The Lessons I Learned After I Lost My Shoes

 

Dear Henry,

This is the story of how I learned to live again.

How I Lost My Shoes In The First Place

In March 1998, a heavily intoxicated man committed an armed robbery of a local convenience store. During the police chase to capture him, I was struck (as a pedestrian) by the assailant’s (stolen) car while crossing the street. He was estimated to be traveling between 35 and 40 miles per hour.

My top seven left ribs broke and were pushed over my spine. My left shoulder, elbow, and hip were severely damaged, and my left tibia and fibula (the lower bones in my leg) shattered and sent the bone protruding out the front of my leg. My leg also developed a complication called compartment syndrome, where fluid builds up between the muscles and the fascial sheath that covers them, cutting off circulation to the affected area. I also had severe head trauma.  It was a miracle that I survived. The initial prognosis was bleak; I was not expected to live through the night, and in fact, surgery for my leg was delayed several hours as the on-call orthopedic surgeon finished other, more promising, emergencies. 

Because the damage to my left leg was so severe, the orthopedic surgeon recommended amputation. My husband convinced the doctor to try, and after a couple of initial surgeries, the doctor was able to secure an internal fixator, which reduced my risk of secondary infection and raised the odds against amputation considerably. 

After several months of physical therapy, it was discovered that the damage to my left brachial plexus and my axillary nerves (the nerves that control my shoulder) was permanent and unrepairable.  I had required an anterior iliac crest bone graft, where surgeons removed most of my left iliac crest (the “curvy” part of the hip bone) and implanted it into the fracture site of my lower leg because the bones were healing too slowly.  Over the next few months, bone marrow was also taken from my right hip to increase the healing speed of my left leg.

Around ten months in, my recovery hit a “baby bump.”  As you can imagine, the pregnancy was difficult.  I spent the first fifteen weeks relearning how to walk and the last nine weeks on bed rest. During the pregnancy, I developed a condition called placenta previa, where the placenta grows over the birth canal. Because I already had what is called an “irritable uterus,” I suffered contractions throughout my entire pregnancy (in fact, my two older sons were also born preterm, at 34 and 29 weeks, respectively); I was at risk of a severe hemorrhage that would kill us both.  At the 26-week mark, that hemorrhage began, and miraculously, it all worked out, and both my son and I made it through.

Both of our recoveries were complicated, and the next two years were a blur of medical appointments and surgeries. It was a difficult season for us.  Ultimately, my son recovered entirely and is now 25. He has led a healthy, medically sound life.  My recovery was never complete.  In addition to permanent damage to my left axillary and brachial plexus, I also sustained permanent damage to my left sciatica (the nerve governing the back of your leg), femoral (the nerve controlling the inside of your leg), and patellar (the nerve controlling your knee and the inside of your lower leg) nerves. I have residual phantom pain throughout my lower leg, hip, and shoulder.  I struggle with abdominal muscle engagement and have a slight form of aphasia, which ensures that I never quite say the right word, as well as palilalia, which means I will say the wrong word several times. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve struggled with gait and postural problems, and because I shift my weight to my right, I have developed overuse injuries to my right side.

And I wasn’t prepared for any of this.  Not to suggest there is a way to prepare, but I was particularly ill-suited for this type of extensive injury.  My parents were addicts, and I was raised with habits that would significantly hinder my chances of long-term survival.  To live, I needed to unlearn everything I was raised to be and learn a new way of thinking, and now that I am a lifetime away from this experience and living an everyday, ‘normal’ life, I’m sharing what I’ve learned. 

Lesson 1 - You Will Never Get Over It

 Pivotal live events are just that—pivotal.  Yet, from a cultural perspective, we are all pressured to “not dwell” and “just move on,” and it's unfair. Any event that dramatically changes your life will forever be a reference point: the good pivots and the bad.

Any life-changing moment will also contain life-changing experiences, and those experiences will become part of who you are.  There is an unrealistic belief that complete (often miraculous) recovery is possible. Some tragedies prune parts of us away entirely, places whose absence continues to ache. I think the focus should be on learning to have peace with our sorrows rather than trying to “get over” them.

I’ve become enamored with the Japanese technique of Kintsugi, where broken pottery and ceramic items are repaired with gold-laced glue, making all the chips and past shatters a part of the item's beauty. It is lovely to think that our scars and tragedies make us more interesting and beautiful. 

