Somewhat Fine
What happens when everything falls apart, and somehow keeps going.
One month ago today, I was being rolled into an operating room.
Bright lights. Freezing cold. A full team of people moving with quiet urgency like this was all normal.
The anesthesia was starting to kick in, and everything felt slightly out of focus. Like I was there, but not fully there.
I remember thinking: this feels excessive.
It wasn’t.
This is what they were about to do.
The week leading up to that moment didn’t feel like a medical emergency.
It felt like normal life.
My husband broke his thumb.
His dominant hand. He got it casted. Life adjusted. We managed.
The following Monday, I was in my hockey game.
I fell.
I’ve got the video of the fall. I’ve watched it at least 100 times trying to figure out exactly what happened.
Here’s what I know.
I was in front of the net.
My teammate was behind it.
I was trying to get open.
Channeling Hillary Knight in the US-Canada gold medal game, waiting for my teammate to be Laila Edwards so I could tip it in.
He was not Laila Edwards.
And I was definitely not Hillary Knight.
And in a split second, I found myself on the ice.
Which for me, is not unusual. But this one felt different. When I hit the ice my first thought was: HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.
My second thought was to get up.
I couldn’t.
I looked over at the goalie a few feet away from me. The game was still going. That’s how much of a non-incident it appeared to be.
She looked back at me with massive eyes and said “wait, are you hurt?”
I begrudgingly said yes.
She started jumping up and down trying to get the attention of the refs.
After what seemed like way too long, the game finally stopped.
A few players skated over.
With some help, I made it to the bench.
I tried not to make it a big deal.
I extended my leg.
Tried to sit up properly.
Both felt impossible.
Eventually with help from my teammates and the ref, I made it to the locker room.
They handed me a bag of ice.
I wanted to get the hell out of there.
I got all my pads off by myself.
Packed my bag.
Carried it to my car — all 20 pounds of it, on my other hip.
And drove myself home.
Here’s the thing about me: I have a very high pain tolerance.
I found this out the hard way with my first child.
I was in the hospital having contractions and had absolutely no idea. I thought she was just moving around.
So I got home and showered.
Iced it.
Took some Tylenol.
Slept on it.
The next morning I seriously considered going to the gym and getting in the cold plunge.
To be fair, I had a reason.
The last time my body felt wrecked after running a half marathon, I cold plunged, and felt golden the next day.
So when my hip was screaming at me after the fall, my brain went straight to its most recent successful solution.
It didn’t occur to me that this particular problem wasn’t going to (and couldn’t) be solved by the magical cold plunge.
That’s not just high pain tolerance.
That’s a habit.
One I’ve been building for years without realizing it.
Instead, I drove myself to orthopedic urgent care. The same place my husband had been seen just days before.
I got x-rays and was told to wait.
A few minutes later, the doctor walked in with a very sure look on his face.
He asked a few questions and then said, “oh yeah, this is broken.”
And then: “you’re going to need surgery immediately.”
It was a non-displaced femoral neck fracture.
Meaning: broken, but not obvious.
Subtle enough that I tried to push through it.
Serious enough that they admitted me to the hospital hours later.
I laughed.
Out loud.
I genuinely thought he was messing with me.
He wasn’t.
He told me the surgeon would be in shortly to talk me through next steps and walked out of the room.
As soon as I was sure the door was closed, I lost it.
A full, heavy cry.
The kind that hits all at once.
A few hours later, I was in my room.
The next morning, I had surgery on my hip.
So. Two (non-professional) hockey players. One household.
His dominant hand in a cast, my hip very much broken.
Two young kids who still need dinner made, homework done, rides to/from practices and games, getting to/from school, someone to show up.
That was just the beginning.
I got home from the hospital late Thursday night.
On Sunday, my husband took my daughter to urgent care.
Ear infection.
And the flu.
The next day (Monday), I woke up unable to breathe.
Back to the ER.
The flu had found me too.
