Date: 2005-06-24
From: Washington, DC

To: Washington, DC
Miles today: 0.0

Guess where I am. I'll give you two guesses. And no, I'm not back on the trail.My foot's been getting gradually better this week, and I was starting to entertain serious hopes of getting back on the trail by Monday, but then yesterday morning I went crazy and walked ten city blocks carrying nothing, and when that was enough to make me spend the rest of the day with an icepack, I was forced to reconsider the wisdom of hiking anytime in the next few days.I spoke with a doctor and said it seemed like the foot was taking an awfully long time to heal. She told me it might, in fact, be fractured after all - that the ER X-ray wouldn't have shown a stress fracture - and that the only way to determine the presence of a stress fracture would be for me to come in for a bone scan or an MRI. However, she continued, even if a stress fracture were diagnosed, they still probably wouldn't cast it or anything; they'd just tell me to stay off it and ice it and wrap it and take Advil and wait for it to get better. Which is what I'm doing anyway. So going in for more expensive tests seems pointless. I've never had a stress fracture before, so I wouldn't be able to guess whether I have one now. But I've had sprains, and this is not like any sprain I've ever had. I'm in a bit of a no-man's-land for now - I can't do anything except wait, and now I don't even know how much longer I'll have to do that. I figure I have a pillow period of about two more weeks before finishing the trail this season becomes less realistic. Of course I know, in the grand scheme of things, that whether I'm able to do all remaining 1320 miles this year or not doesn't matter very much. But dreams hold fast simply for being dreams, whether or not they're important by objective standards, and being incapacitated when I'm longing to be in the mountains is difficult, and frustrating, and disheartening. I hate being stuck inside, unable to walk. I hate it so much.But I've been so lucky in friendship, these past couple of injured weeks. I mean to say, not everyone will watch the E! True Hollywood Story of Saved by the Bell with you. Or inform you casually that due to a Safeway sale on Ben & Jerry's, there's a gallon of ice cream in the freezer. Or team up with you to barrage Tammy in Chicago with so many coercive and bleating phone calls that she finally succumbs to the siren call (Homeric and shrill-fire-engine-noise both, by her own admission) and agrees to come to DC for the weekend.* She's getting here tomorrow. We can't wait. Although, as none of us have cars and I'm strictly restricted to hobbling, I can't be the automatically designated driver I used to be in high school, when those two lazy bums always resisted driving anywhere. Still, there's always the metro. And cable. Man, I've been in the city too long.*(I told her to think of the best interests of her needy, homeless, unemployed, injured friend. "I have so much laundry to do this weekend," she said. I think it was the horoscope in the Washington Post that finally made her cave: on the fourth phone call, I told her astrologist extraordinaire Holiday Mathis was of the opinion that "Crazy, glamorous friends exert an influence over you. You're not one to be a follower, but if someone has a formula for success, why not use it? It takes more than natural talent to win at this game." )Rereading Tammy's horoscope, I turned to Sara. "I guess that makes me Crazy, huh?" She snorted. "You're certainly not Glamorous. Look at you, you shower once a week and you have one pair of pants."