What A Difference A Year Makes

April 29.

Wow. Here I am. One year to the day of that event that truly changed me.

After three surgeries, a month of being attached to a machine, 6 months of continuous rehab, then more months of slowly building back my range of motion and now, tackling the rebuilding of my muscle strength, I’ve seen a lot of ground, physically and emotionally. I’ve been to some dark depths, from intense regret, hopelessness, fear and self-flagellation to some real heights of pride, hope and determination.

It's not at all hard to believe that it's been a year. It has gone fast, but then again, it’s been so packed full of hard work that I almost feel exhausted just thinking about the metaphorical mountains I’ve climbed since then.

I remember all those months ago being told that it would take about a year for me to know what the “new normal” would be for my arm. So it was always in my mind as a benchmark for what to expect. A year later, I have all but a few degrees of my range of motion back when it was predicted by doctors that I’d lose at least 30 degrees on each end of my range. I’ve recently gotten on a regular strength-training regiment to get my muscle strength back (the arm is still shockingly weak) and am slowly getting back into climbing, although more snow than rock.

So, physically, my recovery has been tremendous. I attribute that to an amazing surgeon and a lot of hard work on my part, not to mention stubbornness and determination. Looking forward, in the sense of how much my arm has improved and continues to improve, I will admit, I have become greedy: I will keep working until it’s clear that I’ve hit the recovery maximum. In fact, my dear friend CJ had to remind me the other day how much I have to be grateful for just in terms of where I’m at today- it has only been a year and I am so way beyond what anyone expected. This gives me such an amazing sense of inner triumph that is difficult to describe in words.

There is something thrilling about having refused to accept all the medical prognoses and to have been right. I was told over and over not to get my hopes up, with words like, "you won't," "you can't," "you shouldn't." But something in me- whether it was wisdom or denial or just a sheer fiery stubbornness- wouldn't listen. I'd like to take this moment to thank that iron will- to thank that spirit in me that said, literally (to one doctor's face), "You don't know me very well, do you?" They would smile at my determination, sort of look at me knowingly in one of those slightly dismissive, pat you on the shoulder, "oh, aren't you sweet, being so determined" ways. Mind you, they meant well but I just used that brush off as more reason to work hard.

The mind is a powerful thing. I won't go into the details of my personal thoughts and beliefs on this but I will say that had I just accepted their prognoses, I probably wouldn't have worked so hard and most likely, I would have fulfilled their predictions.

I often laugh about going back to all those doctors and therapists who said, "you can't," "you won't," "you shouldn't" and (only in my silly imagination) flipping them off while fully extending my left elbow that I supposedly would never be able to fully extend ever again. But seriously, I really don't have any hard feelings towards any of those people. They all meant well. They were all trying to protect me from getting my hopes up and being disappointed.

In my more dramatic moments, I like to toy with the idea of being a medical miracle. And yet, it puts a lump in my throat to remember telling a friend exactly *that* only a week after the accident. I do believe I said something to her like, "They tell me I will lose almost half of my range of motion. But those are just statistics and statistics are averages and to make an average you have to have people on both sides of the middle- so *I* am going to be that medical miracle that doesn't fit their average. All I have to do is beat the odds and I can do that."

And I did.

I just now realized, as I'm typing this, that up until this moment, the thought has never crossed my mind or lips, "I am proud of myself." But I suppose, if there is any occasion for finally taking a deep breath and feeling that, it is today.


Emotionally, this life-changing, Tamara-remodeling event has also shifted quite dramatically. For one, it used to be the center of my life and now, is just one of my many ongoing projects. I still look back on this day a year ago with a pang of regret, just a little hint of sadness of having had to go through this to begin with, but I am keenly aware of the many tremendous lessons and the hard-earned wisdom I have gained throughout this process. While some part of me still wishes this had never happened, another part of me wonders if this event is exactly what woke me up and became my “rock bottom” to push off from, like a spiritual springboard. Who knows where I would be today if I hadn’t fallen that day. Maybe I’d be worse off than I am now, maybe better.

But either way, while this event presented some of the largest emotional, physical and spiritual challenges of my life, it certainly taught me how to truly care for myself, how to believe in myself and most importantly, how to have patience with myself.

I am still learning this, however.

When I’m at the gym, sometimes I’ll get frustrated and a little emotional bumping up against my limitations, which are still significant: my left arm is often only able to lift less than half of what my right arm can lift. On some weight machines, depending on how it works my muscles, I can only lift a measly 10 pounds. At these times, I tap into an emotional exhaustion, otherwise known as a complete lack of patience. Yes, at these moments I can feel the weight of this past year and I hear a little voice throwing a tantrum in my head, “god damnit, I’ve worked my butt off for a year and I can only lift 10 frigging pounds?!”

But one of the times I verbalized this out loud to a friend whom I like to call J-dot, he wisely responded, “Yes, but a year ago you didn’t even have an elbow.”

Ah, yes, now that is some true perspective.


If I had to sum it up in a phrase, I’d say, “what a difference a year makes,” the ol’ Maria Grever & Stanley Adams song, sung by a goofy little voice in the back of my head.

From 2006 to 2007, I watched my life go downhill fast, then crash and burn in April. I’ve gone from- a year ago- being a broken woman, both in spirit and in bone, having hit rock bottom (pun intended) to now finding myself “lapping” the old Tamara, even the Tamara before the initial downturn. Sure, there are bumps in the road still, but man, if nothing else- aside from all that caring and patience stuff- I taught myself this past year that when I put my mind to it, I’ve got an iron will. I am stronger than I ever gave myself credit for.

