About three months ago, I hurt my right knee very badly while I was running: I tripped and fell on my knee. I won’t share details on this forum of how that happened, but if you’re curious, I’ll be happy to tell you in person or if you send me a direct message. Thankfully, nothing is broken, nothing is torn, and there is no nerve damage. All I have is a lot of swelling and a subcutaneous hematoma (bruise under the skin) that has been preventing the knee from fully bending. The last assessment I got from a doctor is that my knee is only about 35% incapacitated now, which I interpret as 65% healed, so I am still recovering. I can walk, I can drive, and I can stand for longer periods of time without feeling the need to lean on something, but there are still little things I can’t do yet. For the time being, I can’t kneel, fully cross my right leg, get myself up from the floor without hoisting myself up on something like a couch, get out of my car one leg at a time, or walk down a flight of stairs with only one foot at a time on a step (without almost falling again, unless I’ve just finished a workout). When I would play the piano, I had to play the sustain pedal with my left foot until about a few weeks ago, when I was finally able to play it normally with my right foot again.
A few days after my injury happened, I couldn’t walk without excruciating pain, so I bought a nice, inexpensive cane on Facebook marketplace. I only needed the cane for about a week and a half, but I named it Citizen Cane, and MeepMeep got used to it. At one point, I think she tried to play with it, because one day after I leaned it against the couch and went to another room, I heard a rustling and returned to my living room with Citizen Cane on the floor. See MeepMeep’s halo?
What I would really like to do is show you some rather graphic photos of my injury that I haven’t shared publicly yet, but if that kind of thing makes you queasy or otherwise uncomfortable, I thought I’d show you the cute cat photo first so the nasty-looking photos wouldn’t show up on the thumbnail on your feed.
Shortly after the injury, God started reminding me that this healing journey isn’t just about my knee. I learned that what happened after my knee-injury fall is eerily similar to the scandal that happened with the founder of my church (I shared my thoughts about that here) and also similar to the continued healing of my heart. So, in this post, I will share seven things I learned after my fall. In each section, I will describe my knee injury and its aftermath, and then I will share a “Scandal similarity” and a “Heart similarity.” Not every section will discuss each type of “similarity,” but I thank you in advance for reading what I’ve been thinking about during this monthslong process.
1. One injury in a small part of the body could affect the entire body. This is the section where I’ll share three really gross photos; please feel free to scroll fast or skip to the next section if you need to. When I fell on my knee, I immediately felt a swelling above it. I thought I was OK, but I realized that I would feel it the next day. Ironically, I didn’t really feel much of anything, because my knee swelled up really big and felt numb. No real pain except for a scab from the carpet that I fell on.
However, a wound can prevent you from functioning properly. Just one little wound that takes up only a few square inches of my body immediately prevented me from bending my knee all the way, and then later I noticed bruising all over my knee, my leg, and even down into my foot. The numbness only lasted about a week, and the swelling mostly went down on the outside. But the bruising pressed down on my shin bone in a way that made me feel huge pain every time I would take a step on my right foot. I couldn’t stand the pain any more, so I bought Citizen Cane and made an appointment with my medical provider. Just one little fall, and I now have to adjust my entire life around the healing process.
Scandal similarity: The man who founded and pastored my church fell pretty hard morally and is now disgraced. All he did was give in to temptation a few times (sexually abuse an underage girl) a little more than forty years ago, and now that girl is a traumatized woman who wanted him to pay for what he did to her. There were multiple lawsuits involved during the process. This whole thing also involved the founding pastor leaving the church, us getting a new pastor who moved his entire family from another state to be with us, people leaving our church and decreasing our membership, and some of our church staff getting laid off due to decreased giving. Just hearing the gory details about the scandal re-traumatized those of us who were hurt in similar manners, and I also heard that some folks left the faith altogether. All from one little fall.
Heart similarity: All I did was get my feelings hurt a few times, or maybe thousands of times during my childhood, or maybe into my adulthood as well, due to people’s massively imperfect decisions, and I’ve been left with years of trying to get my heart healed. Sometimes just one little disappointment will happen, or maybe someone will say the wrong thing, and my entire afternoon will be ruined because of the pain that it will stir up inside.
2. Something or someone may look OK on the outside, but serious pain or unhealthiness could be lurking underneath.
When I first started to feel the pain of my injury, I walked with a limp, but I tried to not let my limp show. I tried to play it cool, so I walked very slowly so as to disguise the limp. It didn’t take long for people to see the limp, anyway, so, hiding my injury didn’t do much good.
