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Caroline Moore

Never, Ever Give Up

By InnerVoice

February 15^th, 2019

Summit Day

I have never wanted to quit something athletic so bad in my life. Denali in Alaska is North America’s highest peak at 20,320 feet above sea level. Trying to eat was a fight I never won during our 16-day expedition. When summit day arrived, I was suffering from the cumulative effects of exposure at high altitude, and a major caloric deficit. It was brutal. I told my team I couldn’t go on, that I was pulling out of the rope and I would wait there, 1,000-feet below the summit. Overruled, we pressed on. With the help of my teammates and every ounce of grit, faith, and mental fortitude in my body, we stood together as the highest people in North America on June 5, 2013, at 6:15pm. There is a scope on that iconic mountain top, bringing with it a grandeur that is indescribable. To date, summiting Denali was a feeling unrivaled by anything else, and the most significant moment of triumph in my life.

However, the one-and-a-half day descent of the mountain was no victory lap; it was the coup de grâce for my knee injury, tearing every last fiber of cartilage to shreds. My pain was 10/10 and tears streamed down my face throughout the entire descent.

Little did I know that the ‘easy’ part of the expedition would flip my life upside down.

The 14er bug

I was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, and was an athlete from birth. I played every sport I could at a competitive level. While playing soccer during my freshman year in high school, I was a two-time, back-to-back victim of the “unhappy triad,” tearing the ACL, MCL, and medial meniscus in my left knee. I always had a dream of being a professional basketball or soccer player, but instead, I got bitten by the '14er bug' and when it bites, it bites with a tenacity that is hard to ignore.

The 14er bug is a calling to climb the fifty-eight 14,000-foot mountains in Colorado, and during my senior year of college, I got the itch to start climbing them again – something we had done each year as a family throughout my youth. With the existing damage from soccer, plus all of the additional pounding and toll, I progressively kept tearing more of my meniscus and articular cartilage. I soon earned the 'honorable' title of having Stage 4 Advanced Osteoarthritis at the age of 29.

But climbing all 58 mountains quickly turned into a project, and after learning the art of ‘ski-mountaineering,’ near the end of my quest I began to ski the mountains. I was blessed to be able to finish all 58 of Colorado’s 14ers in 2007.

Relentless pursuit

A few months after returning to Colorado from the Denali expedition, an MRI showed that I was bone-on-bone from significant lesions of cartilage loss. I had triple microfracture surgery, and after spending a year in physical therapy, there was still no evident progress, and the surgery was concluded as a failure. I was left on my own to seek out the best orthopedic knee doctors in the nation and gathered three opinions in Colorado and two in California. Every doctor told me the same thing: that my knee warranted a total knee replacement, but I was an ineligible patient due to my age. Every consultation ended with words that have kept me from giving up on all of this:

“You probably will not be able to climb and ski again, and you should seriously reconsider your activities.”

Unwilling to accept my prognosis, I remained in relentless pursuit of finding a physician who would give me even 1% chance to climb and ski again. I found a doctor in San Francisco who performs a biological knee replacement, and he gave me an 80% chance of returning to sport. I had the first surgery of a two-part series in September 2014 to address the articular cartilage defects and a loose ACL. Everything went very well. Six weeks later I flew back for the second surgery, a meniscus transplant from a cadaver. The transplant surgery is naturally more complex, and 4 hours later my doctor was happy to report that it was also a success.

A few days post-surgery, I began to have excruciating pain that worsened with each passing hour. I already had an extraordinarily high pain threshold, but this was foreign and came unbidden. Every second my leg was in the upright position I was in tears from agonizing pain. It was far above what a cocktail of major painkillers could help with; pain level 13/10, if that is possible. A test confirmed that I had a Staph infection, and I had emergency infection surgery to take the meniscus out. The only thing I could think about was how excited I was to be put under anesthesia for an hour to reap the smallest degree of pain relief.

We all overcome

I had a PICC line inserted into my arm for take-home IV treatment and would inject heavy antibiotics every 8 hours. All I could do was lay in the hotel bed, dreading every millimeter my leg would move. The pain meds compromised my appetite and I lost 16 pounds. Flying home was easily one of the worst days of my life; my leg was strewn across my father’s lap while I sat silently, crying.

The aftermath of the Staph infection is what has thrown my life into disarray. Five months of pain, scar tissue development, a fractured tibia during surgery to mobilize the joint (due to the scar tissue), and developing osteopenia from being on crutches for 10 months - it was all an absolute ordeal. To make things worse, that strain of Staph was very successful – meaning I was hyper-colonized with it and about 50 infections have arbitrarily developed on my skin. Constantly taking antibiotics has caused a plethora of gut problems and excessive fatigue.

