  Finally, I grasped it and pulled, locking down the windmill.  

When I turned back to the house, I slipped on the slick steps.  I didn't fall, and I didn't trip.  My foot merely slid off of the step, and I stumbled just a bit.  I went and crawled back into bed, and the throbbing started in the back of my leg.  I told my wife that I thought I might have done something to my leg.  Sure enough, purple bruises starting making their way up from my ankle all the way up to my thigh.

I called my podiatrist.  He said that he was sure that I ruptured my tendon and set an appointment.  A week, or so, later, he sent me in for an MRI.  Sure enough, there was a rupture in the tendon.  I was surprised.  I didn’t come down on my foot that hard.  How could it rupture?

I consulted with my doctor.  It was going to require some major surgery to repair it, and another eight weeks recovery.  I groaned.  When was I ever going to be able to walk?  When would I ever be able to go on the walkabout that I was planning?  This seemed to be taking forever!  Not to mention that I still needed to get the Achilles tendon procedure done on the other leg, the right leg.

One good thing did emerge from my visit to the doctor.  I told him about my goal once I start walking, about the whole “Without Purse Or Scrip” project.  Since my doctor is LDS, he knew what I was talking about.  I mentioned to him that I knew of a guy in Show Low, AZ who had done his thesis on the Los Angeles mission, which was the LAST mission in the LDS Church to send out its missionaries without purse or scrip.  (Ogden Kraut, who was a famed author in the fundamentalist Mormon community as well as a polygamist, was a part of this mission.)  For my research, I desperately wanted to get a hold of this thesis, and to get a hold of the author, whom I met on one occasion years ago.  But I had no clue how to get a hold of him.  To my amazement, my doctor knew this guy and gave me his cell number.  (I have yet to call him.)

So the morning came for my surgery.  I had been fasting since midnight the day before.  The nurse came in and took my glucose reading, which was high.  Then the anesthesiologist came in and had a talk about my vitals.  Not only was my glucose high, but so was my blood pressure and my heart rate.  My heart rate was 130.  He decided to do an EKG.

He was almost smug when he came and said to me, “You’ve had a heart attack in the last six months.”

I felt like I was struck by a bus.  A heart attack??  How was this possible?

The short of it was – he was refusing to administer anesthesia to me because of my vitals and sent me to the ER.  The doctor in the ER took another EKG and told me not to worry; they had no previous EKG to compare it to.  So how could they really know?

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, they sent me to a cardiologist who ran a series of tests on me – including a chemical stress test (OMG, I thought I would die!), an angiogram, and radiation test.  The results – my heart was fine.

I was bewildered.  I asked him about all the tests that had precipitated all of this concern.

“False positives,” he said calmly.

There had been a few terrifying moments there.  While they were strapping me down for the angiogram, they told me that if they discovered an abnormality in my heart, they wouldn’t even wake me up.  They would wheel me right into heart surgery.  As the anesthesia pulled me into blackness, there was a part of me that helplessly wondered if I would even wake up.

So it was a tremendous relief to find that my heart was healthy.  This enabled me to go into surgery.  I brought my glucose and blood pressure under control.  The whole reason that my heart rate had been so elevated was because I was dehydrated.  It had taken four bags of IV fluids to bring my heart rate down.  (Man, did I have to pee afterwards!)

So they rolled me into surgery to repair my tendon.  While under the fog of propofol, the anesthesiologist, who was sitting in a chair by my head, bored to tears, took a snapshot of my leg filleted open.  He showed it to me on his phone while I lay on the table.  It was a bloody mess.  The drugs made the experience vaguely impersonal to me.

“Cool!”  I grinned.  “Can you send that to me?”

“Actually, he stammered, “I wasn’t even supposed to take that.”

The podiatrist came out to see me afterwards.  He said that – in his nearly 20 years of podiatry – he had never seen an Achilles tendon rupture as bad as mine.  It had literally exploded.  It was like a sports injury.  Normally, when you do an Achilles tendon repair, you make a small incision behind the foot, above the heel.  He had to cut halfway up my leg.  My tendon had ruptured into five pieces.  It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle back together.  To this day, I still don’t know how a small stumble on an icy step created such an injury.

He sent me home with a cast on my leg and an oxycodone prescription.

In my next entry, I will talk about my healing process…

Walk This World

Walking has always been important to me.

I remember my parents going to see a friend of theirs.  The man was troubled and came back from a horse ride sweaty and hot, his horse lathered.  My mother told me that he had been out praying on his horse ride.  This was unusual to us, because we were taught to pray in the LDS fashion - in your room, with the doors closed, on your knees, etc.

Most of my praying has always been done while walking...

I have gone on long walks for as long as I could remember.  As a teen, my night walks were my witching hour.  I would get off of work at 10PM, go home, microwave my dinner, and then I would go for a walk.  I would stuff my pockets with cassettes, spare batteries, and I would walk off into the night with my Walkman in hand and headphones on my ears.  Back  then, my musical tastes included Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and Dead Can Dance.  This music was the perfect soundtrack to the night  - a sweet bar of transcendent light making a continuous stream between by ears.  This was the time to moan lost loves and work through teenage angst.

I had a preset route - across the street and through the campus of my high school, past the football field, alongside the public pool, and into the sleeping neighborhoods.  In the hedges, the black widows would come out at night and glisten in the streetlamps.  I would make a big loop and be home by 3AM and collapse in bed.

I was in love with night.  I was in love with walking.  I remember sitting on the hood of a car outside the Domes in Casa Grande on the night of a full moon.  I just wanted to walk the earth, walk east, and not stop until I could walk no more.  I told this story to a high school guidance counselor, that I did not care about college, or jobs, that I just wanted to walk and see where my feet took me.  She told me that I reminded her of another student.  At the time I was mortified, because I couldn't stand the student she compared me to.

When I moved to South Salt Lake to go to college, I had to find new routes.  The nights were colder, and so I bought headphones that acted as ear muffs as well.  My polygamist aunt was worried about me walking so late in those neighborhoods.  I was baffled by that.  Salt Lake looked like Mayberry, much different from the dusty barrios I had grown up around in Arizona.

Before my marriage, I was walking around four miles a day.  After I got married, I stopped walking.  As a newlywed, I had much more interesting things to do with my spare time than walk.  As a result, I started to get a little extra padding around the midsection.

Years later, when I moved to my ranch in Arizona, I started to take up walking again.  There were countless miles of dirt roads to explore.  My walks - as usual - were a time to explore new music.  But this time was also invaluable to me as a writer.  If I am facing writer's block, the best thing I can do is walk.  The knees pump that blood up to my brain, and the ideas start billowing.

As I mentioned, walking is also my time to pray.  This was vital to me as a husband and father to a plural family where the burdens and responsibilities felt overwhelming at times.  This was my time to pour my soul out to my God and ask for guidance.

So you can imagine how difficult it has been these last couple of years - with the blood clots and foot ulcers - being unable to walk, being unable to have a means to sort through my thoughts.  It has been a challenge not to be able to just go out and walk whenever I want to.

When you are bedridden and all you can see is the sunlight coming through the window, there is no ache that is more poignant than wanting to go out into the fresh air and walk.  I still to this day wait for the day when I can walk again, when I can walk this world.

I will continue in my next post about how 2013 has treated me.