My shin didn’t look too horrible on the outside, compared to the awful bruising and massive pain that I felt for a week and a half every time I took a step, creating the need for Citizen Cane. By that point, I couldn’t hide the pain anymore. My coworkers memorized my cane-walking gait during that time: CLACK. CLACK. CLACK. Yep, they knew Tirzah was on her way toward them. I tried to make light of the situation; it never hurt to walk backwards, so I would CLACK-CLACK-CLACK my way to my desk and then moonwalk the rest of the way into my chair. I mean, you gotta have some fun with a horrible situation, right?
It was definitely horrible. My knee was so stiff and unbendable for a while that I didn’t need a brace; it had already immobilized itself. I had to adjust my car seat so I could drive with my knee straightened. Since my right foot couldn’t touch the ground for a while whenever I would sit down, I brought a small stepstool with me to work so I could prop my right foot up at my desk. All because of some bruise conglomeration.
But all of that was nothing compared to how awful my knee felt anytime anything would come in contact with it. It’s much better now. But those first few weeks, I couldn’t wear a knee brace or tightly bandage the wound without screaming in excruciating pain. Just accidentally brushing against the knee was extremely painful. In the medical community, they ask you what your pain is on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most painful thing you’ve ever felt in your life. I learned that a pain level of 10 involves me cussing, usually involuntarily. One time during a quiet time, I accidentally brushed my knee against my piano keyboard stand, and I shouted a phrase that I’m not proud of. Yes, I basically took the Lord’s name in vain during a quiet time.
Scandal similarity: I heard that there was a weird spiritual thing at my church before the scandal erupted and God started to clean house. On a practical level, the church conducted an investigation and removed people from leadership and/or staff who had either known about the founder-pastor’s past actions and covered it up on purpose, or who had known but innocently didn’t do anything about it. I heard that not too long after that, that weird spiritual thing was gone. On a spiritual level, this thing was named the spirit of Achan, the man in Judges chapter 7 who took something precious that didn’t belong to him, and then he covered it up. The vast majority of us church members (if not all of us) had no idea that something fishy had gone on in our founder-pastor’s life or that it had been covered up. But deep within the organization, the few who knew about it enabled the unhealthiness. On the outside we looked fine, but on the inside something was wrong. Thankfully it’s much healthier now.
Heart similarity: If you’ve read this blog through the years, you know that there are some sections of my heart that can hurt excruciatingly bad when pressed. For example, I [insert involuntary cuss word here] hate Valentine’s Day. With a flaming hot passion. Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (ESV), which means that hoping multiple times for a guy to return my feelings for him, and that hope not coming true, has made my heart very sick. Like, walking pneumonia sick. You’ve probably read my blogged complaints about this or even my resolving to stay single the rest of my life. Is it a way to cope with the excruciating pain? Maybe. Is it God wanting me to just be happy with Him, period? Maybe. We’ll see. For now, I do my best to keep it together on the outside even though sometimes I fall apart on the inside. Or sometimes I’m probably numb as my heart’s way of protecting me from feeling the extreme pain—just like how my knee swelled up right away. But if the pain is brushed up against in the wrong way, my entire afternoon is ruined. I’ve left parties early or avoided certain people altogether who have smacked that extra painful spot in my heart. I still don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day (honestly, it’s scarier than Halloween), but it’s good for me to be aware of how it affects that unhealed part of me.
3. Yes, bitterness is a root, but it can also act like a very deep, unpredictable fountain of yuckiness.
I’ve learned that, for lack of a better phrase, a knee injury is like a gift that keeps on giving. The aftereffects of the wound just keep coming at random times, and they’re gross. I’ve Googled a ton about this to make sense of what’s going on. With an injury of this nature, apparently the body sends various fluids to the knee to help with the healing process; I don’t understand why God designed the body this way, but it is a natural process. The injury swells up with those fluids, but those fluids need a way to escape the body after a while. With a knee injury, the fluids flow down through the calf (which probably contributed to my excruciating shin pain) and down into the ankle and foot. I noticed this happening to me around a week and a half after the initial injury.
So, if I’m walking a lot of steps or working out, the fluid from my knee will drain down and end up in my ankle. For a short while, my foot was swollen, too, like a fat potato with little stub-toes protruding from it. My knee hurts if I’m not active, but if I walk around too much, my ankle will hurt. It’s a weird, frustrating cycle. The best ways I’ve found to move the fluid out of my system are to walk, sit with my foot elevated, or lie down and sleep. I usually wake up with reduced swelling. (Aspirin or ibuprofen can help, too.) The idea is to get that heart pumping so that the fluid can move out of that place where it’s been stuck. I keep waiting for this icky process to end, and sometimes it’s not that bad, but it hasn’t completely ended yet.