And wow, what a difference a year makes!

(and for another reason why today is significant: those who want to read about the other said "ongoing projects" can read about the biggest one here)

Looking Forward

In the process of looking back on my past, when I was beginning to accept all the ramifications of my rock climbing accident, and when I finally started to accept that there was no way I could change it, no way I could go back and make different decisions, that empty sort of surrender was partially made more bearable by the hypothetical ability to prevent a similar misfortune from befalling others in my outdoor community.

Somehow, if what I learned from my experience could be worth something to someone else, maybe it could feel less like a misfortune and more like an opportunity; my loss, their gain.

To draw again on the philosophy of embracing both loss and gratitude, I am reminded of the many times I've been told by friends or family, "In the Japanese language, the same character is used for both the words 'misfortune' and 'opportunity'." I am also reminded of the yin and the yang, the dark and the light. While I don't necessarily have control over the 'dark,' over the loss, at least in some ways I feel like I have some control over the 'light,' the gratitude, the 'opportunity.'

So equally for my own healing and in an effort to try and make something positive of a difficult experience, I recently showed up as guest speaker for this year’s current students in the “Advanced Rock” class which I was taking when I fell.

Each year, there is a safety lecture and this year it was entitled, “To Make Aware, Not Scare.” Because I had heard through the instructor that there would be many examples of accidents had by AR students, most of who fell on non-difficult terrain simply because “they lost focus,” I was afraid that my accident, too, would be framed with that approach: that I’d simply lost focus.

And because I'd often thought of going back to the AR class to speak, there was a certain amount of anticipation building up. I went in almost wondering if I would need to defend myself and explain how my fall wasn't due to just simply losing focus- that actually, I'd been quite focused that day. Having been through a fairly serious accident, I found it difficult to hear others explain away accidents simplistically, especially when it was about just being in the wrong headspace.

I wanted mostly to talk about the value of fear and respecting one's limits. I had remembered many a discussion during the year I took AR about how to get past one's fear of climbing. It had been rather simplified as, "just breathe and smile." Throughout the class, because of my own fear of heights, I'd struggled with finding a balance between respecting my limits and having a "healthy amount" of fear (that amount is something of which I'm not certain) versus challenging myself and trusting the system. Even before I fell, I resisted all the simplistic talk.

So I told my story.

I explained how the whole thing unfolded- how ironically, I'd been incredibly careful for the duration of the course and then in a moment of feeling strong, I "went for it" and that's when I fell. I talked about how I personally believed that being a beginning leader was not necessarily the best timing for challenging one's climbing technique and skill. And I shared the ways I felt I had misjudged the situation and what I would do differently if I could. I showed x-rays of before and after.

And most of this time, I was shaking.

I don't know why I was nervous. All I really wanted to say was, "don't do what I did," which was an instinctive reaction, but yet I knew it was much more complicated than that; my story was not about one wrong decision existing in a vacuum.

It's our human nature to want to simplify things and make them more black and white than they may actually be. This is also where our cause/effect thinking gets the best of us. Still, in the end, I think the theme of my presentation was to carefully consider the consequences when deciding to lead something unless one has total confidence in their ability to make it to the top without a chance of falling. That was really how I came to sum up my fall, complicated as it was: in that moment, I lost sight of the consequences of not being able to make the last move, considering that my last piece of pro was almost 10 feet below me.

I wasn't entirely sure how my presentation was received; it certainly was much more straight-forward than all the times I'd imagined it in my head. There were thank-yous and smiles from familiar faces. There were some questions about the details of the accident. I summed it up with, "be careful out there."

And then as I was leaving, the main speaker of the evening, the man who started the class back in the 70s, found me in the hallway.

"I'm so glad you said what you said in there," he began, which immediately melted any last butterflies or any thoughts I'd had of "did what I say amount to anything?"

I don't remember the details of how he elaborated the point after that, but I was relieved that my challenging of the "just breathe and smile" approach had not fallen on deaf ears.

The golden nugget of the evening was the last thing he said to me before he left; it was something I'd fought for and worked hard at.

He said, "That experience you had out there, that accident- it sounds like quite the day, that maybe you even cheated death that day. And that rock might have broken your elbow, but it's clear that it sure didn't break your spirit. "

And with that, I finally took a deep breath, maybe the first of the evening.

It didn't break my spirit....

Of course, I already knew this on some level. It wasn't the first time I'd heard this. Hell, I was cracking jokes with the anesthesiologist on the operating table, regardless of how scared I was. But I think hearing this from an outsider- someone who really didn't know me, as opposed to a friend of mine- meant a lot. I felt a part of my insides relax.

I don't know that I will go back to future AR classes to give that same talk, to tell my story. Maybe I will. But there was something in me that needed that opportunity particularly this year, the first class since the whole thing, as the one year anniversary approaches.

Finally, I came to accept that it was okay if what I said didn't have any effect. Attached as I may have previously been to the idea of turning this obstacle into an opportunity, specifically by preventing anyone else in AR from falling, I realized that you don't get a message through by shaking the audience by the collar, but by planting a seed and walking away.

Regardless of whether my presentation mattered or not, it was still a step for me, another step towards the opportunity of this story- another chance to continue to look forward, looking for the light.