Yoga and Cookies: My Adult Temper Tantrum June 2011

So I've never documented this story other than verbally, and maybe I'd just as soon wish it'd be forgotten. But for some reason I feel compelled to share it. It was June 2011, Bridger was 5.5 months old, and I had what we can call a bad day. I mean a really bad day. Being a new mom is a lot of work, and I hadn't quite learned the lesson that I wasn't going to manage motherhood, sleep deprivation, 6am yoga classes, and making spectacular meals perfectly. It was a day I was up by 430am to teach class, return home to care for the baby, sleep for 10 min, take an interrupted shower, clean spit up, clean the house, cookie prep for Farmers Market, and get dinner ready for our neighbors coming over.

I very much looked forward to Micah returning home from work to help with a baby that was fussy and wanted to be held, but that summer evening he just wasn't as helpful while trying to get the dinner meat ready on the grill. Since I needed my hands free to finish prepping dinner, I placed Bridger in his swing in the kitchen. He was not happy about it, and he let me know it. But I left him there since our neighbors would be walking in any minute and I still had much to do. When Micah was walking towards our back door and passed by our screaming child in the swing I thought surely he would recognize my time sensitive situation and pick up Bridger. He didn't.

So as I continued finishing dinner with baby screams ever increasing in the background, I noticed that the rice I thought had been cooking in our rice cooker had not turned on for some reason. Great, no rice. With an incomplete meal because of a malfunctioning rice cooker, our neighbors almost to the front door, a screaming baby, tiredness, and my perception of an unhelpful husband I had officially lost it.

I went into our hallway and with a moment of complete frustration and anger I jumped on our tile floor with more force than I've ever jumped in my entire life. It seemed at the moment like a safe way to get out my frustrations with out hurting anything. I was mistaken. I did hurt something very badly. It wasn't my child, my husband, or the tile. It was my feet. You know, those two things that get you EVERYWHERE you need to go. Those two things that Arielle from The Little Mermaid DREAMED to someday have! And I bruised them with such a force that the doctors said they'd only seen the likes of it in roofers who'd jumped off roofs. YUP. My adult temper tantrum.

Almost immediately after the jump I began to feel shooting intense pains down into my heel pads. I quickly walked into our carpeted bedroom seeking relief, realizing standing or walking on my feet was no longer an option. Then just at the moment, lying there vulnerable in pain and realizing I'd actually brought this upon myself, angry tears and sobs came pouring out. I felt like a complete failure. The night was already not going right, but NOW the realization had kicked in, "I COULDN'T WALK". It hauntingly echoed in my head. Micah finally came back after hearing my sobs and letting our neighbors in the house. In a fairly unsympathetic manner he tried to help me stand but I simply could not put any weight on my injured feet, especially my heels.

Well, somehow I got through the night painfully and with help from Micah carrying me. In the morning we went to urgent care and had x-rays. They saw no fractures but indicated I had severely bruised my heel pads. I learned that heel pads are a very thick dense fatty tissue that act as natural shock absorbers. Without them it feels like walking on bone. Consider that for a moment. Luckily I didn't have any visible fractures they could see. The most interesting question that the nurse and doctor posed was how I received such an injury. They wondered if I'd jumped off a roof? I simply didn't have an answer.

I was unable to walk for about a month while the pain was most intense. Instead I mostly crawled on our hardwood floors to get to little 5.5 month old Bridger. It certainly didn't help that he couldn't walk either.

After a few days of crawling I wised up and started using knee guards to save my sore knees. Then an older friend in our ward lent me her walker which helped once I was able to put some light weight on my feet again. Overall it was a month of no walking, weeks with assistance from a walker, and about two months of NO teaching and NO running. That last part being especially painful to the rest of my body. Looking back I realize what made this injury so sad was while breaking a leg is awful you still have use of the other. Because the damage was equal in both feet, it left me completely without the use of both feet for a time.

I suppose in the end I learned a few things from this experience, it's in this post from June 2011 "A Day on my Knees". But really, we can laugh at ourselves or we can cry.

Warning: some of the pics are pretty graphic. Just a few to see how things looked, and my handy props.

Lucky for me my nieces were in town and came to stay with us. Rebecca stayed the first few days, then Jenalyn came and took over. I wouldn't have survived without their help. I'm convinced it was divinely mandated.