It's been two weeks now since I received the devastating news about my hips and legs. It's crept into every aspect of my life. I can't go a single day without a million questions running through my head. "Is this really happening to me? Will I ever be normal again? What is my life going to look like 3, 6, 9 months from now? Is my insurance premium and deductible going to skyrocket next year after all of the surgeries?" Stupid, everyday things that I take for granted suddenly have new meaning now. "Am I going to be able to get up and down the stairs of my house by myself? Doing laundry may be interesting for a while. I had better stop being clumsy and dropping things on the floor. Will I be able to adapt well enough at work to meet expectations?" I start criticizing myself if I'm not filling every second of every day with activity. "You shouldn't be laying on the couch resting for an hour, that's all you'll be doing soon enough. You should have worked harder at the rink. It's 40 degrees today, you should be going for a run. You should be deep cleaning the house, tackling small projects you've been putting off, running errands you won't be able to do." And yet as hard as it is to admit, I find myself very unmotivated to do even the things I love. Skating is emotionally painful and mentally frustrating. "You need to be able to do jump A or spin B well before the surgeries so that you'll have an easier time coming back. You didn't work hard enough at the rink today. You should have tried harder to get that extra bit of rotation you don't trust yourself to do. Who cares if you fall and it hurts? You're a chicken. You suck. You're never going to accomplish your goals. You'll never really be able to come back from these surgeries. You just weren't cut out for this. You don't want it enough." And let's not even talk about the path my dietitian had me on. One day I'll barely eat anything at all and the next day I could eat a whole pizza followed by a entire carton of chocolate ice cream and wash it down with two bottles of Cabernet. If I thought I didn't sleep well before it's nothing compared to now. After working all night Saturday, I slept from 7am Sunday morning until 11. That's about par for the course.
They say that whenever something happens that has a significant impact on your life you go through the five stages of grief. Denial/Isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, not necessarily in that particular order. I definitely spent the first week in the denial/isolation stage. I had no desire to see anyone for the first few days and the only thing that made me leave my house, or for that matter my couch, was that I had to work. I now think I'm bouncing between depression and bargaining. At times that I feel more positive and upbeat I tend to think of a 'perfect' scenario where they may do the major surgeries but at a later time, allowing me to continue competing and have the smaller labrum repair surgery. But most of the time I definitely am ambivalent towards things at best, functioning on 'auto pilot'. I know it's a process and most of the time it's an internal fight between how I think I should be feeling and behaving and how I actually feel and want to behave. With another week or two to go before expecting to hear anything from the specialist in California, it feels like time is both crawling and flying at the same time.
While I found happiness and motivation for a few days in putting together an artistic program for an audition that my head coach is conducting at the end of the month, it quickly faded this week. This past week was, well, just downright tough. I think I walked around with a sign saying "Kick Me" on my back. By Friday morning, I probably should have just been put in isolation. I was unquestionably Eddie's grouchiest lesson of the day (poor guy I owe him an apology Monday morning). I had no desire to be on the ice in a jumps lesson at 7:30am on my only full day off of work (I worked a split work week last week), was mad that all of my lessons for the week had been rescheduled due to an out of town skater, costing me sleep and extra ice sessions, and was quite frankly at rock bottom when it came to my own self confidence in my jumps and lack of recent progression (see destructive self talk above). After spending 2.5 hours straight on the ice (due to the rescheduling issue) I went home and was really ready to throw my skates through a window. As fate, Karma or whatever else you want to call it would have it, I was supposed to go up to Woodland Park--a small mountain town about 30 minutes outside of the Springs--and give a coworker and her kids some skating lessons that afternoon. Feeling defeated and drained, I headed up into the mountains. I spent the next two hours on a full sized outdoor ice rink. It was two hours I wished I had taken for myself a week ago. I haven't coached skating since moving to the Springs. Spending an hour teaching the basics of skating reminded me of how rewarding it is to teach someone and watch them master a skill for the very first time. The look on a young child's face the first time they do a basic 2 foot spin or a toddler doing their very first bunny hop and realizing they didn't crash or an adult learning how to feel in control of themselves in a practically friction-less environment is every bit as rewarding as achieving a new jump or spin yourself. That simple hour of coaching brought back the joy of skating to me that I had lost in the last few weeks.
When I was in high school, we would go and visit my mom's family in Denver on school holidays. I always looked forward to going to the outdoor ice rink at my grandmother's country club in the winter and skating. I would stay out there until everyone else was begging me to get off the ice so we could go home. I remember my grandmother saying how I naturally took to the ice and looked graceful skating out there. She would tell me about her sister skating on the Central Park ice rink in New York when they were growing up and spinning beautifully in the middle of the ice. I taught myself how to spin on two feet after hearing that story. A few years later when she was dying from cancer and we were caring for her, I would go up to a small outdoor rink at a nearby mall in the early afternoons before the schools let out. I would often have the ice rink to myself. I'd turn on my iPod, put in my earbuds and loose myself in the cold wind blowing in my face and the smooth feel of the ice beneath my feet. After my grandmother died and I moved back to Oklahoma, I tried many times to get in touch with the local ice rink and arrange lessons for myself, but no one ever called me back. It would be over two years before I took to the ice again.
As I spent that second hour in Woodland Park simply skating for myself, I was overcome by how different it felt. The cold wind, the trees, the occasional pine needle on the ice catching under my blade...no coaches yelling across the ice. No fighting 17 other skaters to set up a jump or spin. No having to constantly watch over your shoulder for a skater running their program. No annoying tween music playing off of some 14 year old's iPod who doesn't know how to compile a decent playlist for a practice session. It was just me, the wind and the ice. I couldn't tell you the last time I worked so hard on the ice. I must have reeled off 75 jumping passes easily. Throwing combination after combination because I didn't have to worry about another skater 3 feet away from me. Jumping every time I went around because there was no one to cut off my setup. Being bold and unafraid to try different adjustments to jumps that are not consistent for me because no one was there to tell me not to. Doing things in my own time because I wasn't constrained by a 45 minute session with 25 other people on the ice and having to 'be ready' for a lesson to start at a scheduled time. It was fun. I was flying. I was free. It's been over 5 years since I've been on an outdoor rink, let alone one so quiet and surrounded by huge mountains and beautiful trees. For the past two days, I haven't been able to get that rink out of my mind. I found the reason why I fell in love with skating and why for me, it's worth the long overnight shifts at work, living very conservatively so that I can put every extra dollar I have into my training, carefully monitoring what I eat, feeling very sleep deprived, having permanently ice cold toes, and pushing my body beyond its limits. When I'm on the ice, I'm free. It's how I express myself. It's where I've known both triumph and defeat. Success and failure. It's where I discovered myself and where I can find myself when I'm lost. It's a part of me.
Skater says that once you start skating, it's 'in your blood' and I think there is a lot of truth to that. Do I still feel like I'm essentially 'skating toward an end'? Absolutely. Are there still a million unanswered questions racing through my mind? Probably two million. Have I miraculously been pulled out of my funk? Yeah right. But what I can tell you is I'm excited to get to the rink tomorrow. And probably do a ton of butt bouncing. But I'm also really excited to get back to Woodland Park this Friday and just skate for myself. And I'll tackle the issues, the questions and the grief process in two weeks when a game plan is formulated. In the meantime, perhaps I should just walk around wearing a shirt that says, "I need understanding and kindness right now". And maybe that's an okay thing to humbly ask for.
Here is a link to an informal resume of the orthopaedist I'm being referred to in San Diego. http://www.omgsd.com/pages/dr_santore.htm
