The day after Christmas, I was packing my mom's car for Kansas City and trying not to think about my foot.
That was the deal I'd made with myself by then. You don't stop. You don't make it the center of everything. Nine months I'd been in it this time — the ulcer that wouldn't close no matter what, the debridements, three appointments a month — and that was on top of everything that came before it. If you let it be the whole story you'd never go anywhere or do anything again. So you tape it up, you put the boot on, you load the car, and you go to Kansas City with your wife, because it's the weekend after Christmas and that's what people do.
Three times a month I'd go in and they'd debride it, which is a clean word for scraping the dead tissue out of a wound that won't heal, and there's nothing clean about it. I'd gotten used to the whole liturgy of it. Confirm your phone number. Is Brittany still your emergency contact. Any fever. The same questions every visit, like we'd never met, because to them I was one face in a day full of faces — just a number with a foot. I didn't blame them for it. You see enough people, everybody blurs. But there's a particular loneliness in answering the same three questions about your own life to someone who's already forgotten you.
Then the part I never got used to. They'd put down two pads — the blue absorbent kind, the ones that look like puppy training pads — one under my foot, one on the floor to catch what came off. For the first ten months the wound was on the bottom of my foot, right under the big toe, which is about the worst place to have a hole that won't close, because it's where your whole weight lands every time you take a step. They'd scrape, and it would bleed, and I'd look at the ceiling and wait for it to be over. Nine months of that. You'd think going in that often would feel like progress. Mostly it felt like bailing a boat that had a hole I couldn't find.
Brittany was moving around the house doing the last of the packing, the way she does — fast, certain, already three steps ahead of me. She's a small woman, a hundred pounds soaking wet, pale as paper, a natural redhead who dyes it anyway. You'd never guess from looking at her that she was the strong one. People meet her and see the charm, the way a room turns a little brighter when she's talking, and they miss that underneath the charm is somebody you could build a house on.
I didn't know yet how much I was going to need that. I just knew the foot hurt and the car was packed and my wife was ready to go before I was, same as always.
I should tell you what I was, before, so you understand what the foot took.
I was a guy with too many things going at once, and that was how I liked it. A senior infrastructure engineer by day — the kind of job that can page you at three in the morning and expect you awake and useful. On top of that I ran my own company, IANLAN LLC, named after my own network because that's the kind of guy I am. Other businesses hired me to build and rescue the systems they ran on — the invisible plumbing that lets a few hundred people log in every morning and have everything just work. When a company needed to move its whole operation to the cloud, or rebuild a network from the studs, or have a plan for the day everything crashed, I was who they called. And then there was the homelab in the house, which most people would just call a data center — racks of servers, a wall of monitors, more compute humming in my own home than some companies run.
I built things. I fixed things. If something was broken I wanted my hands on it. I didn't sit still, and I didn't want to.
And here's the part that turns it into a bad joke: I was getting into the best shape of my adult life. Fifty pounds gone. Quit smoking. Off the diabetes pills I'd been on for years. Blood sugar a doctor would frame and hang on a wall. I'd spent the past twelve months turning myself into a healthier man on purpose, the hard way, one decision at a time — and I'd done it. By every number that's supposed to matter, I was winning.
And it wasn't just the numbers. I did the unpleasant things too. I let them run an angiogram that fall, thread a wire up into me to clear out the plumbing and get the blood flowing to that foot the way it was supposed to. I fought my own insurance company for a glucose monitor they didn't want to pay for, and I won that one. Whatever the situation asked of me — diet, surgery, paperwork, a needle, a fight — I did it. I was the model patient.
Except for the one thing. I never rested. Every procedure, every surgery, I was back at work the following Monday like nothing had happened. I never took the extended time to heal, never let my body have the weeks it was quietly asking for. I'd do everything right except the thing that might have mattered most, which was stopping. I didn't know how to stop. It would take me a long time, and a lot more than a foot, to learn.
You could not have drawn up a guy doing more of the right things than I was doing. You also could not have drawn up a better way to run himself into the ground while doing them.
We took my mom's car for the trip, and I drove us down. It's about three hours to Kansas City. We talked about nothing — the radio, where we'd eat, the kind of conversation you don't remember the next week because there's nothing in it worth remembering, which is exactly what makes it good. It's the conversation you have when nothing's wrong.
I couldn't get the foot up the way I wanted to from the driver's seat, but I managed all right. Nine months had at least taught me that much — keep it elevated when you can. The foot felt about the same as it had all week. Not better, not worse. Just there, the way it was always there now, this thing I carried around and managed and didn't talk about.
We got to the Airbnb in the afternoon. It was fine — one of those places that photographs better than it lives, but fine. We hauled our stuff in, I got the foot up, and I thought, for about an hour, that we were going to have a normal weekend.
That first evening I actually felt decent, so we went out. Tried to hit a Barnes & Noble and couldn't — it was closed, some kind of fire, and there were people all over the streets because of it. So we found another bookstore, and that one was closed too, holiday break. The whole city seemed to be shut or on fire or standing around in the cold, and we just kind of rolled with it the way you do on a trip when the plan isn't working out. We gave up on books and went and got barbecue instead, which in Kansas City is never the wrong call. It was a good dinner. Then we went back to the Airbnb.
I want to stop on that dinner for a second, because it was the last time for a while that I was just a guy having dinner with his wife.
I didn't know that.
Nobody ever knows they're living the last normal day. If they did, they'd take pictures. They'd stay a little longer at the table. They'd pay attention to things that seem forgettable at the time — the smell of the restaurant, the song playing overhead, the conversation about nothing important.
Instead, you eat your barbecue, pay the check, and head back to the Airbnb.
The foot was still just a foot then.
An annoyance. A problem. A thing that had been taking up too much of my life for nine months.
By the next morning it would become something else entirely.