Just Saying: Making a run for it

I started running after I moved to Montpelier to start my career as a newspaperman. Adopting some Vermonty habits in my new role, I got myself a community garden plot around the corner on Upper Main Street at the top of a steep hill that was a pain in the rear to walk up, so I ran.

And that was the kickoff to some 40 years of recreational running, with a New York Marathon thrown in along with a bunch of half-marathons and many 10Ks.

I am now retired.

Unlike several friends and acquaintances, I never had any knee problems for all the years of pounding on pavement. When the knees go, it’s pretty much the end of the game.

When I was training for the marathon (year 2000), I wound up with plantar fasciitis, a common onset of heal pain for runners, that wasn’t exactly disabling but quite annoying. I went to a podiatrist who said a shot of cortisone would do the trick. It became clear that he’d inject the drug directly in my rear ankle.

My first thought was: my rear ankle is solid bone, so where does the needle go? There was no discussion about that concern and to my wonderment I saw him jam the syringe into my foot, and to this day I have no idea how the cortisone got in there.

Overnight the pain was gone. That is the long and short of my leg injury story.

Jane, on the other hand, probably has run less than a mile total in her entire life. It is not her thing. I suppose if a bear were chasing her some form of running would appear. But no bear, definitely no running. (To her credit, many hundreds of miles of biking, though.)

So it’s interesting (to me) that two weeks ago she had her right knee surgically replaced, which goes to show you that one’s body will do pretty much what it wants to do when it comes to when body parts decide they’ve had enough.

This being Manhattan, we are literally surrounded by world-class hospitals and surgeons who can do such operations in their sleep (uh, metaphorically). We found an excellent surgeon who works out of the Hospital for Special Surgery where Jane has had some other stuff done.

The day came and we took a cab to HSS around 10 in the morning. She went into pre-op mode and I headed to the waiting room for what would be a marathon (!) day of sitting in a chair.

Somehow we misplaced our New York Times. But that would have sucked up about an hour of time, leaving what would be eight more hours of looking at the East River, which was right out the window. (I tiresomely always point out that it is not a river, but a saltwater estuary connecting Upper New York Harbor on the south with Long Island Sound on the north.)

Estuary, schmestuary. It is not interesting enough to hold your interest for eight hours.

So I went into survival mode, which is a technique I honed on countless trips to the Island on the Jitney. It’s basically a non-freak out mode that seems to disable that part of your brain that wants desperately to freak out.

There were about 12 of us in the waiting room, and that did provide a faint feeling of shared despair. I noticed a young woman who spent much of her time out in the hallway on her phone. Typically, even if I had wanted to, there was not a single soul I could think of to chat with.

As the day went on, occasionally a surgeon would come in and brief the person waiting on how the surgery went for the patient, meaning the hospital day was over and it was time to go home.

By this time, the young woman had come into the waiting room and curled up on a chair two down from me. We nodded to one another and I couldn’t help but notice how she had curled up in the chair. Her left leg was so contorted that it looked like it was broken in several pieces.

I said, none of my business, but I don’t think the human leg is supposed to be in that position. She laughed and said, that’s funny, my husband says that all the time. Mercifully, her surgeon soon waved to her and her day was finally over. I said you’re a lucky girl.

I went to the guys at the waiting room front desk to inquire about Jane, and they said we were just about to call you: Jane is almost ready to go home. It turns out she was right around the corner and quite chipper. An enormous bandage covered the surgery.

She is recuperating at warp speed, I’m happy to report. The incisions were at first ghastly to look at, but are getting better every day. She’s walking like a pro, but has no plan whatsoever in this lifetime to do anything that remotely seems like running.