Scandal similarity: Just when you thought your church’s name was out of the news for good, something happens to thrust it back into the negative spotlight all over again. It seems like all our founder-pastor needs to do is sneeze wrong, and suddenly there’s another lawsuit or just another news story that rehashes the same events again. Apparently, serving jail time didn’t end this whole horrible ordeal. But at least ever since we got a new pastor, we stopped getting updates from the pulpit. I like how the new pastor is able to let us live our life as a church without ignoring the ongoing mess from our founder-pastor’s past. I like this stage of our healing.
Heart similarity: Hebrews 12:15 mentions a “root of bitterness” (ESV), which I think means that if bitterness takes root in your heart, it can grow into an awful tree that is hard to uproot later. I remember our founder-pastor telling us once that bitterness is like poison; if you detect it, spit it out before it kills you. Yes, but I wonder if the process is that easy. I have found it to be more like the fluid in my knee injury. Sometimes you need to reroute the bitterness away from your heart and into the arms of the One who can get rid of it for you. And it might not always be a one-time thing. It might be a continual offering of my yuckiness to God.
In the season leading up to my knee injury, I caught myself thinking very bitter thoughts like Men are stupid, or Nobody wants to be my friend. These judgments are terrible, kind of immature, and unpredictable. Then my injury happened, and God encouraged me to lean on Him (before I purchased Citizen Cane or sought medical attention). Then I learned about the fluid thing, and I keep trying to remind myself to offer up the bitterness in my heart like the fluid in my knee to Him: This really hurts, but I lean on You.
4. A severe wound can take an extremely long time to heal.
During these months of healing, I’ve been doing physical therapy. I’ve been experiencing things I haven’t experienced before, like myofascial massage on my knee and ankle. For a few days, I also got some shock treatment on my knee to electrically stimulate the injury under the skin. THAT was an interesting experience! Kind of felt like a cat scratching me.
I’m happy to be experiencing new things, but of course I wish it were under better circumstances, and I’m ready for this entire ordeal to just be over. I didn’t think I would still be icing my knee twice a day, but I do; on the weekend when I don’t walk as much, sometimes I ice it even more. I’ve heard of some knee injuries taking forever to heal, IF they heal at all, and I’m really praying and hoping that my knee will be completely healed and restored sooner than later. I’ve been hoping that my knee will be not just good as new but better than new when all this is over.
I’ve even found myself needing to adjust my stride. On days when the fluid makes my ankle swell, I’ve seen my foot lean over to its right side. Honestly, it was leaning that way even before the injury, but I’m not completely sure why. So, I’ve been working on adjusting how I step so that my foot won’t develop any bad habits during this season.
Heart similarity: In my natural tendency to protect my heart during the healing process, I could unintentionally pick up some bad habits. I could become bitter, or I could comfort myself with really unhealthy thoughts like I’m too much of a woman for any men I know or I’m better than all these people. Come on. On a spiritual level that way of thinking isn’t Christ-like, and on a practical level those kinds of thoughts aren’t helping anybody. And they’re certainly not removing any pain. But I’ll need some time to improve the gait of my heart. I want to walk in the Spirit (Galatians 5:16; Romans 8:4–6), and I want to walk in a way that won’t hurt me or the people around me.
And I gotta say, it really bothers me more than ever when people reduce the healing process to a formula: your heart hurts because of one wound that you received when you were about five years old, so all you need to do is discover what lie you believed when that event happened, renounce the lie, and voilà . Just add prayer, instant healing. Well, I’m sorry, but not all of my wounds are like that. Some wounds are traumas that occur from not just one event but from years of living and functioning in abusive environments. Developing inferior ways of thinking about yourself, relearning how to think about yourself, and building a healthy confidence about yourself and the way God made you, can take YEARS, if not your entire lifetime.
5. Sometimes a wound can be so complicated that it can either make people think it’s something it isn’t, or it can just stump people altogether.
Speaking of situations that aren’t textbook examples, I think my injury stumped some people in the medical or rehabilitative chiropractic community. I first got medical attention around the time when I snapped those photos I shared above. A nurse practitioner took one look at my bruised-up leg and said OMG, and she said that I was exhibiting signs of a torn ligament. She said that I was a “complicated patient,” due to the nature of my injury, and gave me the impression that treating it was beyond her expertise. She prescribed pain medication and recommended that I purchase a knee immobilizer. Well, the pain med didn’t work (I went back to aspirin and ibuprofen after a short while), and the knee brace caused profanity-level pain. Later, when I asked the injury-treatment doctor if that bruise under the skin was a bone bruise or a muscle bruise, he said, “Yeah.” At least he and his physical therapy team have acknowledged that some wounds are just complicated.
