If This is My BBL, So Be It

I sipped from the fruit punch juice box while my legs dangled off the chair. I fought the urge to swing them like a child. The flimsy paper underneath me crinkled, already shredded by my touch. I scooched back in the chair, trying to angle myself so that the ache in my lower back might subside. This is 25. Sitting alone in a doctor’s office, drinking juice, and trying to avoid sciatic pain. I’d been sitting in that room, in that same chair, for two hours and fifteen minutes already. Two hours of that time was spent simply waiting. I’d finished the book I brought, read all the medical posters about bone density and physical therapy, fought off the urge to rummage through all the cabinets, flipped through multiple IG pages dedicated to botched plastic surgeries, and lost any progress I’d made on growing out my nails. In two hours, at least three different people came to check on me, each of them assuring me that there was a special way to draw blood for PRP, and the only person certified to do it was running late. They’re sorry. Am I okay waiting? She’s just a little late because of a transit issue. Or maybe a family/kids thing. She’ll be here in thirty minutes.

Two hours after I arrived, the nurse rushed in, asked my name, and then said she thought she was seeing someone else. I decided not to mention the time unless she asked.

She confirmed why I was in the office and rushed out to grab the kit. Soon after, she strode back in clutching a little white box, peeled back the label on top, and started hastily unloading its contents on the small tray beside me. Her name was Letty, based on the card hanging from her lanyard. She talked as she prepped the needles, mentioning how understaffed they were, hence my 2-hour wait time. Most nurses I meet carry a certain no-nonsense, lightly tinted-with-care attitude. Letty was no different, only this time I could see the weight of the system on her.

Letty held up a big syringe that looked like something out of a Fisher-Price first aid kit and we exchanged glances. Soon, it would be full of my blood. She checked the veins on the inside of my right arm, smirked, and then checked the one on my left arm. Moving back to my right, she instructed me to hold my arm straight out, exposing the soft side of my elbow crease, and make a fist so she could tie the tourniquet. Just as she had put the needle in my arm, the tourniquet slipped off. Maybe things happen too easily to me, in a bad way.

I watched as my crimson blood began to fill the bottom of the syringe. It was full of tiny little bubbles, pockets of air smushing themselves against the sides of the tube for a chance of survival. The going was slow, and Letty struggled to pull back the syringe. Other blood draws I’ve done felt like a fountain of oil just tapped from the earth, spurting and flowing with wealth. This one required labor, like pumping well water by hand. I watched her forehead for a bead of sweat, but it never came. Dark red climbed up slowly, both of us silently urging it to reach the top, until finally, it was done.

She pulled the needle from my skin, applied gauze, and instructed me to press down hard to stop the blood flow. The newly liberated needle tapped against the table, blood staining the surgical pad underneath. I stared at it: A familiar sight. A tiny drop splattered on my hand, a jewel in return for my sacrifice.

She swiped everything into the biohazard bin and told me that she’d take the vial of blood to the back so they could spin it for fifteen minutes. All of that was just preparation for the actual procedure.

A few minutes later my doctor, Dr. Reisman, appeared, sighed in relief when I told her they’d drawn the blood, and insisted I take the fruit punch juice box. She left and the door closed. The silence in the room punctuated only by the sounds of a grown-up internet kid: A straw scrapping the bottom of a juice box and the soft click of fingernails on a phone screen.

Let me explain. PRP, Platelet Rich Plasma, is a relatively new procedure in which blood is drawn in a specific way, spun in a centrifuge to extract certain components to create a higher concentration of platelets in the plasma, and then injected into a site of injury or pain. It’s supposed to kick your body into an immune response, a not-so-gentle reminder to heal. Withdrawing blood to treat injury and illness. It’s like bloodletting, only now medicine is modern, we have germ theory, and you get something back at the end other than another disease.

I agreed to this PRP procedure because I have a torn labrum in my hip among other things like a strained hip flexor, a partial tear in my glute muscle, and bone inflammation from the tears. I’ve been in pain for about two years, off and on, because there is a shred in the cartilage of my hip and that’s what I’ve been feeling every time I lift and lower my leg. The pain sits in the front crease of my hip, almost near my groin. What gave it away as a labral tear is the feeling that my hip gets locked in place. The trick to unlocking it is sticking out my left leg to the side and moving my hips in a circle until I feel and hear a deep, satisfying pop in the center between my hip and butt. Such is life with a bum hip in your mid-twenties.

