Finally I know what I have been knowing

Well......I am just back from the Sports Medicine doc. As I feared, I do have a stress fracture in my left tibia. But there is good news to this. I am in an air cast instead of a boot and only for 3-4 weeks. My bad news is no Mini Marathon. I am really disappointed but know that there are far worse things out there. I will heal and be back running in as few as three weeks! In the meantime, I have to brush up on my swimming strokes as that and cycling are about the only aerobic things I can do. But I can do them and will. It's a relief to me just to finally know what's going on.

In the keeping it real category, I just happen to be reading a book that is keeping me grounded instead of singing the woes. As I state in my blog bio I am originally from South Louisiana, a little town 45 miles southwest of New Orleans called Houma. Close enough to New Orleans that growing up, I could put the car on auto pilot and get there in ......well fast. I with the rest of the nation watched in horror as the flooding and aftermath of Hurrican Katrina unfolded. I cried for days because the places that they showed (the Gulf coast as well because I had family in Gulfport, Mississippi) were so familiar to me. I know that it is hard for people who aren't don't know the South Louisiana people found it hard to understand why these people didn't just leave, but I understood. I knew it was a terrible mistake, but people from that area just don't leave when a storm is brewing. Home is all they have in most cases. They just can't bear to leave it to fate. I am reading a book called "The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous" that tells the story of a group of shrimpers that road out the storm in a place called Violet Canal which is south and east of New Orleans. They went through the worst of the storm, including too many tornadoes to count and storm surges of 20 to 25 feet from more than one direction on their shrimp boats and lived to tell about it. They were heroic in their rescue of stranded folks and were courageous in their attempts to keep life going because they were forgotten......for days. The author happens to be an acquaintance of mine from my home town that now writes for The Wall Street Journal which has made it even more special.

My point to all of this is that reading this couldn't have come at a better time for me. To read about these people's resilience in the face of a terrible tragedy and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, it serves as a reminder that life throws you big curveballs and little curveballs. This is a little curveball that will be better in a blink.
Thanks for reading. Hope all of you are healthy and doing well.