MRI machines make a horrible racket, like a jackhammer. I found the racket soothing. It was loud, but the cadence was at perfectly spaced intervals to lull me to sleep. (I also fall asleep in the dentist’s chair. Is that weird?)
The fall that put me in that MRI machine occurred six weeks earlier during my first ski day of 2019 on January 5. Snowbird wasn’t in great shape that day. The holiday crowds had scraped snow off the high-traffic areas, and the snow conditions were about as bad as it gets in the Wasatch—slick, crusty, and hard-packed.
I hadn’t been skiing in a while because we had family visiting for the Christmas holiday. A big storm was expected to arrive on Sunday, so I went skiing on Saturday as a warm-up.
On these types of warm-up days when I sacrifice fun to work on my technique, I inevitably end up skiing terribly. I was fighting against everything that day. I was trying to make perfect turns on imperfect snow. My skis chattered uncontrollably as I tried to control my speed by skiing shorter turns than my skis would allow. I don’t often fall skiing, but I had already fallen once that day on the flats above Chip’s Face when I caught an edge.
A couple of runs later, I let my skis run when I reached the flats after skiing Lowest Willows. I was making a left turn when my left leg seemed to get caught on something—I think either my ski boot buckle or my ski binding’s brake caught on my right pant leg. I tried to free it so I could start making a right turn to avoid the trees I was headed toward at the edge of trail. My effort to free it threw me out of balance, like when you miss a step on a staircase.
I’ll never know for sure exactly what happened over the next two seconds, but here’s what I surmise: My left ski’s edge caught the snow and detached from my left boot. My right ski kept turning while my momentum twisted my knee to the inside and pushed it so far forward in an instant that it nearly tapped the front of my ski. Despite all that force, my right binding did not release my boot. My left boot dragged in the snow, which slammed the left side of my body down to the snow, and I stopped. I rolled over onto my back and then onto my side.
My left ski was 20 yards uphill. My right ski was still attached to my boot. A skier above me stopped to bring my left ski down to me.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Something got caught,” I said to the kid. “That wasn’t good. Thank you.”
Then the pain started setting in. “Oh, no,” I said to no one.
“What got caught? That wasn’t good. My knee is messed up.”
I stood up with my right ski still attached. “Oh, man. This is not good. Ow!”
“My knee’s messed up. What happened?”
I put my left ski back on and skied the last few hundred yards down to Snowbird Center’s Plaza Deck. Something was not right with my knee. I was sure I had torn my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).
“I’ve got to go to the clinic,” I said to myself as I skied onto the skier bridge to the plaza deck.
I limped to the Snowbird medical clinic after stowing my stuff in my locker. Pulling my boot off took two people. It was excruciatingly painful. My calf swelled after they removed my boot. An X-ray showed no broken bones. The doctors at the Snowbird clinic diagnosed a grade 2 partially torn gastrocnemius (calf muscle), but no ACL tear. I would be back on skis in four to six weeks, they said. They tried to show me the hematoma in my calf with an ultrasound machine, but after they applied the gel and turned on the machine, no one knew how to work it correctly, so I never got to see the hematoma.
The staff at the medical clinic gave me a walking boot, a CD with the X-ray images, and they drove me to my car in the parking lot. I gingerly swapped my medical boot for my hiking boot for the drive home.
By the time I arrived at home, my leg was a disaster. It could barely support my weight. I almost collapsed after my first step onto my right leg. I laughed. My knee felt mangled. My calf had no strength. I walked as if someone had severed my Achilles tendon. I limped badly up to my third-floor apartment. I dropped my stuff and parked myself on the couch with my leg elevated to, hopefully, avoid developing yet another blood clot. I slept there at night, too.
A couple of days later, I visited my doctor. He focused on my calf after the knee tests he performed also revealed no severe damage. But my knee still hurt the most. It felt raw, twisted, and unable to support my weight. He offered no advice, beyond bromides and anecdotes.
“Should I stay off it?” I asked.
“Motion is lotion,” he said. “I’ve seen athletes with torn calves that leave a big hole where the tear occurred. Repairing a torn muscle is like trying to fix a torn wet napkin.”
Wonderful.
“Should I do physical therapy?”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
Why didn’t he suggest it?
He wrote a prescription for the physical therapy place next door to the doctor’s office.
After about six weeks of physical therapy, my knee still hadn’t improved. Neither had my calf. I figured I had torn my meniscus. My doctor wasn’t sure, but when his knee tests produced pain, he ordered an MRI based on that possibility. To illustrate what might’ve happened, he pushed his fist, which represented my medial femoral condyle (the end of my femur), into the thin layer of wax paper covering the examination table, and then he twisted it. The paper (my meniscus) ripped when he twisted his fist.
The MRI revealed possible small meniscus tears and a sprained or partially torn ACL. The MRI also revealed a nondisplaced tibial plateau fracture, which was at the top of the larger of the two lower leg bones. I felt vindicated by the MRI results. But I was also concerned that the physical therapy I had done to that point had set me back in my recovery from those injuries. Should I have been bearing weight on a broken tibia?
When things still didn’t improve after another six weeks (I was still walking with a pronounced limp), I went for a second opinion. The second doctor didn’t seem concerned. I took some solace from his lack of concern and decided it was time to stop worrying and move forward.
The most unsettling development after over three months of physical therapy was the degree to which my balky knee had prevented me from rehabbing my calf properly. My fall had produced no catastrophic damage, but the cumulative damage of multiple injuries doomed my recovery timetable. My knee felt unstable. The muscles in my right leg became weak from disuse. A lot of the strength I had built up over two years of running and hiking vanished from my right leg after three months of hobbling. I also gained about 15 pounds. I wasn’t as vigilant about my diet as I needed to be, and I didn’t pursue my boring home exercises as doggedly as I should have. My recovery languished.
By late April, the knee pain subsided enough that I started walking more normally. My right calf still felt tight and weak, and my right quadriceps looked atrophied, but I didn’t feel that it was in imminent danger of reinjury if I started pushing it a little bit. I tried some hiking. On my first hike, I felt like one misstep might cause my leg to fall apart at my knee, but it also felt good to be back to doing something besides the physical therapy exercises. I also jogged some, which felt odd because my right leg felt half as strong as my left. But I pressed on.
I missed the rest of the ski season after my injury, but my slow progress gives me hope for next season.