I felt it right after I ran my first half-marathon. The twinge, right at the base of my middle toe. It was not quite the same twinge as those around my arches. Those faded each night after mercilessly rolling a golf ball along tendons lining the soles of my feet. No, this twinge didn't respond to that, nor to ice. This twinge pricked instead of ached.

But I didn't really want to think about it.

Then at Zumba on Monday night I pulled up from a weighted lunge, and as I rolled the entire weight of my body across the ball of my foot, pain shot up from my toes and pierced my skull before leaving the back of my head to blot out the sun.

Later that night, I actually screamed when I squatted to pick up laundry from my daughter's floor. I knew: Something was wrong. Unignorably wrong.

Yesterday I broke down and dragged myself to my doctor. She knew I'd been running since July. She knows about my generalized anxiety disorder and how I partially treat it with drugs and partially with exercise. She knows about the eating disorder.

She ordered an X-ray. It was inconclusive.

She smiled sadly at me. "You know, because I know you've read up on this, that often stress fractures aren't visible on X-rays." She held my foot, gently pressing at the base of my middle toe.

YUP.YUP. RIGHT THERE.

"I'm sorry. You need a boot." She sent her assistant to go get a plastic thing that pumps up with air and makes it impossible to bend anything inside it.

She put the boot on my foot and pumped it and there it was, that thing that I've feared since I first started working out five days a week in high school: immobilization. "I suppose you could bling it out," she said.

Now, it's not total immobilization. I know this. I'm very fortunate. I'm not paralyzed. I'm not even on crutches.

But I can't run. I can't dance. I can't jump.

And when I was at the doctor's office, the scale registered five pounds up from where I thought I was since I initially lost ten pounds last year from running.

This, the dreaded combination: Higher scale number coupled with a boot. The axis of ex-anorexia evil: You're heavier than you want to be and you can't exercise and you can't starve yourself because you don't do that anymore.

I admit I cried last night. Hard. I wanted to punch a person, really. Not any of my family, of course. But I was angry enough to want to connect with something that would crunch when I hit it. Awful, isn't it? Awful doesn't it make it not true. When you've known what's like to hate yourself, you hate anything that dares to drag you back there, hate it enough to hurt.

It's hard to resist the voices that still linger around the edges of my psyche only to make their appearance in badly lit dressing rooms and unfairly tagged Facebook pictures and days when I realize I can't do anything about a little weight gain without tempting regression. And I should be bigger than this. It's five fucking pounds, not the end of the world. If only my brain knew the difference. I'm still trying to teach it the difference. Most days there's nothing to teach. It's these days, these boot days, that challenge me.

I didn't fall into the abyss. I hit nothing. I ate dinner. I went to bed. I got up. I worked. I went to the gym and did the one thing my doctor said I could do with a boot: ride the stationary bike. I set that bike on intervals and pushed the hills until I could barely breathe and the sweat poured down my face. I didn't care what anyone thought of the frazzled person wearing a boot and huffing like a freight train. They don't know that this is the safer alternative to crazy town.

When I got off the bike, my legs were like jell-o, but my brain felt flooded with starlight. People looked at me oddly as I clunked my way back over to the stretching area and tried to wrestle the boot into the right position to stretch my hips and hamstrings. Can't be getting another injury, you know.

Then I came home and ate lunch, thumping my boot against the desk as I chewed. Not hard enough to hurt anything. Just hard enough to make some noise.

I'm going to wear this damned thing for two weeks, then I'm going to do whatever the doctor says to do, because I need my foot back. I need to be able to run and to dance. I need to know there are safe outlets for me, that I never again need to restrict and restrict to feel good about myself.

It's scary. But I'm trying. Here, with my boot. 

*THUNK*