🪨 fractures and intrusions

and why i'm taking a break

Jan 05, 2024

Moments before injury, I took a picture of this rock on my new year’s day walk:

It was the pink crystalline ribbon which caught my eye, winding its way through the rock. How did it get there?

At first I thought it might be evidence of an intrusion, which is when magma travels its way up, underground, pushing into other rocks, but then cools and crystallises before it reaches the surface. So you get this banding effect. The pink ribbon looked like a type of granite or other igneous rock because of how coarse the minerals were. But then when I googled ‘intrusions,’ I was met with images of massive bands that sliced through big rock faces, and the scale of it looked nothing looked similar to this rock.

As I continued my Googlin’, I came across an inclusion, which looked a bit more plausible. BUT, I am going to leave the floor open to The Geologists who read this newsletter. What do you think it is? Hit reply or leave a comment at the bottom!

So, for the rest of us. Inclusions and intrusions. What are they?

Intrusion: A rock which has once been magma, which has cut through another, older kind of rock.

Inclusion: A piece of an older rock contained within a younger rock.

So an intrusion happens when something new cuts through, and an inclusion is when the rock holds something older within it.

Little did I know, after taking the photograph of my mystery rock, I was about to suffer my own intrusion.

It involved a tennis ball, a dog, a bad throw, and my ankle.

Ball thrown. Dog launched. Ball hits me. Side step. Dog barrels through. I go down. Ankle twisted. I scream curses. Dog runs around with ball in elation? Confusion? Concern? If it was concern, he did a shite job at showing it.

I got home, weeped, iced and RICE’d my ankle, and hopped/crawled around the house when I needed something. The next day I woke up and I couldn’t let my foot touch anything, as each brush of contact sent glass deeper into my nerves. Dad picked me up and drove me to A&E, where I got into a wheelchair and Dad unceremoniously dragged me in behind him like a parcel delivery to the reception desk.

The weird thing about the waiting room at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary is that they have a vending machine with ready meals, but no microwave. They also had a can of tomato soup in the machine, but I don’t expect there’d be a can opener on hand anywhere.

As I daydreamed about someone holding an unopened can of tomato soup in a hospital waiting room and realising they’d just made a terrible mistake, my name was called. Wheeee! I was wheeled into a nurse’s office where a woman took my foot, ran her fingers over it until I yelled OUCH in certain places, and then sent me off for an x-ray.

Do you think you can feel x-rays when they happen? As I sat on the table in the special room, I tried to focus on whether or not I could sense the radiation happening when the beeps went off. Was it there? A slight tingle or pinprick of something? I kept my foot in the correct position, a square cross of light shining over it like an illuminated window.

I was returned to my first nurse who had told me she’d looked at the x-ray, and I had an internal sigh of disappointment because I wanted to have a look, too. When else do you get a chance to see your own bones? It doesn’t happen that often. I think the most I’ve ever seen is my own teeth. Maybe my ribcage, but that was a long time ago (when I was about 8, and convinced I’d swallowed a fishbone).

She told me that my ligament had been injured, and with the pull from the sprain, it had actually torn off a tiny piece of bone in my foot, creating a small fracture.

There was a great sense of vindication in this verdict, because my foot was bloody sore and the word ‘fracture’ has a kind of weight to it. I have a fracture! There was also relief when the nurse said that as long as I took painkillers, I would be able to walk on it without causing further damage.

Dad wheeled me out facefirst into a lash of wind and rain. About a yard from the car door I had my first go at being a Big Brave Girl™️ and taking my first steps. I got about 30% of my bad foot on the ground and tears crowded my eyes like paratroopers. No walking just yet.

After being bought plenty of painkillers and Too Many Kinder Buenos (see: just the right amount), I got home and by the end of the day, I was able to put weight on my foot and stand like a gout-ridden Dickensian character. Progress.

This little fracture has been quite the intrusion on my January. Like, a big, magmatic intrusion, making itself known across the rock face of my life (Stevie Wonder voice: 🎶 you are the rock face of my liiiiife 🎵 ). I was meant to take the plane back to London two days ago and get on with cleaning, packing up and moving out of my house. Not to mention actually finding another place to move into. Quite the undertaking for my return.

There’s no doubt that it’s going to be a busy month and the ankle situation is not a help, either. So I am going to try and be sensible here and say that I am going to take newsletter writing off my plate until February. You can expect more of A Constellation when I’m more settled, healed, and don’t have twenty boxes to pack.

When I write these geology-type posts, it’s always my aim to compare the Earth’s restlessness to the restlessness in our own lives. And at the end, I always try to come back to a comparison which makes us feel happier, more hopeful, a little bit more magical.

But I am sorry, when talking about fracturing your own foot, I am not going to talk about fractures in the Earth’s crust and then reel off that Leonard Cohen quote, because THIS IS NOT HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN. I would much rather be able to walk properly, and I am not marvelling at the slowing-down of my life right now, when things feel like they’re just about to speed up.

Here’s the thing, just like Planet Earth, our own lives sometimes have moments that just suck. And granted, this twisted ankle is not a meteoric, mass-extinction event. It’s something smaller, something annoying and frustrating.

There are intrusions which we have to hold and make space for. There are inclusions that we must carry with us. There are fractures we have to accept.

I looked through my photo album for pictures of rocks with fractures. These rocks below are scored and shaped by loads of different fractures, from stress and weathering. The moss grows over them, eventually they change shape. They are what they are. I have no further insight apart from… they are what they are.