I pulled a hip flexor while playing roller derby this past weekend. Thankfully there was a sports therapist in the audience who was willing to provide treatment off-track. We went into a separate room, I laid down on the concrete floor, and then spent the next twenty minutes having my sartorius pulled apart like shredded chicken. The closest amount of pain I’ve experienced to that “massage” was when my midwife had to manually mush my uterus to dislodge the placenta after the birth of my second child. (The child slid out like she was late for her prom; the placenta stubbornly hung in there like it was auditioning to be my newest organ.)

At the end of this stint where I pretended to be a ball of dough on The Great British Baking Show, the therapist offered to apply KT tape. It was only after my pants were on their way down that I remembered – I wasn’t wearing any underwear. I think the therapist had already figured it out at this point, but I did sober up enough to mumble an already-overdue apology. No one expects a simple KT tape application to turn into a peep show, and this was a men’s sports therapist, so while I’m sure he’s seen his fair share of balls 😜, I don’t think he was expecting to see what he saw when he purchased his derby ticket that day.

I hope his nachos were still warm when he got back to his seat.

But having a muscle pulled into taffy wasn’t the last unfortunate thing that happened to me this weekend, nor was it even the start of this ordeal. Let me take you back about ten minutes to when I first realized I could no longer lift my leg.

I had already been benched for half of the first game because I kept getting penalties (whether they were justified or not is beside the point here) (but just for the record – THEY WEREN’T), and therefore I was anxious to get back on the track and prove myself in the second game. But with only a few minutes left in the first half, I realized I could no longer lift my leg, which is arguably an important ability for playing roller derby. I immediately began to panic – How can I fix this? I need to fix this! I need to be here for my team! I’m letting my team down! I’m useless! I need to fix this! Stop being weak! Why I immediately went into this spiral of negative thoughts is perhaps fodder for a future blog post. But anyway, I was told there was a massage therapist giving free massages at the back of the convention hall and I should go to her. I was now pinning 100% of my athletic hopes and dreams on this woman.

I skated over to her booth, but no one was there. There was no “Back in 10 minutes” sign, no disengaged teenager scrolling on her phone who could mutter “My mom just went to the bathroom” at me, or any sign whatsoever to indicate when I could expect her back. I felt the floor crumbling beneath my quad skates.

Next to her table was a vendor booth run by the husband of a friend and fellow skater. I asked him if he knew where the massage therapist went and he told me he thought she went out for lunch. “So…she won’t be back for like thirty minutes or maybe an hour?” I said. He nodded nonchalantly, shrugging his shoulders in the carefree way that people not on the verge of a mental breakdown do. “Yeah, sounds about right.”

I said to him, “Can I come behind your booth and cry for a while?”

With only a small amount of visible trepidation, he agreed. I took one step towards sanctuary, tripped and fell to the ground. Then I crawled on all fours past his feet and around to the back of his booth, which is where my wonderful husband found me three seconds later, to the great relief of all (but mainly my friend’s husband.) He picked me up and guided me to an adjoining room, where we were met by the therapist and you know the rest.

So. The Next Day.

After NOT spending time team bonding in the hotel hot tub like I had originally planned, I woke up bright and early, 100% ready to give my best to the second day of the tournament. I had a nice early morning pump-up text exchange with my co-captain, my hip was feeling slightly better, and I was out the door ten minutes ahead of schedule. In the words of a certain, extremely annoying and underdressed pseudo-hero: Tra La LAAAAAA.

My mother, who lives in the town the tournament was played in, gave me directions to a free parking lot very close to the venue, where the path to the venue is mostly free from stairs. Win/Win/Win. But when I arrived, I couldn’t help but notice a (albeit, rather small) sign that said PERMIT ONLY. Clearly my mother either 1) is living in 1988, when this parking lot was still open to the public or 2) hates me and wants me to suffer. (I suppose it could be 3) It’s a brand-new sign, but I’m leaning towards Option 2, especially after what came next.)

I decided to drive around because surely there was a parking garage close by, right? I was in Downtown – there should have been a parking garage on every other block! I really did not want to have to park in the same garage I had parked in the day before, because it was an eight-minute walk away and I had to walk up and down a bunch of stairs to reach the venue. Stairs and I were on the outs at the moment.

So as I drove around and around this absolute noodle bowl of a downtown, my GPS kept trying to reroute me every time I missed a 170 degree turn, thinking it wanted me to take the next 120 degree turn. (Clearly the founders of this city had never heard of right angles.)

I finally resigned myself to parking in the same garage as I did the day before. The devil you know, and all that. I park in literally the same spot as I did the day before, take literally the same elevator down to the ground floor as I did the day before, exit literally the same doors as I did the day before, set my walking GPS to take me literally the same route as I did the day before…

…and went the wrong way.