However, any pottery repaired this way will never be the same.  What was once watertight may never again be so.  The bowl may no longer be strong enough to hold any but the lightest flowers, and there will always be pieces of pottery that are lost, never to be reincorporated into the whole.

While our scars might make us more interesting, they also make us more fragile, and pieces of us will be lost along the way. What Kintsugi teaches us is not that we will be made whole but that we can remain useful, no matter how badly we’ve been shattered. 

Lesson 2 - There is no reason why

The butterfly effect is a term science uses to describe the chaos of our world. While the image of thousands of butterflies taking flight in Mexico and causing a tornado in Kansas is evocative, it is, I think, rather too esoteric to be of any use in tragic situations caused by another person. I prefer another example.

In the early 90s, country singer Joe Diffie released the song “Third Rock from The Sun.” The song is a comical cause-and-effect story about a city’s chief of police who, while holing up in a bar and ogling women, inadvertently causes a catastrophe that takes down an entire city's power grid.

The song made me laugh, but it also made an important point. Many terrible things stem from small and seemingly inconsequential acts, like a butterfly's wings or a late night at the bar. 

You will drive yourself mad trying to pin down the cause, and in the end, the “why” of any situation will not change its impact on you, nor will the “why” contribute to the quality of your life. No matter the “why,” you will still be where you are. The reasons “why” will never restore the “what” lost.

There will also never be a good enough apology, and the lack of one will not matter. An apology will not restore what has been lost, nor will an apology make carrying the burden any easier to bear.  Let it go.

 Lesson 3 – No One Cares

 I say this in a somewhat joking manner. Of course, everyone cares about two dramatic near-fatal experiences and a miracle baby because they have a happy ending. But no one wants to hear about how difficult it was to put on your shoes that morning or how you hadn't slept in two days because you couldn't get comfortable. 

People also don't want to be inconvenienced by an inability to meet commitments or a poor attitude because you can't keep the pain out of your voice. People don't want to hear about how badly you feel every day, nor do they want to hear about how much you suffered.  It's tiresome.

Unfortunately, taxes, speeding tickets, and utility bills also fall under the “no one cares” category. I agree; it feels unfair that you still have to pay taxes and can’t win the lottery. However, the argument “But I’ve been through so much” has no currency in the real world.

Finally, suffering is not a competition, and while you might have the most pathetic life story in the room, other people are allowed to feel and express their pain as well. This can be a hard thing to do. As I mentioned, a near-fatal event is a life-changing and ever-present part of your life, but others have had life-changing moments too. It is essential to realize that you have not cornered the market on suffering, no matter how much it feels like you have. Other people are allowed to be in pain, and it is not for you to judge if their suffering is worthy of that title. 

Lesson 4 – Pain is Not an Illness

 This has been one of the hardest lessons. Today, in our modern world with modern medicine and pharmacology, there is always someone trying to make sure you are more “comfortable.”  The problem is that pain isn't an illness but a symptom, and only treating symptoms doesn’t cure the disease; it exacerbates it.

Of course, pain needs to be managed in a clinical situation, particularly a trauma center; otherwise, medical personnel wouldn't be able to do what they need to. But, once you leave the hospital, you need to leave the painkillers there.

After a significant injury has healed, our bodies will continue to experience pain in the places of previous injury. No one knows for sure if it is because the body recognizes scar tissue as a current injury or because the nervous system is short-circuited. Daily discomfort and, occasionally, severe pain are completely normal after severe injury. I call it body PTSD. Don’t let anyone, even a medical professional, tell you it’s abnormal. It's a fact of life; it’s the price of survival.

A favorite scene in the movie The Princess Bride is when Westley (Cary Elwes) says to Buttercup (Robin Wright), “Life is pain, highness; anyone who says otherwise is selling something.” In the post-trauma world, you will find many people selling something. Despite our medical advances, there is no good pharmacological remedy for pain.   

Narcotics, particularly opiates, are habit-forming, and their pain-killing properties are a myth. Opiates work by rewriting your short-term memory so that you don't remember that you are in pain while at the same time sedating you, putting you into a twilight daze with low dosage and unconsciousness at larger doses.  The memory issue is the opiates' biggest flaw and factor behind America's opiate overdose epidemic. People forget how much they have taken. 