Finally, after years of hurdles, in the spring of 2018, I got approved from my new surgeon to get a total knee replacement. More ready than ever, my dad and I flew out to Utah, and I became my doctor’s youngest recipient of a total knee. Two short hours after surgery, the nurses had me walking again, and everything I’d read or heard was that once the new knee is put in, it’s a reasonably straightforward recovery. No surprise, but not in my case. I struggled, a lot. I had to stay three nights in hospital due to the pain, and I was behind the traditional rehab schedule. I began to consider that I would never be able to return to the lifestyle I had before, and that adventuring may not be in my future. But around the six-month mark I had a breakthrough – the type of breakthrough any athlete yearns for during training or a race – a big one! I observed my strength coming back, and I ran for the first time in 8 years. I felt what it was like to jump again, and I’ve been skiing without agonizing pain. In the inspiring words of a very close friend,

“We all overcome.”

I did, I am, and I will continue to do so.

Live with Passion

Over the course of my injury, I’ve learned to wean out those who broke me down. I’ve had a handful of close friends say, “Caroline, why don’t you give up on climbing and skiing and pick a new, safer sport to pursue?” Those comments, considering who they were from, burned a hole in my heart, but I elected to continue pursuing my love for mountaineering. Through all of the years of daily pain, I knew I wasn’t going to give up on it before at least giving it a shot after getting my knee replaced. I placed a firm boundary between those who broke my spirits, and with gratitude, I’ve replaced them with those who build me up.

One of my doctors and his team employ the philosophy: “think of yourself as an athlete in recovery rather than a patient in rehab.” Wow, those words stuck in my head and always will. I still trained like the athlete I was before the injury, with long hours and multiple sessions, only within the limits of what my knee would allow let me do. I chose to follow what Nike says by “redefining my impossible” and am so fortunate to now have an incredible team working together for my good. People laugh at me all the time, but I’ve always looked up to Tim Tebow. He pursued his dreams to play professional football, and despite all of his naysayers he worked his hardest every single day. He stands as an unabashed defender of his faith and openly wears it on his sleeve for the world to see. He displays natural leadership, humility, kindness, and moxie in a way that I find immeasurably motivating. Everything he does, he does with passion. Without passion, we can’t live our lives completely and utterly to full capacity.

I'm continually amazed at how believing in yourself and visualizing success make an undeniable difference. I refuse to be defeated by my plight. Those people, including many doctors, who told me to give up the fact that I’ll climb and ski again, they fueled the fire in my heart that was pushing me to prove them wrong. Not a day went by that I didn’t visualize myself skiing or climbing. During the 2016/2017 ski season, that same fire in my heart said I should try skiing using two substantial knee braces. Absolutely, there was a lot of pain and some days I could only do a few short runs, but skiing twelve days that season was a miracle given the status of my shredded up knee. And it was only possible through the power of visualization.

Never, ever Give up

I used to have a stubborn mindset that told me to push through what might be unsafe, or quit when I physically could not find it in me to push on. But now, my inner voice clearly tells me to listen to what God is telling me; He knows better than I think I do. If there are any good ‘chains’ to bind me to something, those chains bind me to my faith, which is where my inner voice is the most honest and transparent. I hear patience as loud as church bells. I hear to combat the negative or self-destructive thoughts that can so easily cause a downhill spiral. I hear to stand firm in my faith because that is the one thing that forever remains a cornerstone in my life. I hear that I am loved. I hear to never lose hope; to never, ever give up.

There are so many things I’ve learned over these five years of injury. Patience is the prominent piece I’m grateful to have experienced; I have used that in so many facets of my life. Selflessness is another. It’s not all about me. I’ve learned to embrace whatever is dealt to me, good or bad, and use it to educate others.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the hardest and most unpredicted part of my athletic career was caused by a tiny little germ that I couldn’t even see. On reflection, this entire process has been the biggest test of mental fortitude I’ve displayed to date. And if I’m honest, for a while, I had a really hard time facing defeat. Trauma overwhelms our ability to cope, and I wrongly processed much of my struggle internally, and it manifested into depression. My identity as an ‘extreme’ endurance athlete atrophied right along with my muscles. Once I accepted the difference between being injured – when sport-specific training is no longer possible because something is seriously wrong – and being hurt, the reality of possibly not climbing again taught me to embrace defeat. I was forced to adjust the athletic expectations of myself to work within the parameters of my injury and not from any ego. I learned to be comfortable in complete discomfort and found that to be directly proportional to developing all facets of patience. Uncomfortable became my normal. Most importantly, this has been a testimony to my faith – and that is truly where my identity is found.

Footnotes

Words by Caroline Moore, Cover photo by Jody Grigg Photography, other photos as attributed, Edited by Cody Royle, Published by Travis McKenzie, Copyright NTSQ Sports Group Inc.

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FootNotes

Words by Caroline Moore, Cover photo by Jody Grigg Photography, other photos as attributed, Edited by Cody Royle, Published by Travis McKenzie, Copyright NTSQ Sports Group Inc.

Colin O'Brady

Caroline Moore

Never, Ever Give Up

FootNotes

No Human is Limited

I'm Here To Win

The Humble Son

My Incredible Journey

The Most Interesting Man In The World

Season 3