I spent 26 years preaching motion. Turns out I forgot to listen to my own sermon.
It started in January. A pain in my left calf.
No trauma. No injury. No fall, no twist, nothing I could point to. Just a sore leg that showed up out of nowhere and would not leave.
So I did what we all do. I told myself a story. Trick knee. Trick leg. Lots of rain out there. I worked it out, got some massage done, felt a little better, moved on.
It came back. Then it brought friends. A little wheezing. Out of breath going up the stairs. I figured it was a chest cold, maybe bordering on pneumonia, that time of year, no big deal.
Then a week later I woke up and my calf was the size of a football. Red. Hot to the touch. Painful. Just one leg. No reason for it.
And here’s the first piece of advice, free of charge. Always listen to your wife.
She made me call urgent care. The nurse heard about thirty seconds of it and said the words you never want to hear: get to emergency. Right now. I think you have blood clots.
I’ll give our health care system credit. When it’s matters of the heart, they do not mess around. ECG. Three sets of blood work. A D-dimer test. The threshold on that test is 500. The doctor told me you can usually go up to 1000 and still feel okay about it.
I was at 1500.
Chest x-ray. CT scan. And there it was. Blood clots in my leg. Some of them had broken off, migrated up through my heart, and lodged in the outer lobes of my lungs. They have a name for that. Pulmonary embolism.
The kind of thing you can drop dead from.
I’m an idiot. Let’s just put that out there.
What actually caused it
Here’s the part that stopped me cold, and it’s the reason I’m writing this instead of just being grateful and moving on.
The clots didn’t come from a crash. No accident. No one event. The most likely cause? Sitting. Fourteen-hour days in the chair, cranking out work, not moving. Immobility. Blood that sat still long enough to turn solid.
I have built a 26-year career on one idea. Motion. Take the next step. Don’t freeze. Stillness is the enemy. I have said “motion creates emotion” more times than I can count, and I meant it as a mindset thing. A pep talk. A metaphor.
Turns out it was never a metaphor.
It was plumbing. Blood that moves stays liquid. Blood that pools turns into the thing that kills you. The body does not care about your intentions. It cares whether you move.
The thing that kills you doesn’t knock
Now here’s the part where I’m supposed to point at you and tell you what your trick knee is.
I’m not going to do that. Because I’d be a hypocrite, and right now the mirror’s pointed the wrong way.
Take my advice. I’m clearly not using it.
I didn’t write this from a hospital bed with my life all squared away. I wrote it with a calf full of clots AND a list of stuff I’ve been dodging for months. The exact stuff I tell other people to handle. So let me go first.
My website’s been out of date for over a year. No mention of the development work, which is the thing that’s actually hot right now. And instead of a quick splash and dash to fix it, I decided to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up. Which means it’s still not done. Classic me. I made the job so big I gave myself permission to never start it.
I shoulder the load alone. When something gets heavy, my instinct is to carry it solo and not be a burden on anybody. I have coached people for 25 years to ask for help, and I am terrible at swallowing my own medicine.
And I’m optimistic to a fault. Old stoic idea: a strength taken to an extreme becomes a defect. I’ll find the upside in anything, which is a gift, right up until it lets me gloss over the one thing I should be staring straight at.
None of those knocked. They pooled. Quietly. For months.
So I’m not standing over you. I’m standing next to you, looking in the same mirror. And I’d bet you’ve got your own version of the list:
The property bleeding $1,800 a month you keep saying will come back.
The numbers conversation with your key stakeholders you keep not having.
The deal you should have exited eighteen months ago and keep holding “just a little longer.”
The books, the filings, the structure you keep meaning to clean up.
That stuff doesn’t knock either. It pools. It turns solid while we’re busy. And then one morning it’s hot and red and swollen and it’s an emergency, and you’re sitting in a chair you can’t get out of fast enough, wishing you’d listened back in January.
The dangerous problems in this business are never the loud ones. They’re the quiet ones we’ve trained ourselves not to look at. Me very much included. Especially me.
What I’m doing tonight (pull up a chair)
I’m not handing you a list of orders from the pulpit. I’m showing you my list. Steal whatever’s useful.
- Name the trick knee. I just named three of mine up there. In plain language. Real number, real property, real conversation. No rounding, no “it’s probably fine.” Your turn.
- Take its temperature. Checkup from the neck up. Be honest. Is it actually fine, or have we just gotten really good at not looking? (Guilty as charged.)
- Make one call. The accountant, the lawyer, the key stakeholder, the coach, the friend who’s been through it. This is the one I’m worst at, so I’m booking mine this week. Match me.
- Move something. Stand up. Then make one decision you’ve been sitting on. Stillness is the risk. Motion is the treatment. It always was.
The treatment plan for my leg, by the way, is almost insultingly simple. Blood thinners. Keep moving. See you in a couple of weeks. Maybe three to six months, maybe the rest of my life. We’ll see.
The treatment plan for everything else is the same. Get it moving before it sets.
I’m still here
Grateful. And finally moving. After the scare I got myself a proper fitness tracker and brought back my morning walk, the simple stuff I’d let slide while I was busy being important in a chair. I get to keep doing the reps, keep having these conversations, keep paying forward what 26 years of expensive lessons taught me. I didn’t get these gray hairs by accident. Every one was earned, and a few of them showed up this past week.
I’m not writing this as the guy who figured it out. I’m writing it as the guy who almost didn’t, and who still has a list on the fridge with his own name on it. We’re in the same mirror. I just got the scare first.
You’re worth catching it early. You’re worth the honest conversation, the hard decision, the call you’ve been avoiding. I believe that about you even on the days you don’t.
So tonight, let’s both go find the trick knee. Take its temperature. Make the call. Then move.
And always… always listen to your wife.
In your corner,
Russell Westcott
#Inspire # Encourage #Love
