Resilience
- October 2019
- Simple Living
Right now, hope feels close and that feels good. It’s on the high side of the seesaw. And grief is always there across from it—because everything has to balance.
6 years ago, my husband Mario died. He died behind me and I didn’t see him until the chopper had brought him off the mountain and he was shrouded in a body bag on the grass in a high meadow in the Italian Dolomites. They only let me stay with him for a few minutes. Then I never saw him again.
Many people reached out to me in the first brutal months of grieving. It was difficult to actually respond or talk to anyone. When Mario died, life stopped and I went into seclusion with my dog and cat. I could not be without Cajun and Mao. Instinctively, I cut chemicals from my life: coffee, alcohol, sugar, painkillers, sleep aids. The only way to make it out of the crevasse of grief was to face it head on every second of every day, until I could be with him in my dreams at night.
In the beginning exercise meant making it out of bed to the bathroom and back, then the kitchen. Very gradually I increased to walks, and then to climbing and hiking and running. When I could go up, things got better. I felt the real healing of release on top of Picacho Peak in Arizona early on Christmas morning. I could feel energy lifting into the air, and my body became light. I had forgotten how it felt to not be heavy.
The one thing that gave me comfort was knowing Mario hadn’t suffered: he’d died on impact when he flew into the rock behind me. He wasn’t suffering through this soul-crushing loss, and he’d never suffer through illness or pain or loneliness on the way to death. My first thought was wishing I’d died in his place, my second thought, with him, and my final thought was gratitude that he would not have to do this, he would never have to live through this pain. He would never suffer in any way. Mario was so good. This one thing almost felt just.
This January, two months after our wedding, Ian went to Castleton tower to fly my light speed wing from the talus cone—mainly to get some exercise with Cajun on the walk up the hill because every other trail around town was too snowy to hike up. It was a little windy, and I decided to climb on my backyard wall in the sun and let them go without me. Two hours later, with not much time before sunset and the freeze of desert night, Ian called. He’d crashed. He thought he’d broken his feet. He was getting cold, he was in a lot of pain, and he was worried about shock. He’d already pushed the SOS button on his Inreach.
I spent 5 minutes grabbing winter sleeping bags and down jackets, backpacks, a litter, water and headlamps, then alerted a crew of our friends and drove the half hour out to Castle Valley, sick with anxiety, praying it would be something easy, fractured tib-fibs, maybe, or simple broken ankles. The chopper was already circling the hillside and the local SAR team and ambulance were lined up along the road. After finding out that the SAR team had only an emergency blanket, our three fastest hikers took the warm things we’d brought and raced up the hill to get to Ian and get him warm. Eventually after being injected with ketamine and lowered with ropes to a somewhat flat spot where the chopper could set down, Ian was loaded into the helicopter just as dusk was coming—he was flown to the Grand Junction hospital while I drove the hour and forty-five minutes to get there.
The doctors showed me the scans and told me the scale of his foot injuries was far beyond what they could handle at that hospital. It was beyond anything they had ever seen. His lower leg bones had driven into his feet as he took the impact into the ground, smashing the calcaneous and navicular bones, and destroying joints, nerves, flesh. He’d also broken his back, a fractured L5. The nurses couldn’t figure out how to control his pain as he lay on the table writhing in agony, his clothing cut up in shreds on the floor around it. I got on the phone with my brother, an ER doctor in Salt Lake. We set up a life flight to Salt Lake City, and within a few hours Ian and I were both flying through the dark while the flight nurses got him back on ketamine and into relief.
We never went home again for the next 5 weeks: for the first two weeks we lived in the hospital, the first week in ICU. I had our room set up with camping and cooking gear and coolers that were being restocked by friends, and stayed surprisingly busy emptying Ian’s catheter bag, refilling his Platypus hoser and hanging it on the IV stand, making him protein shakes in Nalgene bottles, trying to keep him clean and somewhat distracted from the pain. When you smash both calcaneouses and naviculars and destroy the soft tissue, nerves and ligaments in your feet, and fracture your back, the level of pain is unimaginable.