I also saw another physical therapist, once, who thought my wound was way worse than it was. While she was evaluating my injury, she said that my meniscus may have been harmed. Then she squeezed the back of my leg, and I said, “Ouch.” Then she said I probably had a blood clot and that I needed to go to the ER. Good grief. So, I went to the ER and had another adventure there. There was such a big crowd that day, so they put me in a bed in a hallway since they were out of rooms. That was an adventure in and of itself, especially as I shared the hallway with a woman who vomited on herself, and all of us could hear a man in nearby room screaming incessantly at the top of his lungs. That also happened to be the first day in I think a couple of decades I had worn shorts in public, so my legs were cold, but hospital staff finally brought me a warm blanket. So, not the most comfortable situation. But after they finally wheeled me into the ultrasound area and got the results, they said I didn’t have a blood clot—just fluids. Shucks, I could have told them that. I also found out from this exam that I had the subcutaneous hematoma, which frankly has overstayed its welcome in my body as I keep waiting for it to resorb completely.
Not that long ago, I also had an MRI, which was also its own adventure. I learned that if I try to function without lotion, hair gel, deodorant, or makeup, all at once, even with a shower, I’ll hardly be able to stand myself. I also learned that the reason why they give you earplugs or earbuds with music during the exam is to block out the horror-movie-esque blasting sound effects. Thankfully, the results showed no torn ligaments, tendons, or meniscus. Or, if I did have any of that at any point, either God healed it or it healed itself by the time they performed that exam. Either way, I’ll take it!
I’ve learned that a broken bone or a torn ligament could take a much shorter time to heal than soft tissue damage, which is what I have. This is terrible news, but I am very glad to have some knowledge of what I’m dealing with.
Hosea 4:6s says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (ESV). A friend reminded me of this verse when she prayed for me at church the Sunday when I went to the altar with Citizen Cane to receive prayer. After avoiding doctor’s offices for a few days, I was finally starting to get some medical attention, and getting answers was helping. Proverbs 11:14b says that “in the multitude of counselors, there is safety” (NKJV). That phrase has been resounding through my soul for the past three months. As I noted above, I got various answers about my injury from various places—or a “multitude” of places, if you will. I’ve gotten some great advice from the physical therapists that I’ve seen, such as not keeping my right foot propped up for too long, or my knee will get stiff. I saw improvement almost immediately after I took that advice and stopped using my stepstool.
More encouraging advice I’ve gotten from people is “Healing is never linear.” In other words, instead of a neat, clean little increase in healing every day, I might see an increase, and then one day there will be pain or extra swelling or fluid. Or, I might go days without limping, and then suddenly, like last night, I’ll catch myself walking funny again. Come on, knee. You’re a knee. You were designed to bend. Yes, I talk to my injury, too.
God has given me some perfect advice, too. He encouraged me recently to worship Him with my injury. That was when I decided to try playing the piano with my right foot on the sustain pedal instead of the left. Took a couple of tries before that got comfortable again. Also, during worship services, I’ve been bending my knee upwards to God, so I’ll end up doing a gentle marching-in-place while I’m praising Him. I think that has helped with the healing process, too.
Heart similarity: In my decades of pursuing the healing of my heart and the restoration of my soul, I have gotten some bad advice from people who I think were just stumped with the wounds of my heart. Hey, just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean God can’t heal it. I’ve had people tell me it would help to go through a Bible study (the study itself didn’t really help), join a singles group (pffffft), or not do something that I really thought God wanted me to do (huge red flag). One time, after I followed God’s advice and left an abusive environment, a close friend told me to go back, and a professional psychotherapist told me that a demon (rather than God) told me to leave. For crying out loud! Just because you don’t understand my wounds or the requirements of my healing process doesn’t mean that you have to stuff me into your box. Just humbly offer whatever advice you have, help me because you care about me, and trust you are only one of many people whom God has placed in my path during this crazy journey.