When I had headed out of the parking garage on the previous day, I had followed a crowd of people who were all headed to the same venue. Thus, I didn’t really pay any attention to where I was going. I’m a lemur, ok?

But now I was all on my own. And nothing looked familiar. I don’t know why my sense of direction is so bad, other than that is just not my brain’s strong suit. I can write; I can cook; I can comfort my children when they are sad. But I cannot, as one friend put it later as I recounted my tale, find my way out of a paper bag.

But like I said, I had my little walking GPS on my phone and so, after double and triple-checking my intersection, I headed off in the direction of that guiding blue line. I strolled down two unfamiliar blocks, and just as I was thinking to myself Shouldn’t I see something familiar by now?, I heard, “Proceed to the route.”

Well, that’s odd, I thought. Aren’t I on the route? My phone identified me as a throbbing blue circle, and just ahead of me was a solid blue line. I kept proceeding. My blue dot kept throbbing. The blue line…wait a sec, was the blue line leaving me behind? I couldn’t tell if the distance between my blue dot on the map was actually falling behind the blue line, or if it was just my imagination.

“Proceed to the route.”

I am.

“Proceed to the route.”

I am…aren’t I?

“Proceed to the route.”

I…I…

“Proceed to the route.”

I’m going to cry.

At this point, I had no idea where I was anymore. Long gone was the parking garage, and for all I knew the venue had been relocated to the other side of the moon overnight; I had never once come close to spotting it. I had been walking for about fifteen minutes at this point, and I finally decided to stop and call my mom.

When she answered, I burst into tears and mumbled, “Mom, I’m so lost I don’t know where I am you had to have a permit to park in that parking lot no it’s okay I know you didn’t know I’m like thirty minutes late it’s really cold my fingers are frozen can you help me please.” And my dear, sweet mother calmly asked me where I was and after I located the nearest intersection, she guided me through the center of downtown, across the central plaza area, safely past all the sketchy alleys, right back to the parking garage.

“Ok, great,” I said, “I’m back where I started. Now what?”

“What do you mean?” she replied. “Isn’t that where you wanted to go?”

There had been a miscommunication.

At this point, I disassociated. My soul floated up, up, and away, all the way up to the clouds high above my Little Matchgirl body, all the way up and out of this dimension and through the screen at the movie theater and into another version of Kate – a version who was enjoying a big bowl of popcorn while laughing at this dark comedy.

Back in this dimension, I gave a great honking laugh – the kind that explodes from you when your last strand of sanity breaks – and immediately felt relief. Unless the disturbed man who had been yelling about when the appropriate time to cross the street was and when it fucking wasn’t decided I was responsible for cross signals and wanted to settle things, the worst had already passed.

My mother then directed me step-by-step to the venue which I reached ten minutes later, my frozen fingers curled into little snacks ready for the passengers of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. I wiped my runny nose and headed inside the locker room where my team had already finished warming up and was sitting around chatting and getting ready.

As I stood to the side, huffing breath on my hands and trying to restore sensation while reminding myself that today could still turn out to be a good day, I was suddenly reminded that I had seen several boxes of donuts on the other side of the room the day before. I generally avoid big fried wads of sugar and bleached flour, but big fried wads of sugar and bleached flour also cause my brain to excrete dopamine, which is exactly what I needed at that moment.

I strolled over and selected the most scrumptious-looking powdered jelly donut in the box, and gently nibbled a small, sweet bite out of it. Pure. Bliss. I took another tender bite, my mouth filling with soft, gooey joy, turned around and saw a sign which read, “For refs and officials ONLY.”

The donut immediately morphed into a giant loogie that clogged my gullet on its way down. I had STOLEN a donut. A sinister voice hissed in my ear, “These donuts aren’t meant for yoooooooou. How dare yooooooou think you can just come over here and steal from the VOLUNTEERS. You’re a THIEF and a TERRIBLE PERSON™ and you literally make bad choices all day long.”

I looked to the skater nearest me and said, “I’m going to go have a mental breakdown. Be right back.” I threw the undeserved donut in the trash, sped to the nearest bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and completed MD Number Three. Or maybe it was Number Four. I’d lost count at this point.

Ten minutes later, I thought that maybe I was ready to rejoin society, but first I needed to make sure I wouldn’t burst into tears over donuts, or walking, or being cold, or the sky, or circles, or my hands, or my hip flexor, or coffee, or skates, or popcorn, or anything else, so I thought about everything that had gone wrong that morning, and everything that had gone wrong the day before, and just for good measure I quickly obsessed over each and every thing that anyone had ever said to me that was mean from about the fifth grade on, and when none of it made me cry, I blew my nose on some scratchy one-ply toilet paper and left the stall.

My team won their next game without my help, and then lost the game after that, also without my help. But our first home bout of the season is the day after tomorrow, and I’m playing in it whether this universe wants me to or not.