Ice Bath Alphabets

Two days before winter holiday break my freshman year of college I trashed my ankle walking down the steps of Weld Boathouse.

 We’d just finished an unbelievably grueling erg workout. It was the first practice that I noticed my splits were starting to creep into the same range as some of the recruits. I didn’t notice quite how dead-tired my legs were as I headed out the door with a couple of my teammates, into the dark and onto the icy steps. I don’t really remember how it happened. Maybe I slipped. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. But I stepped onto the outside edge of my right foot instead of onto the sole – and my whole ankle snapped sideways, taking the full weight of my body. I felt all sorts of tendons slide places they shouldn’t have and heard a loud pop. I took two or three steps further, hoping I could walk it off and pretend nothing had happened. And then I crumpled to the ground.

I remember my teammates carrying me to the medical center, holding me up so that I didn’t have to put any weight on my right leg. I remember the UHS nurse, in classic fashion, asking first if I was pregnant. I scowled with tears streaming down my face and told her my problem was about three feet lower than that. They did an x-ray and confirmed it wasn’t a break – just a really, really bad sprain. They sent me back to my dorm with an ice pack and a boot, and instructed me to wear it once my ankle swelling went down enough to strap it on. My roommates were awesome, bringing me plates of food from the dining hall and xeroxing their notes from class so that I wouldn’t have to crutch around on the ice. Then my dad came in and took me home.

And for two weeks I didn’t do much of anything. I spent a few minutes each day hobbling gingerly around, testing to see whether my black, engorged, barely-booted ankle was ready to take the slightest amount of pressure. But mostly I was on my back – in my bed or on the couch – foot elevated, unwrapping Christmas presents, studying for exams, and popping Advil every four hours. And as the days went on, as long as I didn’t move it, my ankle didn’t hurt that badly. Which I took as a sign that it was slowly getting better.

When I got back to campus the second day of January and went down to the athletic trainer’s office for a check-up, I got some unwelcome news: I’d spent the past two weeks basically doing the exact opposite of what was going to get my ankle better.

Interpreting my Advil-induced relative comfort as a sign that things were improving? Wrong. Constantly holding my ankle elevated to avoid blood rushing to it, and reminding it that it was alive and hurt? Wrong. Keeping it in one position day after day so that I didn’t feel the hot spark of pain when I moved it? Way wrong. Without ankle mobility, you can’t get into a boat, let alone row one. “And if you want ankle mobility back,” the trainer said, “You’ve gotta move your ankle.”

She led me down a corridor and into a windowless room at the back of Dillon Fieldhouse. In the center of the room there was a small tub filled with ice water, a small towel draped over one of the sides. She gestured for me to sit and said, “Alright. Put it in there.”

I remember not being able to breathe for a few seconds after lowering my black and blue leg into the water, stopping just shy of covering my knee. Eventually I took a few loud, deep breaths and tried to relax. Okay, I thought. This wasn’t so terrible.

“Good. Now you’re going to write the alphabet with your ankle. Once forwards, once backwards. Five sets. Let’s get started.”

I remember two things – how excruciating the pain was. And that I could barely perceive any motion as I looked down at my foot, even though it felt like I was making sweeping gestures that should have had water spilling out of the tub. It was one of the most awful experiences of my life. I remember looking up at the trainer after I finished my pitiful backwards Z, ready to apologize – eager to explain that I really was trying, even though it was so hard to see. But as soon as our eyes met she said, “Good. Very good. You’re going to come down here each afternoon at four and we’re going to do this together every day. It will never be quite this bad again.”

The next two months were living proof of that old adage: “a sprain is always worse than a break.” There’s no straightforward fix – no setting a bone and knowing ‘it worked’ when the frayed ends fuse back together. There are days when it feels better and you start thinking – and telling people – that you’re good, you’re back to normal. And then it starts to throb again for no reason, and you don’t want to tell anybody because it was supposed to be healed by now. Every afternoon I slowly made my way down to Dillon to do my ice bath alphabets, watching where I placed my feet on the sidewalk and feeling my lunch churn in my stomach when I thought about how badly it was going to hurt. I sat on the side of the tub, moving my ankle in embarrassingly tiny circles while my teammates pulled big erg workouts on the other side of Anderson Bridge. Every day I was frustrated and didn’t want to go. Every day I went, because it was the only way I was going to get better.

And, by the time the spring season started, I was back in a boat. My right calf was laughably skinny compared to my left. My splits were far from what the recruits were pulling by that point – it was a gap I’d still be working to close senior year. My ankle made loud clicking sounds sometimes when I walked up stairs. But I was back rowing.

I got a card in the mail a couple weeks ago that’s one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever received. It was from my friend, sent for no reason in particular, and in it she told me how resilient she thinks I am. I read it over and over, holding it and walking in circles around my condo. And as I walked and read, I heard my ankle clicking. It still does that sometimes. It feels like it gets stuck in place, and I have to give it a little shake to get it moving properly. It doesn’t hurt at all. But twenty years later it still clicks.

Ever since I got my friend’s note I’ve been thinking about how much this past year has mirrored my second semester of freshman year. Last winter found me in basically the same crumpled position I was in at the bottom of the steps of Weld. I spent a good chunk of this year trying to “keep it elevated” – often at 30,000 feet – on my way to New Zealand and Seattle and Florida. It seemed like that was maybe working – things hurt less when I was away. I slept at my friends’ city places and summer houses. When I got home from Key West I rowed off-hours – in the afternoons between meetings, or after work when there was still enough light in the sky to be out until 7. All of it brought temporary relief. But sooner or later the blood always found a way to rush back in and everything started to throb again. This time I didn’t need a trainer to tell me that what I was doing wasn’t working.

So the last couple months I’ve been making some changes. I sleep at my place, and I’m starting to feel good here again. Really good, sometimes. I row in the mornings at a normal time. My friends shout to me as they pass on the water, and I shout back. That feels better than really good. I’ve been out to the Vineyard twice to spend time with friends, a couple of whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. Those trips led to two of the most meaningful weekends I can ever remember. I came back from each of those trips on a late ferry and got up to row my little boat the following morning. I snort-laughed when my friend Andrea called it PTSD Bootcamp. Because it all finally felt so wonderful.

I think that’s why Resilience can be such a tricky word. “Being resilient” doesn’t feel like what it actually is when you’re doing it in real time. It doesn’t feel like toughness or grit or being elastic enough to spring back into place after getting stretched to your limit.

It feels like a sprain.

It feels like a pit in your stomach every time you start a long walk on a cold afternoon – or a dark morning – to go do the work you need to do to get back to where you used to be. It’s forcing yourself to make tiny movements; movements so small that it’s hard to believe they can feel that excruciating – but they do. It feels like tears and frustration that it’s taking too long, way longer than it should, to get better. It feels like electric shock therapy induced in passing by silhouettes and memories in the places that used to be your very favorite places. But each time, the voltage is a little lower. Each time, moving through those places takes a little less effort. Until someday – so slowly you barely notice it – that thing that used to be a debilitating shockwave has become just a little click. A small reminder, like a card in the mail, that resilience is real. It’s in us. And it’s miraculous.  

Thanks, Yvette. You are living proof.