The Burrow

I can feel the blood flowing, strong, warm, and with alacrity.  Sometimes it gets stuck around a joint that's been bent too long which requires scratching and pressing and helping to get the circulation get going again.  It feels so good, once it's moving properly. Apparently, it wasn't my right hip so much as my left hip and the concomitant pelvic realignment that was to blame for my increasing inability to walk.  This evening, I'm gliding around the house, volunteering to get things from the garage, taking no more than a second or two to get organized before I start walking.   That's fine, slowing down is fine, not hurting is much more than fine.  As my gait worsened and those who love me worried aloud to me, the more despondent I became.... and the stiffer and more painful my gait became.  I started talking about seeing the orthopedic surgeon who reconstructed my hip.   I'm so much more than fine now that I remember that supervised therape...

Not the strict rolfing that true practitioners practice, but a combination of body work techniques designed to lengthen and realign and thereby strengthen all the pieces that work together to hold me upright. It's not for the faint of heart, either physically or emotionally.   She reset the ball in the socket of my hip joint; the residue is unpleasant though necessary.  After all, stuff moved in when the ball moved over.  That stuff is now making its way out of the hip area  - and it's not leaving quietly.  It doesn't feel like inflammation.  It feels like sludge. Several people asked if I needed help at Costco.  TBG carried the meat out to the bbq. I want more decorations inside and out, but the thought of moving off this couch and carrying them back leaves me cold. I'll feel better tomorrow.  Tonight, I'm going to indulge in some serious self care.  My hip is kind of insisting on it.

You'd think I'd have learned the lesson by now.  I've spent the past 6 weeks preparing for and celebrating and preparing for and celebrating family and friends and arrivals and departures and holidays out the wazooo.  What I haven't been doing is exercising. An occasional Pilates video, mostly to break up the monotony, when I didn't have a package to wrap or a book to read.  There haven't been that many monotonous moments recently. I rode TBG's spin bike exactly once, due to the arrival of the cute bike shorts I'd ordered when I momentarily agreed with TBG that regular cycling would strengthen all that needed to be strengthened.  He was right then and he is right now. Like I said, you'd think I'd have learned the lesson by now. Big Cuter's face was horrified as he watched me lurch around the kitchen.  MOM! Do something about your leg!  He's a grown man, who's guarded with his emotions.  This was my little boy worrying about me.  It go...

It was another morning of outdoor yoga.  The same little black bugs were annoying, but Tiger Balm kept most of them away from my exposed flesh.  The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and as our Yogi noted, the trees had magnificent shapes. Taos Bubbe joined me; I haven't exercised next to a friend in 20 months.  It made my heart sing. We started standing, which led to balancing, which led to a lot of quivering.  Rooting down and reaching up, floating my arms..... mostly trying not to fall down. Through my efforts came the Yogi's words - from grace and ease comes strength. Strength is what I miss the most.  I carried my own heavy grocery bags.  I did the heavy lifting in the garden.  I liked surprising people.    Now, I usually accept help with a grateful nod.  If I can, I should is my new mantra.  But not many everyday activities remind me of what I am missing.  I ambulate well and sometimes it even looks like walking. ...

Fixed may be overstating the case, but improved is certainly true.   I drove Scarlet and her pooch up to Scottsdale three times in the last week.  It's about 120 miles and takes about an hour and a half.  We drive there, she drops off the dog, and we turn around and come home.  I take the time she's in the office to stretch.  I do all the driving. Normally, I'd be bent and broken by the time I returned home.  But her surprisingly wonderful Camry left me feeling strong and straight.  Why?  Perhaps because her seat has many more adjustment options than my Honda HRV.  Her seat can dip down at my knee.  I sat further back than I usually do.  Her steering wheel adjusts up and down and forward and back; I put it lower than the Honda's and further away. With my leg stretched out instead of bent at the knee, I could sit with both butt cheeks firmly planted on the seat.  I found my posture was improved.  At the end of the last...

