Hello Loves,
The first step I took on a trail after my accident was deep in the winter and it was on a prairie.
I measured this accomplishment only in steps, about twenty of them total, delicately attempted, crutches in my armpits, Andy standing next to me to make sure that I didn’t fall. I was still in an immobilizer brace, the kind I’d been wearing since my surgery in October.
But, oh, those twenty steps, the cold air in my face, the snow-dusted prairie all around us after a ride in a car (a ride in a car!) was everything I’d been wanting as I spent the autumn and the holidays in bed.
Doctors seem to be trained to dole out prognosis in strange waves of positive and negative. At first there was terror in the faces of the interns who talked to me in the ER, the fear of “non-union” where the shattered pieces of bone won’t knit, and the knee never works as it should again. Then there was cheery, get-her-out-the-door future-casting of the post-op ward, listing typical recovery time for knee surgery. That soon devolved into a reminder in follow up appointments and PT that my knee surgery was anything but typical. Weeks projected turned into months, expectations were downshifted into hopes for functionality as a baseline. Return to normal was out the window. My bone did find union, even if my tendons resisted repair.
And it was in this limbo that the trip to the prairie took place, in the uncanny valley between initial chaos and the later slogging months of rehab and hope, the space where I currently reside.
I don’t know how to write about this space where my walking is concerned, so I haven’t been trying. I don’t know the outcome. I’d rather give you a story that has an answer. My kidney disease is a slow-motion process of destruction without a clean narrative, like ecosystemic collapse. I have made my peace with that, or as near to peace as I can find. I know how to tell that story, complex as it is, full of waiting, full of losing by degrees over years.
One of the ways I told it was by walking. My legs have always been my salvation. My kidneys swell, making dancing and yoga harder, I lost running, bike riding became painful. I swam by using a kickboard so I wouldn’t twist and injure my kidneys. But walking was safe. Walking was joy. I walked trails because my legs were always strong and sure.
Even knowing better, even after years thinking about disability, I naively thought of broken knee recovery as more straightforward than the work of being a PKD patient. This injury anyway, is not straightforward at all. As the bone has healed, the tendons, restitched into a Frankenstein network of reimagining, won’t stick to any narrative of healing. Now I am left with the same lingering questions my disease has posed. What will the future hold? Will the knee every work properly? Will physical therapy become a place where I don’t cry my eyes out every time? Will I need more surgery?
There aren’t answers yet. There is only work. Which brings me back to the prairie.
The prairie where I took my first tiny steps after the accident was a place I’ve written about before. That prairie is a protected area called Nachusa Grasslands, managed in part by The Nature Conservancy and home to the first returned herd of bison in Illinois. It is a place with a dozen stacked metaphors for the long road of restoration, rehabilitation, reparations, conservation and return, and for the failures of the same.
We live, as does the land around us, as do the peoples with whom we share the land—in a state of lack of control, of strange turns of fate, of the echoes and wounds of traumas. And yet, somewhere in the uncertainty, we have to find a way forward. We have to find hope, even if it is tenuous, optimistic future-casting, even if the hope is only long months and years of work, even if in the next breath the hope fades to some complex reality that requires, as reality always does, just more work.
This weekend, we went back to the Nachusa prairie on Easter. The season has been one of storms. Over spring break while visiting colleges, we drove ahead of a line of weather. We drove ahead of a tornado that killed people in a town we passed just a half hour before. We sat at home finally with the cat carriers ready in case we had to flee to our basement. We had other storms too, a complexity in our family with two households, the bills and insurance denials, delayed PT and the financial stress that comes, in America, after a medical crisis.
By Easter morning, though, the storms were mostly passed, and we drove back to Nachusa, and to a trail we’d done first in 2021, year two of the pandemic. And there, on Big Jump Prairie, the grasslands had just been through the prescribed burns that happen there regularly. A prescribed burn is good land management for a prairie. It keeps the prairie free of invasives that don’t like heat and encourages and stimulates the growth of native plants that evolved alongside fire. It is a balm to see the black fields of a well-managed prairie preserve. It is a wonder to walk the black grass, and to smell the soot of it, and to listen to the brittle whispers as your feet turn the stands of grass to ash and dust. It is a pleasant surprise for the naturalist to find the bones a fire leaves behind.
There were the bones of deer and large bovines in the black grass, skulls and teeth, pelvises and vertebrae, all white and circled by the black. For a family between and among religions, with a son so big he’s tired of candy, this was our Easter hunt, looking for bones in the dark.
I used my hiking poles as canes, stepped carefully and slow, bent from the waist not the knee, turned back to the car so that the others could hike on, hike fast. Walking alone took me a long time. I stopped a lot and felt the joy of standing upright on my own feet and smelled the air like a dog. And for that moment, it was enough. There was evidence of loss and death, and the hope that healing and restoration would follow. I stood in that moment—paused between winter and summer, between holy celebrations and the return to normal life, between the fire and the emergence of the young green shoots—and listened to the chorus frogs in the wetlands made by the storms, and I breathed in the sun-warmed smell of fire.
I’ll write soon,
Love,
Eiren