And it was extra aggressive, because my body was already exhausted from the previous six days.
The following Monday, I woke up with excruciating ear pain.
Urgent care again.
My own ear infection.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, my father-in-law had a heart attack.
The following week, my mother-in-law had a stroke.
We were hundreds of miles away, unable to do anything about it.
I’m not making this up.
No one talks about this part.
When you’re holding everything together, and then you physically can’t hold anything, the world does not pause.
Your kids still need breakfast.
Your dog still needs care.
The calendar does not care that you are lying in a hospital bed the day after surgery wondering how any of this is going to work.
Speaking of my dog.
If you read my last piece, you know who he is.
The one who’s been there for everything.
The one who has Degenerative Myelopathy and can no longer walk on his own.
The one I have been carrying — literally carrying — from room to room.
And then I couldn’t do it anymore.
Because I couldn’t carry myself.
There’s something almost poetic about that in the worst possible way.
Two of us in the same house.
Unable to move the way we used to.
But needing help we didn’t know how to ask for.
I’ve been thinking about the cold plunge alot.
About the fact that my instinct (even with a broken hip) was to push through.
To shake it off.
To not make it a thing.
That’s not just high pain tolerance.
That’s a habit.
You just keep going.
You get off the ice.
You carry the bag.
You drive yourself home.
You don’t stop until someone tells you — definitively, in a clinical setting — that you actually can’t.
And even then, you laugh.
Because you genuinely can’t believe it.
And then they leave the room..
and you fall apart.
I’ve written about loneliness before.
About moving to Minnesota and leaving my community behind in Texas.
About the strange specific isolation of being sandwiched between young kids and an aging parent.
And then this happened.
And I found out something I didn’t expect.
Minnesota showed up.
A meal train materialized.
Dinners showed up on our porch.
Offers to grab groceries.
People stepping in for the dog.
People showing up in ways I hadn’t asked for and didn’t need to ask for.
And it wasn’t just Minnesota.
My LinkedIn community showed up too.
People I have never met in person.
People who know me from a screen and a job title and whatever version of myself I’ve put out into the world professionally.
They reached out.
They checked in.
They cared.
I didn’t see that coming.
I’ve spent the last few years quietly grieving that chapter of my life.
The career I walked away from.
The professional identity I lost.
The network that felt like it belonged to a version of me that no longer exists.
And those same people, the ones connected to all of that, showed up for the human underneath it.
Not the résumé. Not the title.
Me.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
In my last piece, I talked about not having a community.
About feeling alone on an island. About how the specific kind of loneliness I carry is hard to explain and harder to find people who understand.
And I still believe all of that.
But I also think that sometimes community doesn’t look like what you imagine it will.
Sometimes it’s not a standing dinner or a group text or people you see every week.
Sometimes it’s meals on your porch during the one of the most challenging months.
Sometimes it’s overwhelming kindness from someone you’ve never stood in the same room with.
Sometimes it finds you when things fall apart.
That has to count for something.
I’m still recovering.
The staples are out. I’m walking again.
My husband got his cast off.
We’re starting to sleep more.
We’ve watched both of his parents navigate serious health issues from hundreds of miles away, unable to do anything about it.
I don’t have a lesson here.
I’m not going to tell you everything happens for a reason.
I don’t really believe that, and it would be condescending to pretend I do.
What I will say is this:
We are not fine.
But we are somewhat fine.
And sometimes the people who show up for you — even ones you’ve never stood in the same room with — remind you that you are more rooted than you realized.
Even when you’re flat on your back.
Even when your hip is broken.
Even when your dog can’t walk and you’ve had the flu twice in four weeks and nothing, not a single thing, has gone the way it was supposed to.
You are more rooted than you realized.
That’s what I’m holding onto right now.
It’s not much. But it’s something.
Thanks for reading Somewhat Fine. If this resonated, subscribe for free. And if you’re going through your own version of this, I’d love to hear from you.