I got the tear from running, probably in my first half-marathon training cycle, but made worse in my second. There was never a moment where my hip went pop and suddenly I was filled with pain. I’ve asked many times why it happened to me and the best we’ve got is that my hips have a slight forward lean to them, so the way my bone fits into the socket is unique. This is not what I meant when I asked the universe to make me unique.

For a while, no one could tell me what it was. I tried a few different things: shockwave therapy, heat pads, chiropractic adjustments, a decompression machine, massage guns, physical therapy, glute strengthing, and finally just not running. Physical therapy, glute strengthing, and not running helped the most the first time, so much so that I went back to running and did it again. This time though, those things weren’t helping.

I can really only blame myself for running even when I know it hurt. Another part of me wants to blame living in New York City, a place where I can never truly give my body the rest it needs. Subway stairs and walking miles a day as fast as I can while carrying three bags full of stuff are distinctly not resting. A third part of me blames the unknown workings of the universe (genetics?) for giving me an oddly shaped hip socket that can’t withstand that level of high-impact repetition. Maybe there’s nothing in particular to blame, only to accept that it makes sense how I ended up in a situation where more medical action was needed.

Dr. Reisman made one thing clear about PRP: ‘Expect pain.’ It would be painful, and I couldn’t take any anti-inflammatories afterward. No Advil. No icing it. She’d gone as far as to pull out a notepad and scribble expect pain for 3-5 days on it. And PRP isn’t covered by insurance. It would cost me $750 out of pocket and could take 4-6 weeks to feel the full effects. And it would be painful. Some people don’t feel an improvement the first time and require the procedure up to 3 times before it’s effective for them. Universe, if you can hear me, do NOT even think about it.

Part of being a runner is acting on that sick part of you that wants to move your body so aggressively that you can’t think about anything else except putting one foot in front of the other. I’ll admit though, I’m a romantic, and the doctor’s order to do nothing physical appealed to me. In that sick way that anxious people, homebodies, and cat lovers think, I began to look forward to the procedure. Yes, I’d be in pain, but I also got two days off of work. I’d uber home afterward too, my lollipop for being a good patient. What would await me would be cozy hours spent on the couch with a movie playing and something warm to sip on. I felt this way until moments before the procedure, when I’d changed into the gown, sat in the chair, and watched as it declined back until flat.

Both Reisman and Letty came in at the same time, the nurse trailing behind, grimacing and leaning on the office chair in the corner of the room. Reisman asked her if she was okay, to which she shook her head. The doctor replied that her stomach was still sick too. I stared at them, realizing that all three of us were sacrificing something for this procedure. My next thought was wait, what the fuck did they just say?

The second they began unfolding a surgical pad and rolling back the gown to expose my hip, I remembered that I had to endure the procedure before I got my moment on the couch. Dr. Reisman and Letty chatted idly, and the reality of what they said began to set in. It would be painful. They couldn’t give me local anesthetic beyond a topical numbing spray. The whole thing would take 20 minutes, or so Letty told someone on the phone who’d asked how much longer the doctor would be.

After Reisman tucked back my gown, she pulled out an ultrasound machine and glided it on the skin of my hip, the gel chilling to the touch. She navigated for a spot without blood vessels and after she’d found one, she asked Letty something about a three and a half and the spray. She handed her a needle and sprayed my skin with the numbing agent.

The spray was cold, and my nervous chuckle gave away my weakness. I knew there would be no warning for the injection. Dr. Reisman was known for her straightforward nature and deadpan delivery.

The needle came through my skin like a sharp-point pen piercing a sheet of paper. It felt like nothing more than a blip in a thin barrier, and for the first thirty seconds, that was it.

As the needle dived deeper, my discomfort grew. Once it’d found its resting place near my bone and the serum began to seep out, a wave of pain more intense than any I’d felt in my entire life seized me. I instantly felt my body shirk itself of color and a sweat broke out on my upper lip. I’d always thought it was a thing of fiction but I wondered if I would throw up from the pain. No, ew, I’m not doing that. What I could do was pathetically say, ‘Wow, that’s painful.’

