Hobbled

I'm home again . . . and off my feet.

Seems as if miles of mud and rock and wet feet and rock and . . . did I say mud? And uphills and downhills and rocks and, well, mud . . . and 'updated' insoles in hiking shoes that worked perfectly well for miles on flat roads in June but don't work so well in other conditions. The edge of the arch part of the insole began digging into my feet. I moleskinned. I patched. Did I mention that my feet stayed wet? And muddy? Nothing would stick to the foot to keep the blisters from getting worse. So I cut the insole apart - cut the arch part out of it. It was too late. I tried some more moleskin - did it correctly. I covered the blister area with something so that the moleskin wouldn't stick to the blister. Then I used athletic tape wrapped all the way around my foot to try to keep it all in place. Four hours of walking later and the pain getting worse . . . I stop and take the wet (and muddy) shoes and socks off and discover that it has all moved. And despite the fact that moleskin won't stick to wet skin . . . it will stick to wet blistered skin. And then tear that skin right off. Ouch! I lost a thick huge hunk of skin from the bottom of my right foot (at least 1 1/2 inches long . . . and half that wide). At least the skin stayed over the blister on the left one.

So, I cleaned it as well as I could (Purell on an open wound is such a rush! NOT) covered them with gauze, and turned to the big guns - the duct tape. Wrapped that around my foot. And it stayed in place! Despite the wet and the mud. And I kept walking.

But not for as long as I would have liked. It was really too late for that right foot. I worried about what was going on under the duct tape (did I get it clean enough?? would it hold for a few more days until I went home anyway for that wedding??) I finally sat down (in the rain - - have I mentioned that it was wet and muddy?) - and took stock of where I was, how slow I was moving, how much pain my foot was in . . . and called Rick to come get me at the nearest road crossing (about 4-5 miles away at that point).

So I'm home now. Clean and dry, but with an infected foot and feeling much hobbled. Faith afoot? Not at this point!

In the end, it will be all right. Right now I'm just trying to regroup and figure out a direction for this month. I did learn a few things from the beginning of the hike I did take:

1) Take stock of the reality of life and situations, rather than "the way things were".
The last time I put a full pack on and headed out for longer than two days I was 6 years younger and many pounds lighter. At this point in my life, I should have realized that I couldn't do as many miles as I used to do! (The second night out I was camping with a young couple - 20 somethings who were not overweight - who had taken two days to do the same stretch of trail I had done in one day - - their's was the smarter course!)
2) Don't try to do too many things at once.
I had brought "sabbatical work" with me to a long hike. At some point in the past it had sounded like a really good idea . . . but I discovered that instead I was too tired at the end of a long day of (hard) walking to spend time reading and/or writing (yep - you all notice how many blog entries I managed to post from the trail!! despite lugging the technology along to be able to do so. And I never opened that book I carried, either.)
3) Be willing to reassess, and change plans.
At least this is something I think I already knew how to do! Otherwise, I'd be still hobbling up there on that trail . . . and risking some kind of long term issue with this infected foot.

I'll leave it up to all of you to figure out what those three things have to do with being church in the 21st century!