Biting the Dust on Dog Water

Are you ready, hey, are you ready for this?

Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?

Out of the doorway the bullets rip

To the sound of the beat

Another one bites the dust

Another one bites the dust

It's fairly ironic that this would come on as I made my maiden voyage on the stepper today after being sidelined for a week.  As the song played I relived the reality of last Tuesday night.  Here I was fresh off my latest insane work jag, and crazy speed training schedule.  It was late and I was spinning around doing odds and ends in the house before finally calling it quits and attempted a simple trip from the kitchen across the tile headed to the bedroom.  I had missed the water that existed outside of the dog's dish, I remember the sensation of the slip, the slow motion loss of balance, the flash as my face hit the pantry door and the sickening sound of my left knee hitting the tile.  I would get up, pace around, try to inspect my lip in the bathroom mirror as I knew it was cut.  Shit.  Light burned out.  I would then walk around the dining room assuring myself my knee was ok and once again, try to cross the same damn floor, only slower this time to my own bathroom within the bedroom.  It was then I noticed it.  There was blood on the floor.  There was a lot of blood on the floor.  I felt my lip, cut but not bleeding, knee already turning purple, also not bleeding.  Hmmmm.... I slowly became aware, my left index finger hurt.  I looked at it and found it was bleeding, and surely the nailbed doesn't normally look like that.  I would wrap it up just as the 14 year old would come down and trace the trail of blood to me.  I assured him I was fine, just a little cut, no biggie.

When I got up in the morning it was clear it may be a bit worse than I thought.  A band aid was not going to do it.  It had bled all night until I found myself in the midst of training two people at work that morning, asking a colleague to look at it.  By the time he was done, I found myself having a small procedure I won't get into, as it made me a little queasy, and some xrays.  The reality was I had an open fracture courtesy of my pantry door.  I had a purple lip too but thanks to the magic of COVID, I am in a mask all the time and nobody could see it.  Honestly?  I wasn't sure if I should be sickened by all of it or downright pissed that I can manage to run 14 Spartans with no injury, but walking across the kitchen was clearly a problem.  Yep, I bit the dust on dog water.

Are you happy, are you satisfied?

How long can you stand the heat?

I guess you could say in the days that followed I would have a little PTSD, as I now refuse to walk on that floor barefoot and every now and then my mind wanders to the flash of my face hitting the door. Every day I find other splatters of blood in places I had missed with the initial clean up.  Today?  Said light switch in the bathroom where the bulbs had been burned out now replaced and illuminating my blood perfectly.  I further had cause to hit the pause button on my training schedule.  I was not going to run and risk elevating my heart rate as my finger already had it's own throbbing heart beat.  I put in 60 hours of work in the week that followed my tumble seeing crazy numbers of COVID patients which was completely annoying as my finger did not fit in a glove easily.  When I finally took a day off, I was completely overwhelmed with the things to do at home and was having anxiety over paused race training.

So I did what I always do, checked in with the accountability partner, and when I say check in, I mean whine about my finger and how it is getting in the way of everything.  I committed to walk that day to see how it went.  It was clunky with the bulky splint on my finger but I even managed a light jog.  Following that was a successful trip to the hand surgeon, and other household errands.  Then it happened  I got a difficult challenge.  As I was busy complaining about the million things that had piled up on me when I was busy with work, I was challenged to a night off.  No work, no bills, no blog, hence this is days late, just breathe.  Oh ok.  A night off?  I wasn't sure I could do it.  I had charts from my work days, I had bills to pay, taxes to prepare, a blog to write, business related things to do, get my kid ready for his summer school calls the next day, laundry......and, and, and.....  a night off?  Damn accountability partner was killing me, now I was just going to be further behind, but I was doing it.

I would find myself on my back patio talking to a friend, admiring my flowers, and enjoying the cool breeze with an adult beverage.  Yes.  I felt guilty.  Yes.  I had so many things undone, but to take the time to be present, I found I suddenly could breathe.  I would later go to bed and find myself getting a full night's rest that night which is definitely a rarity for this card carrying insomniac.  In the day that followed, yesterday, I would break company records in actual number of patient's seen, and not even miss a beat.

Today, my finger was settling down and my lip is nearly healed so I was back at it.  Three miles on the stepper at a sub 8 minute pace, renewed from the simple act of taking the night off.  It makes me wonder how many times its going to take for me to learn the lesson.  I tend to live life at 100 mph.  I am driven to be the best I can be at all times at home and at work often pushing so hard I forget there are cool breezes, good friends, pretty flowers and this crazy renewal thing called sleep.  I suppose I should be thankful for biting the dust on dog water because it helped me to see that sometimes pushing hard is simply too hard and if I am not willing to slow down, surely the universe will find a way.

As for tonight?  I think I'll go sit on my patio again.  I will take a second night off in the same week, crazy, I know.  I'm pretty sure out there I will begin to see that sometimes biting the dust on dog water clears the way to see that the best is yet to come.