These adaptive skiing posts started out being about my five days as an amputee in the Greek Peak 2014 Winter Challenge program, but it's really about my whole winter's skiing. And bruises. And self-discovery.
I expected it to be challenging, sure. I figured it would be physically difficult. But I didn't expect it to be my new form of therapy. Wasn't expecting to find so many left over emotional pockets of panic and powerlessness. I thought I'd pretty much purged my psyche with all the therapy, meds, time and self-knowledge. Wrong again.
The most rewarding part of skiing this winter was how I learned to accept both my fear (the panic that still ambushes me) and my trust of the incredibly supportive skiers who helped me. You may not have noticed, but I have a slight (ahem) tendency to charge at life determined to conquer everything on my own. I carried this attitude into amputee-hood. It's important to be stubborn and independent. But it's just as important to value people who want to help.
When I shut up and listened, I began to trust. I stopped feeling overwhelmed and started to progress, slowly, but surely. It took a month for my bruises and pulled muscles to settle down, but then I went back every Sunday I could the rest of this season. March 16 was the final day of the adaptive program and we celebrated with a dish-to-pass lunch and a very moving awards ceremony.
That was also the day I began putting some turns together with more confidence and reliability. I 'm still on Alpha, the beginner slope, but I'm gaining tools and confidence. I can imagine the day I'll venture onto another slope--with my entourage, of course. Scott, one of my instructors (who masquerades as a para in a wheelchair but is actually a maniac on a monoski) told me, "Pretty soon you'll be off to the top of the mountain! You'll see!" He also told me, during one of my mild but recurring panic attacks, it took him two years to work through the panic.
This sense of community has opened my eyes. Admitting I need help opens up opportunities. After my above-knee amputation seven years ago, I climbed back on my horse and sort of battled at riding. One-legged-ness wasn't going to slow me down! Except it had, along with being middle-aged. To ride safely, I need help. And guess what I'm not good about asking for?
But skiing has limbered up that part of my brain. My friends at the barn where my mare lives want me to ride. They are supportive. I don't have to feel limited by not being able to charge out into the woods or over the biggest jumps. I'm looking forward to getting back in the saddle. I wasn't expecting this gift from my adventures on a monoski.
In 2007 the Academy Awards were held the Sunday night before my amputation. The surgery was scheduled for 8 am, Monday February 26. The night before, I was home with my older daughter (17 at the time), my sister and my cousin who'd each driven eight hours to be with me.
We'd had an impromptu party on Saturday night. It had featured strong margaritas, loud music, and a giant paper leg we burned in effigy in the snow outside. It was a rowdy, over-the-top celebration, a send-off I called my Leg's Retirement Party. But all day Sunday I paced and trembled, too stressed to speak to anyone. When a well-wishing neighbor stopped by, rather than answer the door, I hid. I waited for the hours to pass. I endured. I was ready; I just wanted to go.
That Sunday night, my daughter took photos of me in shorts with my left leg. Later she told me I had the dead, sunken eyes of a concentration camp survivor. Then we watched the Oscars with my cousin and my sister. We watched them straight through but still I can't name a single film or actor mentioned that night.
In the morning I fed my appaloosa in her run-in stall where she was free to come and go. Laredo munched her grain seriously, nose deep in the bucket, breath swirling up in clouds of vapor. Her neck was warm and her thick winter coat soft against my face. the smell and feel of her was like oxygen, like hope. I pressed my left leg against her left foreleg. I wanted the strength of her smooth tendon, knee and muscle as its last impression.
I haven't regretted it, not since the moment I woke up in Recovery with my thigh a bandaged stump. It's complicated but so is every life. Here's to my next thirty-five years, or more.
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This weekend marks my fifth anniversary as an above-knee amputee. It's sort of a personal New Year, both end and beginning. My amputation was definitely both an end (of years living with a knee that fused itself when I was a teenager, during a horrific untreated bone disease) and the beginning of mylife as an amputee. I chose this road open-eyed;. The bone diease (osteomyelitis) just happened to me.
My parents were devout Christian Scientists at the time; we lived near Boston, headquarters of Christian Science. Back in the 1970's, Massachusetts law protected the rights of parents to choose "spiritual treatment" over medicine for children. My parents believed my only chance was a healing through prayer. I spent a hellish year and a half in bed and a wheelchair. But I survived.
The previous photo of the girl bareback on her horse is me at thirteen, Novmber 1975, with my crazy appaloosa mare, Flicka. My father took the picture about two weeks before my knee suddenly--viciously--swelled without warning one night. I'd lived in my legs. I'd run hurdles on the jr high track team. I'd ridden since I was six years old. My last day running was in late November 1975. It was a good day.
In the thirty-six years since that photo was taken, I've had a wonderful life. Even with a fused leg I was able to do almost everything with horses that I'd hoped including training, teaching, competing in low-level hors trials and riding racehorses. I've always written about horses, and for the past eight years I've finally begun to wrestle with my life on paper. I'm here tonight to begin a conversation (one-sided so far, though I'm hoping you'll join in) about three aspects of my life:
1. Horses: I've never been able to separate myself from horses, physically or emotionally. They have taught me to forgive and to be a better human. I can't stop keeping them. I've still got two and a half out in my pasture right now, unless you count the mini as a whole horse...
2. Religion: I left Christian Science in 1994. I am an atheist. Now, January 2012, 38 states in the US still permit parents to opt out of medical treatment for children on religious grounds. (Five states have religious defenses to crimes including manslaughter and murder.) I am just beginning to speak out against this privilege . It's personal.
3. Motion, physical activity, movement: This is the essence of who I am which has been facilitated by horses all these years, and held back by the limitations that are the legacy (pun intended!) of my untreated bone disease. My remaining leg is failing. My knee grinds bone on bone and my limited insurance, which paid for my prosthesis, for which I am grateful, just refused a much more inexpensive knee brace for my suffering, 80-yr-old's-equivalent knee.
These three issues are the triangle that stabilizes and limits me, galvanizes and spurs me on.
More to follow. Be well.
