weeks. Meanwhile, the amount we had coming in was chopped in half.
The pain of that went beyond money, though. I served as both a volunteer
firefighter and high school wrestling coach, commitments that suffered
because of my bum leg. Sundays became a challenge too. I’m one of
those pastors who walks back and forth during the sermon. Not a holy-
rolling, fire-and-brimstone guy by any stretch, but not a soft-spoken minister
in vestments, performing liturgical readings either. I’m a storyteller, and to
tell stories I need to move around some. But now I had to preach sitting
down with my leg propped in a second chair, sticking out like the jib on a
sail. Asking me to sit down while I delivered the Sunday message was like
asking an Italian to talk without using his hands. But as much as I struggled
with the inconvenience of my injury, I didn’t know then that it would be only
the first domino to fall.
One morning that October, right about the time I’d gotten used to
hobbling everywhere on crutches, I awoke to a dull throbbing in my lower
back. I knew instantly what the problem was: kidney stones.
The first time I had a kidney stone, it measured six millimeters and
required surgery. This time after a round of tests, doctors thought the
stones were small enough to pass. I don’t know whether that was a good
thing, though: I passed them for three days. I had once slammed my middle
finger in a tailgate and cut the tip off. That was like baking cookies
compared to this. Even breaking my leg into four pieces hadn’t hurt as
bad.
Still, I survived. By November, I’d been hobbling around on crutches for
three months, and I went in for a checkup.
“The leg’s healing correctly, but we still need to keep it casted,” the
orthopedist said. “Anything else bothering you?”
Actually, there was. I felt a little weird bringing it up, but the left side of my
chest had developed a knot right beneath the surface of the nipple. I’m
right-handed and had been leaning on my left crutch a lot while writing, so I
thought maybe the underarm pad on that crutch had rubbed against my
chest over a period of weeks, creating some kind of irritation beneath the
skin, a callus of some kind.
The doctor immediately ruled that out. “Crutches don’t do that,” he said.
“I need to call a surgeon.”