A year and a half ago I was going about my usual Friday routine. I’d finished work at 2pm, packed up some Poshmark orders and was rushing to get ready for my class at the gym. Arms full, I hurried down the stupid spiral staircase that lead to my loft office and missed a step about halfway down. The packages went flying, my phone went flying, and I went flying. On the way down my Birkenstock clog caught on the stair (I think?) and my foot kept going.
I knew even before I landed (thankfully on carpet) that I’d hurt myself. I lay there for a while, gasping from the pain and waiting for the lightheaded dizzy feeling to go away. I tried to sit up. Nope. I waited a few more minutes and tried again. NOPE.
I eventually texted my now-husband something along the lines of, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” He left work early and came home to find me still on the floor, shivering under the throw blanket I’d pulled off the bed. I didn’t know until later that you get cold when you’re in shock. By then I was able to sit up but I couldn’t put any weight on my foot and by god if that man didn’t carry me down two flights of stairs to the car.
We went to urgent care for x-rays and the doctor said he didn’t seen any obvious breaks but there were a few areas he didn’t like the looks of and urged me to see an orthopedic surgeon, like immediately.
I’m incredibly grateful for this doctor - I think he knew exactly what I’d done but didn’t have the expertise to make the call. I also had an Internet friend reach out and say that my bruising looked like a Lisfranc injury. She knew because she’d had one too! I saw an orthopedic surgeon the following week and got weight bearing x-rays done. I also got an MRI, so that was fun too.
The Verdict: Lisfranc injury. Basically, I’d broken and displaced the bones in my midfoot and damaged the ligament. This is a weird and quite rare injury that sometimes happens to football and soccer players but can also happen by falling in exactly the wrong way.
Back in the pre-modern-surgery days, the “cure” for this injury was amputation, that’s how bad it is. Your foot’s structure is pretty complex and if you injure your Lisfranc joint complex, you basically lose all your foot’s stability and also, it’s incredibly painful.
My surgeon laid it out - I needed ORIF surgery1 which has a full recovery time of one year. After a year I’d have the option of a second surgery to get the hardware removed. Oh, also, I might eventually get post-traumatic arthritis in which case I’d have to get a fusion surgery. Cool cool cool.
I was 50 years old and had never broken a bone or had surgery of any kind. I had to cancel a post-holiday trip home and would definitely be in a boot for my upcoming wedding ceremony/honeymoon. Devastating.
When I posted about this on Instagram one of my online friends posted this:
…you will miss your regular life a lot and you will be so happy to get back to it. It will be awful in the moment but in terms of your whole life it’s a blip.
When I first read that I was like, THIS IS NOT A BLIP OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL. But you know what? She was absolutely right. It was the defining struggle of one calendar year of my life but now that I’m on the other side I’m getting to the point where it feels like it might actually just be… a blip.
This is how it went: surgery/splint (two weeks)→ hard cast (four weeks) → boot (six weeks.) It was painful and boring and frustrating. Most of this time I was non-weight-bearing but eventually I was allowed to walk in the boot with crutches. I got married and went to Paris in a boot and everyone there was incredibly nice to me and made jokes about a skiing accident. One morning a French guy crutched past me wearing a boot and we gave each other a mutual look of such empathy that I have never forgotten it.
It was all very frustrating, but the time passed as it does and eventually I got to put my swollen potato of a foot in the world’s ugliest pair of Hokas and attempt to walk to the corner of the block and back. I hate those Hokas but my foot loves them. Goddammit.
My foot is never going to be quite the same. It still gets stiff if I sit too long and I may never be able to wear heels again, which is fine. I’m still worried about arthritis (aren’t we all?) but I can’t control that. There’s a short list of things I’ll probably never do again: box jumps, running at speed, any kind of high-impact moves. I’m also still working on flexibility and my lunges on my right side are super sad. My balance is still off and I always have the sensation that my sock is bunched up under my injured foot even though it’s not. (This is weird, right?)
On the other hand, recovering from this was incredibly motivating. I’ve never worked so hard to get back in shape and I recently got PRs on my deadlift and my back squat! These aren’t post-injury PRs, these are actual middle aged Adrien PRs. I am definitely stronger now than before I was injured because I took recovery seriously - I did all my PT and I hired a coach for a while to help with my muscle loss and imbalance. The only way out of this was through and I went THROUGH. IT.
Last December I got the hardware removed from my foot because even though it was healed (it really does take a full fucking year) I still had a fair amount of stiffness and discomfort. I’m nearly six months out from that surgery (a blip!) and I’d say I’m at 90%-95%, which I can live with. I can walk for miles, I can mountain bike, I can lift weights. I am incredibly grateful for my skilled surgeon who understands this weird injury, a husband with endless patience, and I’m also very grateful to know someone else who went through this and came out the other side just fine. (Thanks, Barb!)
Really, it was just a blip, right?
PS. If your health insurance package includes accident insurance, pay the extra $5 a month and get it. Trust me on this.
This stands for “open reduction and internal fixation.” Gross.
I fell and broke both wrists at the end of 2016 (I tripped! On the block where I'd lived for 12 years!) and lost a year of my life to recovery. I had broken my ankle about 15 months earlier but the wrists were much much worse--just smashed. The CT scan looked like the asteroid belt. Gonna write it up someday when I can bear to think about it.
I'm curious about how you approached the weightlifting part of your recovery post-surgery. I'd be absolutely terrified to go for a heavy squat. How did you get your brain to cooperate?