The local Cornell Club had an outing on Saturday.  Eighteen intrepid souls met early n the morning for conversation at the Visitor Center at Sabino Canyon Recreation Area. That sounds like a venue for ball fields and playground equipment.  It's not.  It's part of the Coronado National Forest; the activities are in those you can do in the great outdoors.  And this is The Great Outdoors.  The mountains loom overhead. The boulders and the cacti and the trees and the water are all the enticements you need.   There are two options - hiking or riding.   There's a shuttle to the top of the developed area.  For $12 you get your own brand new earbuds - just like the ones you buy at CVS when  you're on the way to the gym and realize you've left yours at home - and a seat on the open-air tram car.  The narration is in English and Spanish; it hits the right note between nerd and knowledge.   FDR is responsible for a lot of the co...

I noticed that my hip doesn't hurt.   Brother said, halfway through this adventure in perforation, You never get a break, do you?  It's always there.   He was right.  It was always there, until suddenly, it wasn't. Sure, I can make it hurt, but the dull ache of chronic pain centered in my hip is a thing of the past. ***** Of course, right now, after Pilates and swimming a quarter mile's worth of laps, my newly discovered adductors are announcing their presence with authority. As always, so long as the pain  sensation keeps moving around, everything's good.  ***** It's not pain.  It's a sensation.   A wise physical therapist counseled  me to assess the threat value of the sensation  before I decided it was pain and not discomfort related to getting better.  It was very good advice.   I feel the sensation and I re-adjust my posture so that all my muscles are working together and, while it takes effort to hold mysel...

 I noticed it in  Pilates on Tuesday morning.  I didn't do anything unusual, but all of a sudden certain movements were quite unpleasant.  The tendon or ligament or nerve that goes over the top of my hip bone was inflamed.  Swollen, warm to the touch, ouchy when compressed.  Sitting up straight became an imperative.  Slouching produced a sharp, hot pain. Yes, pain.  I adhere to the mantra given to me by a marvelous PT in Chicago as I started out on this journey:  Assess the threat value of the sensation.  Akin to adopting a Mindfulness outlook, I notice and appreciate and investigate the feeling.  I don't automatically jump to pain. This was pain.  I took 2 Advil and 1 Bayer and lay on my belly.  I rolled over.  I sat up.  Nothing worked.  I reviewed my activities, such as they were, trying to figure out when I'd done such damage to myself.  I could recall no injury, no incident, no moment of trauma. I ...

Jonathan Swan's Axios interview with DJT  was a candidate for this post.  For some reason.... okay, for many reasons..... it makes me extraordinarily happy.  The man's a blithering idiot, waving around charts with big (seriously big), bright bars of color and pouting that the interviewer couldn't ask questions that weren't on the chart.   TBG and I sat, fascinated, then closed our eyes and couldn't tell if we were listening to Alec Baldwin or the real deal.  We opened our eyes and imagined Sarah Cooper lip syncing his words.  The exercise made it a bit more palatable.... and then I started to giggle.  The whole thing is so ridiculous, and Mr. Swan was so meticulous, and yes the Modern Major General did come to mind. But that's about all I had that to share. The faunae (isn't that a great plural?)  are racing and slithering and scampering and leaping (yes, it's leaping when you're a bunny covering great distances on tiny little legs) and soar...

That's the blend of ground beef I buy.  That's also the balance between recovery and disability I face.  On the surface, that's a very, very good thing.  I remember when I couldn't bend over to empty the bottom rack of the dishwasher.  Picking up a plate down there- let alone a stack of three or four of them - was impossible.  Once the plates were out of the machine, turning and walking the two or three steps to the cabinet was excruciating.  It was much easier to concentrate on the top rack and let TBG bother with the bottom.  It's our division of labor even now, almost none years later.  When I'm alone, I can.  When he's there, why should I? That's the dilemma of 85/15.  A physiatrist, looking at my Activities of Daily Living, would be delighted.  I can hear it now:  At my age.... with my injuries.... 85% is wonderful. That last 15% though, that's all the fun stuff. I gardened,   Getting up and down off ...

