The Galesburg physician went straight for my swollen ankles — saying all the pain I was reporting could be explained by the swelling — and checked my blood pressure.
My blood pressure has been a bit high for some years, though never so high that any doctor has said I needed to do more than watch it. But now this doctor, reading it and looking at my ankles, said the time had come to do more.
I won’t claim to understand all the details, but apparently high blood pressure makes swelling in the feet caused by fluid retention (edema) much worse, and edema makes high blood pressure much worse. There are serious dangers involved, both to the feet and to the heart. And even though my normal (“resting”) blood pressure still isn’t so bad, it gets quite elevated when I’m walking with my backpack, past the point where it feeds into the swelling in my feet — so that now I’m caught in the vicious circle of each one aggravating the other.
The physician said: You’ve got to reduce the swelling to zero before you resume walking. How, said I? By keeping your feet above your heart, he said, until the swelling is completely gone. It can be done in twenty-four hours if you lie on a bed with the foot raised thirty degrees above horizontal, never getting off except to go to the bathroom. If you interrupt it more than that, it’ll take longer. Keeping your feet above your heart for less than two hours without interruption will do you no good at all.
He also gave me my first-ever prescription for medicine to lower my blood pressure — and assigned me a low-sodium diet. He mentioned things like wrapping my feet in bandages. But elevating the feet was Priority One.
I thought about it during the afternoon. Keeping my feet elevated that rigorously didn’t look easy to do on the road, even if I drove myself from place to place and then elevated my feet as best I could all night. I didn’t know, either, how soon or how fully I’d be able to resume my regular walking schedule afterward. If I relapsed many miles from the nearest town — and there are many such places on my route — what would I do? And then there was the fact that my regular doctor, the last time I talked to him, didn’t want me on hypertension medication.
The best thing to do seemed to be to lay up with my feet elevated back at my home — doing it as intensively as possible — and talk to my regular doctor while I was at it. And I had a window of opportunity in which to do this, because I’m not due to meet with another Friends community until Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, this Sunday evening, June 11.
Did I have fall-back options, if I couldn’t go back to my original walking schedule once the swelling was gone? I explored that question in my heart, in prayer, while I drove my little rented car to the bed-and-breakfast in Dahinda where I had my night’s reservation.
I drove the route I’d planned to walk. It followed back roads devoid of any traffic; it wandered the lengths of winding ridgelines, hopping from ridge to ridge across deepening, tree-shaded creek valleys; it carried me into the heart of the Spoon River watershed, which is a very off-the-beaten-path sort of place. Foot-high corn plants spread green leaves in the bottomlands, and sheep and horses pastured on the hillsides. How I wished to have been walking that road instead of driving it! But driving it, I saw it would have been a very taxing day’s walk, even had my feet been in perfect shape — just under 17 miles, and much of it steeply rolling.
And where I arrived at the end was a homey place of rest; I sat that evening on a farmhouse porch with my hosts, resting aching ankles and watching fireflies flicker, while they told me of the Flood of ‘93, when first the Mississippi, and then the Illinois, and finally the Spoon River rose up out of its banks and poured across the farmlands, and they and their nine guests couldn’t get out of the house for four days because of the waters covering the only road. They watched their hay bales float away, big waterlogged quarter-ton bales still lighter than the waters sweeping them off; and they played a lot of Scrabble, and learned to make pancakes with almost no eggs; and at the end, they built a raft to go for food and poled it across the floodwaters —
I understood that night: I’m still not released from my leading. God, in that form of Revealer-of-what’s-loving-and-right in which He (She) manifests in my heart, still wants me to do this walk, feeling the distance underfoot, listening to Friends, being vulnerable, being changed. But it is equally clear that God is not asking me to destroy my feet or myself by walking when walking becomes more than my physical body can bear.
I continue to feel that the requirement to do this walk is not rigid — not a matter of, I must physically walk every step from here to there — but rather, a matter of keeping faith with the Inward Guide, completing the journey as best I can given my limitations, in trust that good things will come of it.
And if that is truly the nature of my leading — well, there are always ways to keep faith and do the best we can. There is always some sort of way forward. Love finds ways.
Yesterday I drove home in my little rented car, back across the Mississippi and the rolling hills of Iowa, and my wife was glad to see me when she found me in the house, and I to see her.
I have an appointment with my regular physician this afternoon. I’ll let you know how it goes.