Alcohol works much like opiates and disrupts the brain's ability to write short-term memories, but it doesn't make you feel much better. However, alcohol is great for bringing all of your baggage out into the open, and, let’s be honest, no one likes people who do that. Drinking away pain will never be a good way to cope.

Both alcohol and opiates are significant contributors to Type-II Diabetes and high blood pressure, and, when coupled with the sedentary lifestyle that most “hurt” people adopt, compounds the problems your injuries have caused, limiting mobility and decreasing the quality of your life.

While cannabis is a safer option (you can't accidentally overdose and die), it has its risks, too. The smoke is a lung and throat irritant, and additionally, smoking cannabis significantly raises your periodontal disease risk.  There have been reports of psychotic breaks with regular usage at high doses. It’s also an expensive option and illegal in much of the United States. It is not covered by insurance, and many employers take exception to its use, even medically. 

It is best to find ways to manage your pain with minimal pharmacological help. In many cases, regular exercise, mindful living, and a positive attitude will provide enough resilience to handle all but the worst of days. Of course, there will be bad days. However, if you can keep yourself active and mobile, you can weather the bad days without breaking.

There are a couple of things to remember about chronic pain, however.  Firstly, it's exhausting. While you need to learn to work around pain, you can't ignore fatigue and must ensure you get adequate rest.  The other thing you need to watch is your fight-or-flight response. Pain can be enough to trigger that instinct, and you may need to remind yourself often that you don't need to be defensive and ready to fight.

Lesson 5 - Your Health is Your Problem

 You must learn to advocate for your health; the medical community will not necessarily be your ally.

Our society has been conditioned to look at doctors as miracle workers and is inclined to turn to them for every little ache and discomfort. Doctors, for their part, run expensive scans and, unless they find an abnormality, begin treating symptoms, which in many cases turns into a revolving door of “Well, let's try this drug...” and “Maybe this surgery will help…”

It's a poor healthcare model, and it’s one you can't follow if you have had severe trauma. 

In addition to a low efficacy rate (please refer to the chapter on pain), drugs designed to curb the pain, muscle spasms, and neurological issues of a near-fatal experience are also depressants, requiring the use of anti-depressant and anxiety medications, and those can be addictive.  They also come with a whole host of side effects and don't always mix well with each other.  They certainly don't mix with alcohol, a favorite go-to of the injured, and despite clear evidence of ineffectiveness, they have become medicine's first response. 

It shouldn't be.  Many studies have been done, and it's beyond question that a healthy weight, regular exercise, consistent range of motion, and strength training beat the pharmacological solution every time. But to follow this approach is to take responsibility for your health and well-being. It means looking up the efficacy rate of prescriptions and challenging surgeries. It means sticking to your guns about using physical therapy treatments first. It means staying abreast of the latest treatments. 

Most importantly, it means doing the things that are good for you, not the things that would be easiest. And finally, it also means you must acknowledge your condition for what it is and not for what a young surgeon thinks they can do for you. 

Lesson 6 – Happiness is a Habit

 Happiness is elusive, especially when you are in pain. However, there is a secret: Do what happy people do, and the emotions will follow. Happy habits make you happy.

What are happiness habits?  Oddly enough, they are essentially the same habits that will help you stay healthy and cope with pain.  Once again, a healthy diet, with exercise, will take you quite far.

And there are other things you can do as well.

In my experience, we can only make a few decisions before we struggle and become overwhelmed, so try to eliminate as many of the unimportant choices as possible. This might mean eating the same things every day and ensuring all your clothes match so that it is easy to pull out a top and bottom without thinking about it and still look reasonably put together. 

Try to adhere as closely as possible to a schedule, including exercise, housekeeping, writing, reading, and meditating, to eliminate the guesswork of “what to work on next.” This will allow you to work on autopilot during the worst times and accomplish much more than expected.

Finally, happy people don’t allow things that don’t serve them to be in their lives.  There are a lot of people who are exhausting to be around and who suck the happiness right out of you.   

To be happy, you must let them go, even if they are people you love.  The same is valid for clutter and chaos.  If you spend more time stressing about and rearranging your “stuff” than enjoying it, it’s time to give it away.

This might sound boring, but it is quite peaceful, and peace is the true definition of happiness.

