lbb

Hi Josh,

I started to try and answer this, and realized that to make a truthful answer, I had to go pretty deep into the question and all that surrounds it -- so I decided to start a new thread.

The feet have many moving parts, and there are so many ways they can become injured -- it all depends on the injury. Mine was a stress fracture of the second metatarsal that was greatly aggravated by a close encounter at high speed with an elbow (sparring...elbow always wins), and that turned into a non-union fracture. And (because I kept using it) it got re-injured, and re-injured, and re-injured, and...

You want to know what helped me to fix myself. Usually when we ask about healing injuries, we're looking for something that we can do. We want to find a doctor or a treatment or a supplement or an exercise that will make it better. There's a lot of practical value in these discussions, because often there is something out there that can help. But at some point, the key to fixing ourselves lies in accepting the fact that there may be no fix, now or ever.

My foot was like that. It became a non-union fracture, which is a medical term for, "The bone won't heal, and we don't know why." I saw orthopedists, including one of the best sportsmedicine orthopedists in Boston. I tried all kinds of therapies and supplements, I stretched it, I exercised it, I rested it. I iced it and heated it and wore orthotics. You name it, I tried it. Eventually I had to face up to the possibility -- likelihood, at that point -- that this was a permanent injury.

The thing that got me through was the message I got from all the doctors I dealt with, which basically was: people break in ways we can't fix, and you have to find a way to live with it. And something that one doctor in particular said: "It may just stay with you. At some point you have to stop waiting for something to happen, and make a decision: do you want to spend the rest of your life in a rocking chair?"

And so…I didn't do anything to fix it. Instead I decided to live with it. If it never got any better, okay -- I could still walk, not fast and not well, but I could get where I was going. Most of all, I could stop being angry and frustrated and upset over what I didn't have. My doctors didn't have a fix, but they had a great fount of wisdom, which boiled down to: live with what you have. When you decide to live with what you have, you open your hands and release all those things that you don't have.

I think that that's when the healing started to happen, when I wasn't looking. At the risk of sounding overly mystical, I think that the act of letting go created the conditions where healing was possible. Without expectations and without anger about what my foot could no longer do, I started to treat it with kindness and attention and appreciation for what it could do. At the same time, I didn't fuss over it or let it take over my life. It's almost as if I had a child with a long-term illness. It needs help and care, you hope it will get better, but life is going to go on. The family is going to go on, and the kid is going to be a part of it. You're still going to go on picnics, you're going to go hiking, you're going to go to the ballpark. You won't do those things despite the problem, and you won't do them because of the problem. You'll do them while living with the problem.

The same is true of a non-trivial injury. Ignoring the injury, treating it as if it wasn't there, acting as if your fallible body were the enemy, bellowing, "No pain, no gain!" -- that doesn't work. Coddling it, babying it, shying away from all discomfort, cultivating the expectation that everyone everywhere (in the dojo and out) will fully and seamlessly accommodate your injury (and being resentful when they don't) -- that doesn't work either. Getting upset at the unfairness of it doesn't help. The only thing that helps is to face the possibility that your injury could be permanent. Most aren't, but yours could be -- or at least, it could very well leave you with permanent effects. It could be with you forever. If it is, what will you do?

Over the years, my foot has largely healed. I can't remember the last time I noticed that it hurt or didn't work right. Realistically, it is probably clumsier than it used to be, but I don't notice it. We're in this together, me and my foot, and "this" is life. There's nothing special about either of us -- we're just like all the other people with their sore feet and aching knees and hurting backs, their aches and pains and fears and failures. Your body is the vehicle in which you go through this precious human life, and if treated with love and respect, a beater will get you where you're going just as good as a Rolls Royce.