Sometimes, when I catch a reflection or a mirror's evidence of my uneven gait, it stops me in my tracks. Why is my right hip up at an angle.  There's no way that helps propel me forward. Why is my entire torso angled to the left?  My hips are going forward, and my head is aimed that way too.  But my thoracic spine decided a while ago to turn away from my injured acetablulum, trying to escape the inescapable. In response to a talking head on tv,  TBG wondered if I would ever get over  being shot.    No , and I don't want to. Certainly the physical pieces are constant reminders, so hoping that I'll be able to relegate it to the Oh, yeah, what about that?  bin in my brain would be a fool's errand.  And why would I want to get over something which at its core is evil but whose effects have been quite special? I'll never get over the murder of my little friend, or the hole she's left in the lives of those who loved her.  But I look ...

I haven't commented on my physical well-being in a while.  Today, a good day, seems like the time to bring you up to date. I decided not to climb the Sears Tower this November.  It's not that I couldn't do it, it's that I don't want to train for it.  The thought of spending an hour a day for the next twelve weeks in a stairwell became ever less appealing.  I can tramp up the only steps I regularly encounter (to the Pilates studio on the 2nd floor) without holding on (most days) to the railing.  I can plant each foot firmly on the tread, lifting my knee high enough to land on the next one without canting to the left.  Most days, I don't need both feet on one step before proceeding onward and upward.  Going down is a whole 'nother story.  Then, again, I don't know a lot of people my age who spryly bounce down stairs.  Hiking down was always harder for me than hiking up; this feels like a return to normal.  Well, almost. gaia.com ...

I haven't felt this way in a very long time.  Coming out of the hospital, everything was scary.  Skinny white boys in hoodies crossing in front of my car gave me shivers.  TBG dropping a pan in the kitchen made me screech.  An unexpected touch made my skin crawl.  Everything was threatening. Over time, my fight or flight reaction calmed itself down.  Adrenaline's metallic taste didn't fill my mouth when seemingly ordinary events stopped me in my tracks.  Gradually, I reentered the world.  Lately, though, I've been finding that scratchy feeling at the back of my neck, a hyper-vigilance response to driving past an awful car wreck, hearing an ambulance's siren, turning a corner in the grocery store and finding a stranger staring at me.  It may have something to do with a fear of falling.  The first question I'm asked when I go the doctor these days is When was the last time you fell?  Not Have you fallen?  or How many ti...

There are long minutes of intense, concentrated, focused work interspersed with grown up conversation.  It's the perfect combination for me. She's wise about bodies in general and mine in particular, noticing things I feel but can't pin down.  It's never you are weak here ; it's always engage this and use the breath.  I'm using what I can until the rest catches up, and catch up it will.  Pilates is all about symmetry; it feels awkward to be left behind. Today, we reorganized a piece of equipment to accommodate my shorter than the usual client's leg length, and laughed about how proud of it all we were.  You Tube videos were mentioned.  Then she had me lay down and rest my legs against the re-positioned bar and I discovered that it's possible to rotate to turn out with ease when it's your lower calf and not your ankle bone resting on the steel cross-piece. Did I mention that she pays attention to detail? I'm usually sore when I leave, but ...

I planted snapdragons.  I carried a 20 pound bag of soil to the bed at the back of the patio.  I knelt and I sat and I bent. The sun was out, the air was cool, and the breeze smelled of creosote from the rains the day before.  I was wearing gloves and long sleeves and tights; nothing was going to raise allergic bumps on my skin. I trotted back and forth between the garden garage and the containers, lifting the bag of potting soil up to the rims and pouring in fresh nutrients.  I carried everything back to storage.  I dragged and un-kinked the hose, stomping on the curls that wouldn't straighten out. I had no pain.  I didn't notice my hip.  I was strong and fleet of foot. At the end of the day, I had "regular people's tiredness" planting me on the couch.  It wasn't a perforated person's performance at all. I seem to be making progress without really noticing it at all.