Ian had surgery on his feet almost immediately, and then a week later had his lower back fused. If it had just been his back, he could have expected a full recovery, for all intents and purposes, in less than a year. The foot surgeon, known to be one of the best in the field, not for his bedside manner, told us he’d never seen injuries this bad. He said it literally made him sick to think of what Ian would go through. He couldn’t use screws to join the bones because none of the fragments were big enough—instead he threaded together what he could, with wire and skewers. He could only do so much on the left foot because the skin and flesh were so damaged that he couldn’t risk compromising them more without losing the foot. He was a little happier with the right foot, but there was a massive wound on the bottom that could take up to a year to heal. Ian’s ankles and legs were fractured as well, but that seemed to be something of an afterthought.
The foot surgeon and PA would come in to look at Ian’s swaddled feet from time to time and tell us the best they hoped for was for him to eventually be able to wear real shoes and walk. “That’s great,” I said, “hiking is what he mainly wants to do.” “Walk….around the house,” the PA replied.
I had to work not to vomit or pass out during those chats. Ian was generally in a haze of drugs and pain and didn’t seem too perturbed. Later he told me that whenever they started saying negative things, he just tuned them out. Friends who’d broken their feet and backs came to visit, telling us their surgeons had said they’d never walk, never climb, never hike, never dance, never fly, never do all the things they do, and we should absolutely ignore them. But with injuries of this type and scale, no one knows outcomes. It was hard to hear extreme pessimism from the experts. A couple of months later when the surgeon looked at the xrays and I asked if the bones seemed to be healing normally (meaning, at a normal pace), he said to Ian “normal went out the window when you hit the ground.”
Ian stayed in ICU on a ketamine drip for over a week, and while he was able to appreciate the experience for a time, by the end he was just worn out from tripping. When they took him off the drip and moved him to the regular floor, it was a constant battle to manage his pain before it escalated out of control. Destroying your feet ranks very high on the pain scale. Ian had the unfortunate timing to be injured at the height of the opioid epidemic when hospital policy appeared to be almost completely focused on not administering pain meds. The problem was that it was almost impossible to get control of his pain once it spiraled too far. Any complacency, mistake on timing, or reticence with pain meds sent Ian down a tunnel of agony that couldn’t be relieved. It was hard not to lose my shit with the nurses when that happened. I sat next to his hospital bed, stroking his head as he rocked it helplessly back and forth on the pillow through the worst relays of pain. His suffering was grueling.
When we were finally able to leave the hospital, there was no way Ian could handle 3.5 hours in a car to get home to Moab. And it felt dangerous to be that far away from the trauma center. So we stayed at my brother’s house in Salt Lake for another 3 weeks.
It was hard to manage the physical and mental effort required to take care of Ian in the first months. We both felt helpless, in different ways. Moving medical equipment around, getting him in and out of the house and truck, keeping track of all his meds for different hours, keeping him fed and hydrated, dealing with insurance and scheduling, juggling my work obligations with the doctor visits and daily care….it was all exhausting, on the edge of too hard.
A friend in Boulder lent us a nicer wheelchair, which another friend drove to us in Salt Lake. Friends built ramps to my brother’s porch in Salt Lake and to our porch in Moab, and knocked out doorways inside our house so the wheelchair could fit into the bedroom and bathroom. Ian’s parents and sisters flew out to help, when I had to travel for work. Things got much easier once we were home in mid-February, but for the next several months we drove the 3.5 hours to Salt Lake every two weeks, for surgery to get the wire and pins taken out of Ian’s feet, to have his casts changed, to have stitches removed, to get xrays, to get giant “walking boots,” and to have his wounds monitored. His feet oozed and peeled and smelled inside the casts. Eight of his toes curled tight and couldn’t be straightened. He couldn’t feel touch on the bottoms of his feet. His legs atrophied. A red scar ran up his lower back like a giant centipede.
