COLD AND HOT
Sitting with an ice pack on my wretched knee trying to freeze this intrusive pain into oblivion. Will follow up with a heating pad as an apologise to my leg and then will segue into a full set of exercises that will hopefully restore some semblance of normalcy. Have also swilled down three ibuprofen and am as usual snacking on cookies and chocolate to fuel my writing.
The culprit in all of this is apparently a full blown arthritis invasion, but replacement surgery is not recommended or needed as the interior condition has only deteriorated a small amount in the last ten years.
Besides…I intend to leave to leave with all the body parts I came with.
Am not going in twice week to PT because…well…at the moment it’s 520 miles away. And insurance does not cover out of state costs. So it’s up to me to be…diligent. Which is not in my nature. At all.
The one cardinal sin of exercise is that aside from being at times painful it is also wretchedly boring.
Unless..of course…you have the good fortune to be…a dancer Dancers can stare at themselves for hours on end watching the movement of every body part. In the gym I always know who the dancers are because they are the ones on the treadmill facing a mirror staring at themselves in fascination while I’m trying to keep my balance while reading a book or studying a script.
I did try to replicate the formal PT experience by purchasing a mechanism that attaches to a bike and keeps it stationery. I had sent my bike to Ohio to live with Ron a while back so all we needed to do was attach this thing. One of the reviews I read stated clearly that it was amazingly simple to assemble.
Not so amazingly…it wasn’t.
Ron made a heroic effort to get it to work and it took one second on the bike to realise what I mistake I made.
Riding this way means the knee going backward has to bend…and therein lies the problem. That’s where all the pain is.
And as usual Ron did not despair but explained how it can still work by using it slowly and carefully a very little bit at a time.
So…here I go…thanks for reading this far….will report progress…
I love the difference between the narrator and the dancers, the no-apologies dismissal of gym-therapy as "boring." I loved the image of the narrator on the treadmill, escaping as best she can with book or script.
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