We were playing Family Basketball the last time I fell down.  I was going for the lay-up and Big Cuter was having none of it and the next thing we knew I was bouncing off the driveway, bleeding and surprised.  Falling is unexpected once you leave elementary school. So, you know you've reached a certain age  when the first question the doctor asks is When was the last time you fell?   It's not something anyone wondered about when I was a teenager, or when I was a young mother, or when I ran for the school board.  But now, as I enter the realm of senior care, it seems to be an issue of some importance. I don't fall!  is my usual retort, packed with some attitude and delivered with emphasis.  And it was a true answer, one that I was proud to deliver.  Mrs. Dr. N complained that she was starting to hold onto the railing when she walked down the stairs, frightened that she'd send her 70-something self hurtling down the incline.  She said it ...

I did. I put on my sneakers and loaded up my gear and I took a walk. I listened to Michelle Wolf's sometimes laugh-out-loud sometimes oh-dear-God schtick at the White House Correspondents Dinner.  I paused half way through and stretched.  I kept up a decent pace, and thought about my stride.  I tried to keep my hips even and my shoulders straight.  I used my newly found quadriceps and aductors, listening to them squeal and choosing to ignore their outbursts. I marveled at the blossoms, but I didn't stop to admire them until I was finished walking.   20 minutes out and back on a relatively flat surface. Rewarding myself with a moment communing with my little friend. remembering her with others who share the loss.  I talked to her about this,  a new to me example of the wonders of nature. I strolled on the newly raked paths in her garden. Then I went home. I took a walk today.

I asked Not-Kathy how I was walking.  Didn't she see improvement?  After all, she hadn't been around for the last 6 months; the difference must have been striking. Right?  Actually, not much. She's honest. She loves me. She's a nurse.  Those three qualifications factored into her analysis.  That made it all the more upsetting. I've been noticing newly awakened musculature.  Nerve endings have connected with little explosions of  joy  making their presence known in my upper thigh.  I'm able to do more in the gym and in Pilates, and do it with less unpleasant accompanying sensations (aka pain).  These gains have, I suppose, led me to a false sense of accomplishment.  If Not-Kathy thinks I'm stuck, then I'm stuck. It's time for a reassessment. Once again, I have to assume a double role - patient and trainer.  I can't wimp out while looking at the weights; I have to put the 10 pound plates on the Smith Machine and do my squ...

I joined Moms Demand Action in the Rose Garden outside the State Capitol in Phoenix today. I parked without knowing exactly where they'd be gathering, and I walked through the lot and around the building before I found them. There were enough chairs and benches and tables for everyone, some in the shade and some in the sun, but I wandered around, crossing the grass, greeting old friends and making new ones. I stepped over and around the boxes under the tent.  I walked back and forth in the State Museum Building looking for the cafeteria (it closed 6 months ago).  I stood for the group photo and moved with enthusiasm for the boomerang (which is something on social media I didn't quite understand). I walked to offices and meetings.  Hours passed. And then, I had a moment. My hip was not in the way. I stood in the sunshine.  I walked on the grass.  I wandered.  I congregated.  I gyrated. I'm still not perfect, but today came pretty close.

A cloud has been following me around, trying to catch up.  I feel it over my shoulder, around a corner, hiding in the rosemary hedge outside my window.  It's somewhat terrifying, somewhat mystifying, and totally sad. I haven't had a bad day in quite some time.  This feels like one trying to get in.  I hid, for a while, in the next C J Box mystery.  But, it's set in Wyoming in December and the description of the snow and the ice and the wind had me shivering in the sunshine.  I put the book down and came to the desk, hoping that I could sort it out through my fingers. I'm not having much luck with that, as you can see. I'm fed.  I have fun plans for the evening.  I got a great haircut.  I played tether ball with first graders and put stickers on 4th graders and complimented third graders on their respectful demeanor.  All of that should be enough to put a smile on my face. Oh.  Wait a minute.  I had a body work sessio...