6. Psalm 84: Healing can be a journey where you can meet some awesome new people.
I’ve thought about Psalm 84 quite a bit during this whole crazy thing. Verse 11a says, “No good thing will [God] withhold / From those who walk uprightly” (NKJV). Maybe one reason why all my dreams haven’t come true yet is because some of them weren’t/aren’t “good things.” Verses 5 and 6 say that you’re blessed when your “heart is set on pilgrimage” and that when you pass through your valley, you “make it a spring” (NKJV). In other words, when you journey through a hard place, you can lean on God and find some joy there. You could even have fun and encounter some cool people along the way.
Not to mention, your pain helps you understand other people’s pain a little better. I may have hinted at this earlier but, if you want to get people’s attention, walk with a cane. You’ll get way more sympathy than you ever hoped for. People will want to hear your story of how you got injured, they will tell you stories of their similar injuries, and you’ll be encouraged to see that they’re walking just fine now.
One of my physical therapists told me once that “an injury can make you think you can’t do something.” As I’ve been doing new exercises at the rehabilitative chiropractor place, I’ve found my knee being able to do things that hasn’t been able to do in a long time. They sat me on an exercise bike awhile back, but my knee wasn’t able to turn the pedal. Then they sat me there again this week, and suddenly my knee can actually pedal on that machine. Injuries can be liars, can’t they? Plus, it helps to be around encouraging people who won’t bring you down.
This whole thing with the knee injury has helped me identify with people who have a temporary injury or a physical handicap: folks who limp or walk with a cane or use a wheelchair. If you can’t walk normally, I have a small idea of what you’re going through, and hopefully I can give you my undivided attention if you ever need my help.
I think about certain Bible stories differently, too. Bible characters who were paralyzed, lame, or limped had an extra hard time. I can get around in my car, but not being able to walk during biblical times was a very big deal. If you can’t walk, or if your walk is negatively altered, you won’t be able to go anywhere unless you have awesome friends to help you (like the paralytic man in Mark 2:1–12). Jesus healing you of your mobility issue is Him giving you your life back.
Kind of as a side note, I’ve also been reminded of when Jesus walked on water. Matthew 14:22 says that “He made the disciples get into [a] boat and go before Him to the other side” (NKJV). While those disciples were following His instructions, a really bad storm hit and freaked them out. Jesus showed up, walking on the water, and Peter even walked on the water for a short while. The disciples were just minding their own business, doing what they were supposed to do, and a major trial came along. Can you imagine if they hadn’t obeyed Him? They probably would have felt safer on solid ground at first, but they probably wouldn’t have known that Jesus is capable of walking on water, Peter would certainly not have experienced that phenomenon for Himself, and they might have gotten a talking-to later for disobeying. Like the disciples, I was also following instructions when my storm hit. The enemy reminded me of this once, belching a suggesting into my mind that if I hadn’t been where God wanted me to be, I never would have hurt myself. Well, stupid enemy, I’ve gotten to see all kinds of aspects of God’s healing processes that I never dreamed possible, and maybe one day I’ll get to walk on water, too—limpless, caneless, and wheelchairless on the path that He’s prepared for me.
Scandal similarity: When the scandal first erupted a couple years ago, our church learned real quick who our friends are. Some hit the bricks as soon as the situation first made the news headlines, but others have stuck around with us long term. We even made some new friends who experienced a similar scandal in their church, and they’ve lived to tell about it and encourage us during our healing process. I think maybe some people thought our church would close some of its campuses, but our new pastor wants to open more someday. Our worship team even wrote some new songs and recorded them with songwriters from other churches who I don’t think we’ve recorded with before. I’ve seen some raunchy comments about our church from people online, but I’ve learned to not read those comments and to appreciate our encouraging friends instead.
Heart similarity: When I share my story, which involves my journey of emotional healing, sometimes I confuse people, and other times I meet people who can relate to me because they’ve been through similar things. And hopefully my story can help people, too.
7. YOU ARE WORTH IT!
I think one reason why God has allowed me to experience all of the above was so that He could show me that I am worth all of this trouble to heal me. People in abusive environments would basically tell me to pull myself up by my bootstraps and be healed in the name of Jesus, but I would keep feeling oppressed and depressed. (Probably from all of the abuse.) Now that I’m in a healthy environment, all of the attention from this healing process made me kind of uncomfortable at first. That is one reason why I took so long to seek medical attention. But now that I know how severe my injury really was, I understand that I have needed this focused season of healing—on my knee and on my heart.
So, these have been the seven things I learned after the fall. One little fall has affected nearly every aspect of my life for the past three months. But my knee is getting better. While I was typing this post, MeepMeep ended up perching directly on my hematoma, and it didn’t hurt. I look forward to my knee getting even better tomorrow.
