!Breathing Hole cave hurt me --- agk's diary 20 February 2024 @ 04:17 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 & ThinkPad X61 w/model m&vf15 in living room while daughter naps and kitchen as she monologues, sings, and climbs all over me --- Last month I tagged along with Bloomington Indiana Grotto and Central Indiana Grotto on a trip down into Breathing Hole Cave. Breathing Hole is in Harrison-Crawford Forest in southern Indiana, in the Wyandotte Caves area. Nate, the trip leader, handled the DNR permit. My famous 3-year-old sat this one out at the campsite with some friends, and good thing she did! About 19 of us suited up and headed out into the woods, off-trail, over a couple small ridges. A couple cavers opted to not go, because the cave's mean. "Mean?" I thought. "I'm a tough, wild-assed caver. How mean can it be?" A couple hours later I learned how mean. The entrance is an unassuming meter-wide hole in in the forest floor, a little tighter than a manhole in a city street. We moved down slowly, sweating, over ledges, down short drops, through squeezes. We passed packs (but didn't rock any), encouraged people behind us to put their foot somewhere good, and paused often. During the pauses as we all slowly wormed our way down 50 meters, I got some of the cave's story. Supposedly a caver was obsessed with it for the better part of a decade, when it was a hole in the ground that didn't go very deep at all. A cigarette held over the hole showed bilateral air movement, in and out, indicating some huge passages somewhere down there. So, the story I was told goes, the maniac dug and and dug, for years and years, assisted by whoever would help. All the shelves and drops, squeezes, and crawls we descended between 50 meters of what looked to me like big seperate rocks, connected only by dirt and mud, were dug. The descent took a while before it got cave-cold. I run hot, even in my sleeveless spandex top, and found myself dreaming of the cold water and smooth walls in Mullins Springs cave as I descended between jagged rock after jagged rock. But the cave had not yet been mean to me. That came later. The slow clambering descent through what I can only think to call breakdown ended in a horizontal stream passage big enough to easily walk. Most people opted to stay out of the ankle-deep water as much as possible, but anybody in DUG knows my dolphin ass stayed in it. The stream deepened to 30 cm or a half meter, usually with a sandy bank or breakdown to walk on. It was always full of big jagged rocks. The rocks didn't break square, but into horrible dagger-like wedges, like Imperial Star Destroyers from Star Wars. I splashed on, banging my shins on those shitty rocks but enjoying the cold water. The stream passage frequently split into upper and lower passages. Eighteen people clambered up over the jagged breakdown at these points. I dolphined down under it, and shook the water out of my ear each time I came up. After a couple of these, I figured I could race the people above me. Shin-banging intensified, and became increasingly painful. Once or twice someone followed me through the water under one of these breakdown bifurcations. Gosh, I was a hot-shot. Lesson of the day: just 'cause you can do something in a cave creek with a sandy or pebbly bottom don't mean you can do it in a cave creek full of thousand kilogram pointy things that want to hurt you. The passage opened up into a series of cavernous rooms, with steep mud slides to perilously slip down and slip and slide up. The walls, jagged rocks emerging from the mud, and the mud itself were encrusted with glittering gypsum crystals, needle- sharp. We moved single-file through the huge auditorium of a room, to disturb the crystals as little as possible. We'd been in the cave two or three hours. I started slowly realizing I had a problem, possibly bad. My left ankle ached like I'd sprained or strained it. Each step was worse than the last. I wracked my brain, but couldn't remember landing wrong. Just those dagger-like rocks hiding under the water, the water that no longer iced my ankle, as we'd left it behind. We stopped for lunch in the hugest room yet. Not an auditorium, a stadium. There were a few spectacular pillars, stalagmites and stalactites, including some that charged under UV light and glowed in the dark. There was a waterfall, and a snake skeleton more than twenty years old. I told Nate I'd hurt my ankle, and expected I'd need some help getting out. We couldn't come up with any splint ideas better than just leaving my boot on. "Well," Nate said. "If this turns out to be your last cave trip, you really can't be buried deeper for cheaper!" The way out just got tougher for me over time. Each limping step hurt more than the previous. I hurt too much to do any hot-shotting. At key points the bunch in the front stopped and waited for Nate, Springtime, and the rest of the group that stayed with me. I kept my foot in the cool water when I could, and envied Springtime's new kneepad/shin protectors. My slow pace allowed others to find wildlife, the coolest of which were a number of blind fish. Finally we were back at the bottom of that jagged, tight, long 50 meter climb, one by one, back to the surface. Everybody's pace slowed. My three points of contact meant I didn't really need my bad foot much. Sometimes I could keep moving with just three limbs. Sometimes the knee above the ankle came into play. But that ankle couldn't tolerate any weight by this point. I couldn't push with it. A few spots that meant I lay for a while and thought, tried a lot of approaches with pauses between each and a few people below and above me offering encouragement or suggestions til I managed inch by inch to continue. I wasn't the only one. Another member of our party got stuck at the tightest part of the ascent for at least 20 minutes. I rested on my back, foot propped higher than my heart, singing softly for pain control, appreciating the indefinite break til a few cavers who'd scampered up to him finally got him through. The last five meters the cave was sucking in cigarette smoke. The movement of air was really dramatic. When everybody else took off back through the trailless woods, Springtime and Nate hung back with me. I leaned on Springtime and a stick and yelped a lot. Nate kept us smiling as we blundered our way slowly back to the cars. That was when I finally got a look at my foot, and got to poke and prod and wiggle my way into a guess of what to do to help it heal. The biggest thing, other than awful pain when it bore weight, was it wanted to drop. I had to consciously use my muscles to keep my toes from drooping. There was blunt trauma all over the shin. I figured I'd bruised stuff that loses function when bruised: a tendon or ligament, a nerve, or damaged a muscle. Back at camp, my old friends from Indianapolis who'd been watching my daughter, Springtime, and I went through a dozen revisions of a homemade orthopedic boot to stabilize my ankle and prevent foot drop. The final one's foot support was a child's board book extended with some scrap cardboard and wrapped in duct tape. The vertical ankle support was a flexible cutting board from the dollar store, a sock, and a bunch more duct tape. It was possible to get the boot off when my foot needed to breathe, but I mostly kept it on, took Ibuprofin, and stayed off it as much as possible the rest of the night and the next day, with a LOT of help from my friends. I had to skip the Sunday morning cave trip, very slowly broke camp, and yelped as I drove home every time that foot had to engage the clutch to shift gears. At work I called in sick and managed to get a week of light-duty accomodations. I was mostly out of the boot in 4 days, and mostly out of ace wraps, linaments, and pain in two weeks. A month later I still have a nodule below the skin two-thirds of the way up my shin, where Breathing Hole kissed me. It's best to keep your boot on while you evacuate an ankle injury. They swell, the boot's a good splint, and what comes off may not go back on. Once evacuation's complete, somebody reasonably qualified should assess it. I host a good assessment guide at agk.sdf.org/lib/cse that can jog the memory. When in doubt get high-tech assessment and further care. I can't be entirely certain what happened, since I ruled out really bad stuff so decided to skip the high-tech assessment. The hospital would have given me a more definite diagnosis, but their care would have been the same as what my friends helped me improvise in the woods. Breathing hole was beautiful, if mean. My friends made up for it with an abundance of care. Next time I guess I'll be more careful.