It’s been a few weeks since the making of the scab.
The tumble itself was not traumatic at all…my left foot just slipped slowly, gently off the slope of the trail. It was my right knee that caught me. No ankle twists or knee tweaks. Not even a back twinge. Just an ugly skin abrasion…which on closer inspection maybe was more than an abrasion?
It was the skin flapping about, the red seeping through the caked-in dirt that tipped me off. Gross. This may not have been a painful fall, but it was going to be a painful cleaning out. Half a mile into an eight mile effort, I quickly decided that it wasn’t worth trying to irrigate it, or even brush most of the dirt off with the sparse supplies I had on me. This flesh wound could wait for my post run bath.
So, I finished my run. Listened to a podcast. Called a friend. Finished the run while still on the phone, so took my conversation to my backyard where I sprayed down my running shoes with the hose, and took my first pass on irrigating the scrape. I managed to clean the basic dirt from the majority of my legs, but the hose didn’t do much for the dirt embedded in the cut. I finished my phone call and went inside to the bath. This was going to need a soak.
But the soak didn’t dislodge that much mud…so the internet. “How to clean an abrasion with mud caked in.” Running water for five minutes. Okay. Still not satisfied. I wasn’t comfortable going after it with a wash cloth...though I did try tweezers. Problem was, there wasn’t any sizable debris. Just mud. It was becoming one with my flesh, blending in with my blood. After an hour’s worth of text messages, phone calls, and a visit from my down-the-street-nurse-neighbor, I’d done what I could. So glad for the recommendation of saline; it did wonders that water didn’t do to clean it out, but my nurse-friend’s other professional recommendation I wasn’t so sure about:
“Are these scissors sterile? I can cut off the flap.”
Hold on . . .
Look how thick it is! It seems like I need this part…won’t it adhere if we just gently put it back into place?
She let me keep it—as long as I kept it clean. I wanted the extra padding and protection, and honestly believed it would grow back into place. I also told her I wanted to avoid a huge divot when the scars formed.
Later when my primary care provider followed up with the process and pictures I’d sent, she corroborated that I may just want to cut that skin flap off. But I disagreed.
For the next few weeks I dressed and redressed this wound on my knee, carefully preserving the extra flap. At one point, the most fleshy part did actually adhere to the wound. But I let the top, paper-like part of the flap go, cleaning scissors and cutting it as closely as I could to the thicker, lightly adhered section.
After my morning bath last Thursday though, as I inspected the now much smaller and on-it’s-way-to-healing scab, I noted that instead of a divot, the preserved skin flap created a bulge. In fact, the top of the bulge, post soaking was all soft and white…like that dead skin that sometimes needs to be rubbed off a callused spot. Ahh.
I decided it was time to say goodbye.
No longer tender and raw, submerged in the bath, I gently used a washcloth to rub away the unneeded skin. And re-dressed my wound. Not nearly the same ordeal the original was, this new tearing of my flesh did produce a little fresh blood, and left the top layer raw again. But obviously healing. Compared to a few weeks previous it looked fantastic in fact!
So did I not need to preserve that skin flap?
Medically, probably not.
But it did serve a purpose.
I wasn’t ready to part with it. It provided a wee bit of cushion on my knee where the hole was otherwise quite deep and raw. It had the hope of growing back when I couldn’t yet imagine that my body could regenerate all the flesh it needed to make my knee whole again. Maybe it even protected the raw wound beneath it from debris or infection when I was out running? I don’t know.
But when I was ready to part with it, I knew.
And my body let it go.
And even crazier, my body didn’t delay the healing process until I got rid of that unneeded piece. It’s been healing underneath that skin flap all along. And now that I’m brave enough to face the world without that little extra padding, I’m all in on trusting my knee and its full restoration. Divot or no.
That was also the day that I took Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life to the bath with me. I read often enough in the bath, but this one has been sitting at the bottom of my library stack for months; I’d been waiting to open it until I felt *ready.* Sigh. Will I ever be, really?
It was a day for ripping off band aids it seems: I dove into the book. I lost the skin flap. I opened up a word doc and just started typing.
I’ve been meaning to/talking about/thinking about starting a blog for a few months now.
Some of that *just percolating* time has been good. It’s given me the awareness that I’ve needed to notice the little nudges that I get every day prodding me in that direction. I’m a creative. I’ve known that. But not every season is a writing (or heck, even a productive) season. Some seasons are for just walking through, one day and one step at a time, taking in what I’m meant to be taking in. Knowing that when it’s time to come out, I’ll know. And it’ll come out.
I can trust my process. Some days are journaling days. Some days I spend waaaay too much time filling the little boxes in my training log with looooong descriptions of my runs for my coach to read and respond to. Other days are for the visual arts, or Instagram reels. I’m always expressing something.
Some days I’m tempted to write those expressions off as caving to distractions—a creative busying herself with small and unimportant projects in avoidance of the “real” work—the “real” calling. To express with a capital E. To *really* Write.
But this day brings that moment when I’m ready to accept all of the parts of the process. Those little creative projects, the many journal pages, and those mile-long-cells in my training log are all parts of the process. My process. The process that I can trust.
Maybe I’ve been avoiding this day as much as I’ve been preparing for it. But that’s okay. It’s all part of the journey.
Welcome to Run With Me.