Yet Ian maintained a steady positive attitude. I saw him really low only one time, in late May, when an infection started in the deep wound in his right foot—the “better” foot. He was running a high fever and was weak and sick. It turned out he had a deep abscess inside the wound next to the bone and now it was at risk of leading to bone infection and amputation. So it was back to Salt Lake for 3 weeks of daily hyperbaric treatment, heavy duty antibiotics and aggressive wound care, right at the 5 month mark post surgery when he’d just been cleared to start trying to walk. After the long wait and initial excitement of being able to stand up and take some steps, it was back to the wheelchair, plus the added anxiety of possibly losing a foot. Fortunately the treatment worked.
From the first days when the news seemed to get harder and harder to hear, we agreed that we wouldn’t listen to any negativity from anyone, surgeons or otherwise. Ian is not the average person. He quietly makes whatever he does look easy, until you actually think about what he’s doing and realize it’s not. He carried a 200 pound friend out on his back from a canyon after the friend broke his ankle, hiking at the same pace as the rest of the group who were just carrying light packs. I calculated that if he could recover even to 60% of his past hiking ability, he will still be hiking faster than me.
Ian realized pretty quickly he wouldn’t be returning to work as a skydiving tandem instructor. So he took coding courses over the first months of downtime, and then used his engineering and nursing degrees to get a job managing the informatics software system at the Moab Hospital, 3 blocks from our house as soon as he could get onto crutches.
As soon as he was cleared to start weight bearing, he spent the end of the summer kayaking, SUPing, lap swimming, lifting weights, mountain biking and doing slow one mile hikes on trails with trekking sticks. He did “walk….around the house,” the first day he stood up from the wheelchair.
10 months since Ian’s accident, his pain levels are manageable—-he takes Tylenol at night only as needed and CBDs, and he can almost always sleep through the night. He does physical therapy and engineers different contraptions to work on his seized-up muscles and ligaments. Still, some pain is present in his feet, his ankle joints and his back from the time he wakes up until he falls asleep. He says you just get used to it. So far the pain is prohibitive for real hiking, as in straight up mountains, even without carrying any weight, which is what he really wants to be doing. My brother severely injured both ankles and feet in years past and uses exoskeleton braces, which have allowed him to return to backcountry skiing, hiking up mountains and paragliding. These seem to have real potential for Ian as well, and he just got fitted for a pair. Whether the braces turn out to be the answer or not, we both know he will find the way to do everything he wants to do. Hope is much closer than it was 10 months ago.
I have a theory about humans and progression, which is that within the potential of what is actually possible mechanically, we work as much as we need to work until we get where we want to be. And we stop there. And depending on priorities, those theres are different. I think this makes it difficult for surgeons to give real predictions of recovery outcomes to individuals, but it’s something they should take into account when they talk. Because everyone has different priorities and so everyone stops at a different there. Ian’s recovery is far from over, and he’s far from done working to get there. He’s far from where he plans to be.
Right now, I see Ian thriving again. His spark is back. He loves his new job and walks with less and less pain each week. We can walk on trails together with Cajun again for a couple of miles, and not even that slowly. It’s still early days, and it’s amazing to watch him move with no less grace, just more intention. This morning he said, “when I think about my life now and my life before the accident, I realize I’m actually more happy now: I appreciate being able to walk and everything about my life. I don’t think I appreciated things enough before.” And now I’m able to start turning more attention to the things I do, beyond just keeping life together.
We both agree on this: no matter what happens and how bad it is in the moment, looking back you will always see it brought you something, or to somewhere, that is good, that is where you want to be now. Which is always impossible to believe at first. That’s joy at sudden disappointment. It takes faith. But it’s always true. That’s why you always keep going, because otherwise you won’t get to find out what it is.
