At my PT appointment Tuesday, I was a cranky old bat, whining and moaning about my aches and pains. I felt sorry for Evan, my physical therapist, for having to listen to me bellyache. On the other hand, if I was lithe, lively and spry, I wouldn't be in physical therapy. He knows the drill: you are supposed to hate your physical therapist and they are supposed to cause you pain. If they aren't causing discomfort, they aren't doing their job. Nevertheless, I feel there is somewhere in the patient job description that I should be stoic and uncomplaining. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary on my computer, the root word for "patient" and "patience" is "suffering." According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary on my phone, the definition of "patient" means "bearing pains or trials calmly without complaint." Perhaps I should call myself a client instead, which just means I am paying for a service. Does that give me permission to roll my eyes like a teenage girl when he asks me to ride the stationary bike and then corrects my crappy form?
"You need to watch the angle of your ankle as you go around," Evan said. "And you are twisting your hip."
I think, I know my form is abysmal. Thanks to a childhood of dance, I am painfully aware of how my body looks as it moves through space, even though my dancer's body started to leave when I got a job after college in cubicle land. Any hidden vestiges of that life completely left after my son was born. But I am not thinking about how I look. I am thinking about how I feel. I feel like a small plum is going to pop out of my knee each time it goes around, but I am going around anyway.
I don't say that. Instead, I grunt and roll my eyes like the teenager and pre-teen who live in my home.
This day was the day of the bombing in Brussels, and the footage was playing on CNN in the rehab room. Usually, the television is turned to a sports channel. I think the television is used as a distraction so people can tune into a sports game and tune out their body aches. While CNN is on, Wolf Blitzer interviews an expert on the use of torture with terrorists. While I complain about being tortured, I am not in fact being truly tortured as defined by the Geneva Convention. I freely walked into the sports medicine clinic, and I could leave at any time. The people who work here are kind, and they are doing this for my benefit, not theirs. The goal is to improve my dignity, not take it away.
But then Evan and I walk to one of the weight machines.
"You are walking with your leg straight," he said. "You need to bend it when you walk. You want to walk so that people don't think there is something wrong with your leg."
Fuck. I should have warned him I am high maintenance and sensitive. My imprinting was such that I was trained to be graceful, or at least to try to appear to be graceful. I really don't care how fast I ski--looking good while doing it is more important to me than being the first to the bottom of the hill. So here I am, having to learn to walk properly. Walk.
"I suppose all dancers have to learn to walk at some point," I said. I've seen dancers walk across the stage, and there must be a dozen different ways to do it. I channel some inner patience until he bring out the mirror and makes me look at myself as I walk forward.
I crumple and whine and thrown a mini-tantrum. "No, don't make me do this." I was more patient when he was bending my unbending knee ten minutes earlier. Mirrors were a major part of my childhood. Every dance class I took had mirrors on the walls, as do most yoga classes. I remember one awesome experience where I took a ballet class at my health club in Chicago. I was in my twenties, and three of us had to leap across the room. I was in the lead, and the other two flanked behind me like geese in a vee. We all leapt in unison at the same height. We were all wowed by our coordination. It triggered some happy endorphins for all of us, as we were in the flow or zone or whatever people call a transcendent athletic experience.
Watching myself in the mirror walking was the opposite of that experience. In fairness to me, Evan had only told me four days before that I could unlock the brace and walk without it. In fairness to Evan, it is his job to kick my butt. The mirror doesn't lie. It doesn't say or do anything, but it was the worst form of torture I had that day, worse than riding the bike. It can make me miserable, for now.
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