14,197ft.

Sawatch Range

31/58

I tore my ACL at a gymnastics meet my junior year of high school. The sound carried across the gymnasium to the spectators sitting in the bleachers before it echoed right back to me, finding a home in my memory to this day. I fell to the mat and grabbed my femur, convinced it would be in two pieces, but it was whole. I proceeded to hobble around on a balloon shaped knee for the next several days. I was in complete denial.

An inevitable orthopedic appointment confirmed what my gait and symptoms already suggested: a left ACL tear. Surgery came and went and physical therapy became my religion. I spent every single chunk of free time logging miles on a stationary bike. I was told that, with diligence, I would be able to start jogging in April. In mid-February, with the help of an incredible orthopedic doctor, I was cleared to participate in track practice without restriction.

It was my only taste of lifestyle-altering injury for the first twenty-five years of my life.

Last summer, I made the conscious decision to push through what began as a nagging ache in my right lower leg. I hiked and hiked (and hiked) falsely believing that, come cooler weather, when I was stuck sitting in a classroom, the ache would resolve.

After several weeks of being relatively stationary with persistent pain, I scheduled an appointment with an orthopedic doctor who brushed me off with little to no assessment or diagnostic testing. I explained my odd variety of wide-spread symptoms and the way they impacted my daily life and he left me with the instruction to “hike with poles,” and a physical therapy script to mend a strained hamstring. My pain was widespread, yes, but none of it dwelt in my hamstring.

I began squeezing weekly physical therapy appointments into my full time school plus full time work schedule, funding them alongside of those full time school bills.

I wove physical therapy into my schedule for months without change, or maybe I got worse. Maybe it just felt worse because I was aching and deprived of the activity that had brought me emotional healing for so many months.

It knocked me down hard.

On my best days I popped some useless Aleve and dreamed of climbing mountains without restriction in the near future. On my worst, I teared up scrolling through photos of mountains I feared I would never stand on top of and clenched my jaw at texts from friends suggesting we plan an adventure. “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH PAIN I’M IN. ALWAYS.” I wanted to scream cry. I wanted them to understand that despite my ability to tough out activity and power through — the amount of motivation it required me to take my dog around the block, the dreaded ache I feel carrying my laundry up the stairs, the pain that shoots down and then back up my entire leg before nestling deeply in my hip every single time I push the gas peddle in my car. But mainly I wanted to cry and beg them to not take their lack of chronic pain for granted.

The thing about my injury this time around is there was never a clear answer. There was no torn ligament we could point to and fix and then rehab back into shape. We’ve found some concrete clues and significant pain sources, but mainly I’ve been an anomaly to everyone I’ve. One person refers me to another and so on. I’ve had bone scans and XRAYs, MRIs, massages, acupuncture, chiropractic adjustments, steroid injections and dry needling all to turn around and try each pain management modality in a different order.

There have been days when I wonder if I I’m making the whole thing up and then my doctor or chiropractor or massage therapist etc. will praise my high pain tolerance secondary to their findings and an intervention deemed intolerable to most.

I don’t have much else to say except that I’m still at a loss most days and I still deal with pain daily. After consulting with my doctor, I was told I could do what I could tolerate without anything catastrophic, he also gave me permission to start adding strength. So here I am and it continues to be a balancing act.

But, as I’ve told people many times, it’s more painful for me to sit around and do nothing than it is for me to be in increased physical pain while I do something I love. I maintain that.

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I wasn’t planning to hike Mount Princeton, but I wrapped up an internship shift in Vail at 10pm the night before and I heard it calling my name. A trailhead was the only place I wanted to end up that night and the advantage to my abnormally busy summer was that everything I needed to stand on top of a 14er was in my vehicle. So, instead of crashing on a nearby friend’s couch like I had planned, I fueled up my car, texted a friend where I’d be and when he might expect to hear from me, and drove straight to the notorious Mount Princeton Rd — it took the amount of time it would’ve taken to get me home, but I was headed in an entirely different direction.

The road up Mount Princeton was as bad as I had heard, especially solo, in the dark, at 1am. That being said, I knew based on the time of day I had probably avoided the risk of encountering a vehicle coming the other way, so I drove and drove up that awful one lane road, passed the radio towers, until I sat in my Forrester at the final switchback.

I slept in my car for a few hours, woke up and climbed. I don’t know if I expected to summit. But I a few hours later I stood at 14,197ft. I wrote in my instagram post that I cried on the hike down thinking about all of the mountains my body got my broken heart up last summer. “I’m pretty sure my heart got my broken body up this one,” I said.

It was really nice to be above 14,000ft feet for the first time in 2019 and it felt like home as much as it ever did.

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I don’t pretend to have it the worst, I know there are people out there who do far more with far greater pain. But still, I’m here. Putting one foot in front of the other and trying to navigate this foreign world while I tread the fine line between too stagnant and too much.