Lesson 7 – Make Your Life Not About You

 One of my favorite quotes comes from the show Downton Abbey. In this scene, the Dowager Countess Violet Crawley (actress Maggie Smith), after listening to her granddaughter Edith (Laura Carmichael) recount her sorrow and tragedy, counsels her: “You are a woman with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining and find something useful to do.”

When you struggle with your health, it is easy to get wrapped up in yourself. While it is necessary to watch out for your health, selflessness is the most considerable coping technique I’ve learned. Think of someone other than yourself.

There are hundreds of ways to contribute to the community around you, including picking up garbage on the side of the road or scanning documents at a library. You can also read to seniors and children, serve lunch at a soup kitchen, or help restore the landscaping in a park.  Even if you have mobility issues, even if you are homebound, there is something you can do to help the world around you.  

For example, my volunteer work includes working with the Roanoke Master Gardeners, the Friends of Old Lick (read about that project here: https://www.takethebackroads.com/2022/10/the-resurrection-of-old-lick-cemetery.html) and of course, The Everyday Patriot Project (read about that here: https://www.everydaypatriot.com/p/the-purpose-behind-everyday-patriot.html).  I am also a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Get out of your head and get to work because the only way to give your life, with its tragedies, any meaning is to mean something to others.  Your trauma will never provide enough meaning to live.

Lesson 8  – Find Something Beautiful (Or At Least Funny) Everyday

Being a nature photographer (check out my online gallery here: https://shop.takethebackroads.com/) has saved my bacon.  It has forced me to leave the house, walk, and find something beautiful.

The world can be an ugly place. There are wars all around the world, famine, disease, trafficking, guns, politics, and lousy seafood everywhere. Guess what?  There is little to nothing you can do about any of these things.  Even complaining about them on social media won’t help. 

But if you can improve your own outlook, you will positively impact the people around you, who will, hopefully, positively impact the people surrounding them. Soon, good feelings will spread all the way to Kansas—the butterfly effect of positivity. 

To do that, you must leave the house and find the butterflies (flowers and sunrises). Stop paying attention to the negative things around you (particularly on social media) and focus only on things that make you smile or make you laugh.  It is an outlook that will change your life entirely.

 Lesson 9 – Find God

This really should be the first thing you do, but it took me a long time to figure it out, too. A great deal of my baggage was handed to me by “Good Christian People,” and it was hard to get past those experiences.

(If you are interested in my journey to God, however, you can read about my religious journey  in the following posts:  “Taking the Back Roads to Rome”  https://www.takethebackroads.com/2021/12/taking-the-back-road-to-rome-my-journey-to-the-catholic-church.html,  “Finding God in Gomorrah” https://www.takethebackroads.com/2022/06/finding-god-in-gomorrah-a-journey-through-books.html, and “The First Ashes” https://www.takethebackroads.com/2023/02/the-first-ashes-story-of-lent.html)

That being said, faith helps. Psychological and medical studies show that people of faith generally live longer, happier lives, and this is doubly true when you are talking about traumatized people. 

There are many reasons this is so. 

Religious practices provide routines, communities, and often healing rites.  While non-believers might poo-poo the supernatural cause of these things, even the great atheist Christopher Hitchens saw the palliative effects religious practices have on psychological well-being.

Religious practices can also include prohibitions against intoxication, which can go a long way in the prevention of addictions. 

Finally, most religious doctrines contain the doctrine of evil.  The acknowledgment that evil exists, that many people embrace it, and that it roams about the world wreaking havoc on regular people without any motive can give a reason to events without any other cause. “The Devil did this to me” is a surprisingly comforting statement, particularly when it comes to my parents.

Belief in God is also a belief in grace, and looking back over the course of my life, I can see many instances throughout my life where it was by “God’s grace” alone that I survived.

Conclusion

 All of these tips require a bit of self-discipline and the desire to take care of yourself; I admit, not everyone wants to do that.  However, it has been my experience that this is the surest path to a life worth living, a life you can be proud of, and a life you will not regret.

xoxo a.d. elliott 

P.S. Check Out My Video Here: https://youtu.be/89a_5mbxEe8

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a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller currently living in Salem, Virginia. 

In addition to the travel writings at www.takethebackroads.com, you can also read her book reviews at www.riteoffancy.com and US military biographies at www.everydaypatriot.com

Her online photography gallery can be found at shop.takethebackroads.com

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