A is for Amy who fell down the stairs...

I think my faith in doctors has been restored.

In the last three or four years I have only been to the doctor for two maladies. The first time it was neck pain—I woke up with a crick in my neck and several days later it was still there. The second time it was hip pain, which was quite traumatic since it hit just over a month before I was supposed to run my first marathon, and ultimately forced me to postpone my goal for nearly a year. The neck pain was distracting me from my studies and the hip pain had abruptly ended my running right when I was spending more time on the road than I ever had in my life. And so I had good reason to want both of these conditions to disappear as quickly as possible, and I trusted the doctors to be able to do something about it. Both times I was disappointed. Both times the each doctor I visited, as well as the physical therapist, hemmed and hawed and examined absolutely normal x-rays and MRIs and couldn’t figure out what could possibly be wrong. All I got were free samples of painkillers, several unfruitful sessions of physical therapy, puzzled expressions, and an unexpected bill of several hundred dollars for an MRI that it turned out was not subsidized entirely by BYU insurance after all. In the end, both times, I stopped paying visits to the BYU Health Center, and in the end, both times, the problem finally just went away on its own many weeks after its onset (months, actually, in the case of the neck pain). And though I know perfectly well that doctors cannot possibly recognize and cure everything, the experiences left me wondering why I bothered seeking a professional opinion in the first place.

But when something goes wrong, I still feel like a doctor ought to know more than I do, and ought to be able to make it better somehow.

A little over a week ago, when I went to take the trash out, I stepped on some snow that had melted and refrozen, and I came down hard on my left knee. I sat on the ice for a moment in pain and shock, then slid my way to where the asphalt peeked through and I could get a foothold, pulled myself up, hobbled around a bit, and finally forgot about it within an hour or so as the pain faded. The next morning I completed almost an entire five mile run before my knee began to bother me, and it all went downhill from there. By the end of the day my mile walk home from campus was excruciating, and that pattern has repeated itself several times since. I’m mostly fine in the morning and able to run, and then the pain gets worse and worse until I go to bed. I took Saturday off (unthinkable—Saturday is my favorite day to go running), and I took Wednesday off (less unthinkable—in fact, I almost always take Wednesday off). Thursday was warm enough that I ran outside instead of on the treadmill, which turned out to be a mistake as I found myself three miles from home and in pain much sooner than expected. I didn’t have much choice but to finish the run, and so I spent those last three miles experimenting with different ways of distributing my weight every time I landed on my left foot. If I ran on my toes (almost normal if I’m running uphill, but quite awkward on the flat ground that makes up most of Ann Arbor) I was almost pain-free. If I landed on the inside of my foot I could minimize the pain even more. The problem certainly distracted me from my run, but it was a lovely morning and I didn’t particularly want to be distracted.

Anyway, the fact that my knee did not seem to be getting any better (and yes, I know I was not helping it by stubbornly continuing my normal running routine) finally drove me to the University of Michigan student health center this afternoon. I didn’t have much hope that they’d be able to help me, but I figured if something was drastically wrong they could tell me so that I wouldn’t spend the next several weeks thinking that maybe tomorrow the pain would start to recede.

And all in all it was a good experience. I arrived at 2:30 and was given an appointment for four, but was called in at three. They sent me to someone who specialized in whatever sort of medicine it is that deals with knee and other joint injuries, and he listened to me very patiently and elicited a very detailed account of my experience over the last week. It turns out that he himself is a 35-mile-a-week runner, which meant that he only chuckled in understanding when I confessed that I’ve been running anyway, and which also meant that he knew just how important it was for me to get back on my running feet as soon as possible. He asked lots of questions, pressed me knee to check for pain, and then showed me a rubber model of the knee joint and explained what he thought had happened when I fell, and what happens when I run that aggravates the injury.

Then he gave me very doable instructions. I have to take the weekend off of running. I need to ice my knee for half an hour three or four times a day. I should avoid stairs as much as possible. (In fact, this particular recommendation was not just for this weekend. “People here make fun of me all the time,” he said. “I’m probably the most fit person in the building and I always take the elevator. You’re running thirty-five miles a week; you don’t need the health benefits of taking the stairs. They’re horrible on your knees.” I found it a little amusing that the doctor was recommending that I not take the stairs when there’s an elevator, especially since I have long held my willingness to choose the stairs over the elevator as a matter of pride.)

I do all this I should be able to run again on Monday.

I probably shouldn’t jump to conclusions too hastily—I have yet to see if the recommendations actually work. But it was such a relief to have a doctor who seemed to know, with a great deal of confidence, what was wrong and what would get me better, and who understood and could relate to my concerns about being off my feet. And it made me feel so much more willing to follow his recommendations. In my previous experiences, I was quite resistant to the neck brace and the hip stretches and all the inconveniences that were supposed to maybe help me but seemed to have little basis other than the fact that the doctors couldn’t think of what else to try and something seemed better than nothing. No, I don’t want to miss my Saturday run for the second week in a row. No, I don’t want to sit in my apartment with an ice pack strapped to my leg several times a day (especially when it’s well below freezing outside). But if it means I really am going to get better, and if it means I have the doctor’s go-ahead to run again on Monday, then I’m willing to do it.

So wish me luck. I am, of course, looking forward to being able to run (normally) again. But at this point I’m most interested in just getting rid of the pain. You don’t really realize how nice it is to be healthy and pain-free until you’re not…