Where Winter Devours: Part 3

Unlike that piece of glass, which could be removed and resolved, the threat of pain was now everywhere.

Happy Sunday!

Here is the last installment in the series, Where Winter Devours. You can go back and read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already. As always, your likes, comments, and *especially* shares help this project tremendously.

Thanks for reading,

Michelle

P.S. I share updates on my adventures and writing life on Instagram, so I’d love to connect with you over there, too!

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“Are your toes always this dusky, purple sort of color?” my feet were bare on the floor of the doctor’s office. 

What she really meant was, do your toes always look like they belong to a gurney-bound cadaver?

“Um, no?” I replied, suddenly unsure of what my toes were supposed to look like. All I knew was that I was experiencing excruciating pain, at seemingly random moments, and I need some help now.

“Your toe isn’t broken. I think what you have is called Raynaud’s Syndrome,” the doctor said, looking at me with compassionate eyes.

She proceeded to tell me that my body overreacted to the cold. The blood vessels in my toes constricted too much to conserve warmth, leaving the tissue in my toes and fingers without blood supply.

Each episode would render my toes without circulation until I got them warm again, meaning long-term exposure to the cold could result in serious tissue damage.

“How do I treat it?” I asked.

It was February in Colorado, and snow had begun to fall outside.

“Unfortunately, all you can really do is avoid the cold.”

——

When I was ten, I stepped on a shard of glass on the porch while playing “restaurant” with my cousins (I was the server).

When I sat down and pulled my injured foot onto the opposite thigh I was surprised at how fast the slick blood spilled down my leg; how red and shiny it was. Though I plucked the glass out of that warm wound by hand, I still felt as though there was something deeper inside, a piece I’d missed.

For months, I still felt something sharp wedged inside the base of my foot. Every doctor told me it was just scar tissue, that I was simply imagining the feeling of something that was there once, much like the way a soldier imagines a phantom limb. 

The last doctor I went to told me that yes, indeed, there was something inside. Not only that, but I’d have to have it surgically removed. I didn’t have a choice.

Then, on the operating table, the anesthesia wore off too soon and I opened my eyes to watch the surgeon threading a long black string into the sole of my foot at the end of the table. 

“Go back to sleep,” the nurse had said. She placed the plastic mask over my face and sent my mind back into blackness.

Later, the doctor showed me the specimen that had come out of the plastic cup. Inside, I didn’t see any glass. Instead it was a small, fatty-looking blob with lumps like clouds.

“Scar tissue,” he’d said. I only looked at it once (he wouldn’t let me keep it), but I was amazed at how my body had defended itself against a foreign invader. 

Unlike that piece of glass, which could be removed and resolved, my new diagnosis was not caused by a single entity.

With Raynaud’s, the threat of pain was everywhere.

——

The second doctor I went to was a rheumatologist, who held my fingers and toes gently, inspecting each one from knuckle to tip, checking for ulcers, calcium deposits, signs of autoimmune diseases. 

There was nothing else — just the fact that I couldn’t bear the cold.

There is a heart medicine I could take, he said, a vasodilator (meaning it widens the blood vessels to boost blood flow, and therefore increases warmth).

“It can make you short of breath,” he said. “Anytime you exert yourself. Walking up the stairs, exercising, that sort of thing.”

Me: the hiking, running, biking, yoga-loving person. 

I couldn’t imagine not being able to exercise.

Not being able to walk up a mountain trail in the dew-soaked morning. 

Adventure, the outdoors: it was my life.

Instead of taking the medicine, I resolved to just stay out of the cold. I could use Hothands and invest in a new pair of nice warm boots.

I could not, would not, let this affect my quality of life.

——

I soon learned that when the doctors said cold, they did not only mean winter. 

Cold also lurked in the refrigerated aisle at the grocery store. It found me reaching in the freezer for a bag of frozen fruit to make a smoothie. It breathed onto me through the air conditioning in cars and offices. A cold beer from the fridge; a cool summer night; Autumn; apple picking; the frozen insides of a pumpkin while carving Jack-O-Lanterns on Halloween. 

All of these things, once ordinary and harmless, signaled the potential of pain.

There was no going back to the way it used to be.

——

These days, I am still struggling to reckon with all that I’ve lost. 

What I will always miss about winter is the way it made me value the warmth of my life. Whether I was out on the snowmobile or building a snow fort or hurling snowballs across the yard, the invitation to step back inside was always there. 

I loved how my cheeks flushed pink when I stood in the kitchen, how when I peeled off my wet snow pants and hung them over the heater my clothes beneath were dry and fresh. 

Something sweet always awaited me in that warm place: a cup of hot cocoa, golden cookies in the oven, an art project with my mom. 

To be inside in winter was to be encased in warmth, the true beauty of which did not exist without the knowledge of winter’s cold.

To live in this kind of climate would bring me comfort. I’d love to find home in a place with all four seasons, with trees that turn crimson in fall and mountains that sparkle with snow in winter and a bright, rainy spring that blends into a summer that burns with emerald and blue. 

Yet the way I want to live is at odds with what my body can endure.

I know now that, when it comes to the things we cannot change, joy lies within the ability to relinquish our dreams of what could be and simply accept what has already become.