Reisman asked if I was lightheaded and asked Letty to tuck an ice pack underneath my neck. It’d been another thirty seconds of this pain, rolling in and out but ever-present nonetheless. I tried to say that I didn’t feel lightheaded, but I was feeling something and I couldn’t exactly say that it wasn’t lightheadedness.

The entire thing must have taken 3 minutes at most, but the pain continued even after she’d removed the needle. In my mind, the front side of my hip had furrowed into itself and every muscle in my thigh and hip had contracted until it couldn’t anymore, like it was caught in the event horizon of a black hole, ripping into pieces and condensing into a singularity simultaneously. I felt the icepack at the back of my neck dampening my hair and tried to focus on the cold sensation.

I slowly moved my knee inward, almost to a ball, and found mild relief. Inward and outward, the pain backed off from its peak. Any thought I’d had of not ubering home had died with a squeak 4 minutes ago.

Reisman gave me a small reward for my bravery, a ‘This usually makes grown men cry’ token. I gladly pocketed and filed it away in my ego. They’d made enough plasma to do a second injection, so she asked if I wanted it in my left glute. I paused, thinking of the tear in my butt and the way it never seemed to get bigger no matter how many squats I do. If this is my BBL, so be it.

I rolled onto my right side, feeling the smooth skin of my butt exposed to the medical room, my doctor, and the nurse. Again, the needle broke through paper, diving deeper with each second. It found its place sooner than before, content to settle within muscle rather than seeking bone this time. Again, seizures of pain gripped my glute muscle, four full contractions before the needle came out. My hopes had been right, it wasn’t as bad as the first one.

I lay for a second, feeling my body try to adjust to its new situation and convincing myself that my butt was definitely bigger now, but still natural. Nothing like a placebo effect. As I sat up, Letty reminded me to take my syringe of yellow platelet liquid home so that I could do a facial with it. She’d brought this vial in along with the injection serum for the procedure, a BOGO deal on the special potions that have a red sticker on them. The injection serum had been a pinkish yellow, so this tincture was somehow different, but still made entirely from my own body. She joked that I was young anyway so I didn’t even really need it.

I hobbled to the table where my stuff sat, wobbled as I pulled on my pants, threw the bonus elixir to the bottom of my bag, and called an uber.

All in all, the procedure went okay. Except for those weird moments but those tend to happen to me in any context, so, all in all, the procedure went okay. There is irony in undergoing a passive medical procedure to be active again. And it’s painful knowing the thing I love to do is hurting me in return. In this case, freedom illuminates the fragile cage of my body.

Here I am, out $750, and four days of pain later, feeling almost back to normal, with no discernible difference in my butt because it turns out that having a phat ass is a state of mind. But mostly, I’m hoping to feel the pain of running again. The pain of the time it takes from my life to train for a race. The pain of my toes cramping together at the front of my shoe. The pain in my chest from breathing too cold air too quickly. The pain of stretching my calves on a sidewalk curb. I can’t ascribe my relationship to running as anything sensible, only that I know its unique catharsis is something I crave.

But it’s also painful knowing that I am so young and I’m already here. Athletes recover all the time from worse injuries, and I’ve read more than a few random blogs from runners who’ve had a labral tear and returned to running, but still, something folds inside me when I think about my future. I probably won’t be one of those retired runners who decides to BQ (Boston Qualify) when they’re 65 and I might not make it to running a 5k Turkey Trot with my kids in 20 years. What if I find I can’t even hike a small mountain in 10 years or have to have a hip replacement in 15? Why am I so insistent on ‘being a runner’? How can I love something while knowing that it’s destroying me from the inside?

It’s an understatement to say it sucks to be at odds with your body, wanting more from it than it can give, shoving it through a cycle of life that might not ever have been its intention coming into this world. I have, in some part, always lived my life in pain and will continue to, as is the experience of being human. In a way, I chose the pain of a labral tear in my hip, the partial tear in my glute muscle, the strain in my hip flexor, and the bone inflammation that came because of those. I ran into it, smiling and crying and free, and I will run out of it the same way.

Calista LaMotte is a writer, runner, university administrator, and cat mom. A native Texan from the Rio Grande Valley now living in Brooklyn, Cali mainly writes non-fiction that explores identity, belonging, contradictions, and unlikely situations. Cali has a BA from the University of Texas at Austin. You can find her writing on Substack: spicytostada.substack.com.