Pessimista!, Can and Can't, and Squat

Bike Time: 2 x 10 minutes

Distance:  1.83 for   one ride!
Other: The leg press is the bane of my existence. I loathe and despite it.

Yesterday, I was making some breakfast sausage for the Boy. I had to bend down below the cooktop to get out the skillet I usually use for cooking sausage.

I wish I could squat, I thought to myself. It would be so much easier to reach the bottom cupboards in my kitchen if I could squat. Instead, I bent down with my legs straight and spread apart with my butt in the air. This was not pretty.

This wasn't the first time I had this thought about squatting. This is one of the many things I can't do (yet) during my recovery. I am in this weird middle ground where I can get out and about, but I am nowhere near as functional as I want to be. What should I be: an optimist or a pessimist? (Spoiler in the title above.)

Writing a blog like this is like writing a memoir before I know how it ends. I hope that I will get better, that I will return to skiing and dancing and squatting, but I don't yet know for sure. I don't know if it will have a good ending (picture of me having successfully reached the bottom of Dave Murray Downhill) or if something bad will happen. And my definition of optimism and pessimist might vary from the dictionary's. I am thinking critically of my present situation more than my future situation.  Pollyanna or Candide would be my optimists. I think of pessimism as being unhappy with the status quo, and thinking it won't change without a miracle or, in my case, a ton of work. Perhaps I am more like a curmudgeon than a pessimist. But I digress.

I can walk, which is good. I walk very slowly and I can't go very far. I have to think about each step so I can have a decent gait. My son said yesterday afternoon, "You are walking like a normal person!" In a way, this is a happy milestone, but this "normal person" walk requires almost all of my attention. Extend my leg, plant my heel, roll through my toes and lift the heel again, runs through my mind with each step.

I have to make decisions about things that I didn't have to think about before. Yesterday, I was picking up a book I reserved at the NE Library. After I got the book, I thought about going to Top Pot Donuts to get a decaf mocha. I had to decide if I should walk the half of a block to and from the library to Top Pot through the gravelly alley or if I should drive there. I decided to drive, which if I had a fully functioning knee, would have been crazy. I tried to rationalize driving there by saying I was opening a space in the always crowded library parking lot, but it takes less time to get coffee than it takes to roam the stacks.

I also want to go canoeing. I could go down to the aquatics center, rent a canoe and paddle around Lake Washington. The weather is warm and sunny--it would be awesome to spend it on the water. Plus, I could use my upper body and not my legs. As soon as I think about this, I think my physical therapist would have a cow. "Nooooo!" he might say if I told him my plan. When discussing where I should take the family for Spring Break, he said I couldn't play in the waves of the ocean as they might knock me over and damage my new ACL. A similar logic might apply to getting into a canoe. I don't know how I could get into a canoe from the dock. To get down stairs, I have to think "down with the bad" and lower my injured leg first. My injured leg would not be stable in a rocking canoe in the water. Plus, I can't submerge my leg in water--even a bath!--until six weeks after the surgery. Lake and river water are fully of all kinds of microscopic life that can cause infections in wounds.

Long story short--I can't squat, I have to ponder every step I take, it takes me forever to walk half a block, and I can't canoe. But I can walk! Yay?

I am going to be a pessimist and embrace my inner Debbie Downer. I will relish in the fact that is sucks that I can't walk far. Why? Why choose to be miserable, gaze at my navel and write lists of the things I can't do?

Years ago, I read Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. Her basic premise (if I remember this correctly) is that looking at the bright side of life* brushes off problems like poverty and disease. She isn't necessarily advocating for pessimism, but you first need to identify problems before you can solve them. I want to be able to squat and look in my kitchen cabinets. I want to be able to walk from the library to Top Pot to get coffee, and I want to canoe. These are little milestones that I should be able to make before the end of my nine month recovery. This little bit of grumpiness makes go to physical therapy and do my exercises, and that is a good thing. I don't want to be content just walking "like a normal person."

As I was driving home after my trip to library with my decaf mocha from Top Pot, I felt like Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. They went on a big, scary adventure that made them uncomfortable at best and in fear of their life at worst. Bilbo and Frodo didn't get second breakfast, but at least they didn't get eaten by trolls or spiders, cooked by a dragon or killed in battle. They prevailed, but they were not the same. My battles are with canoes and getting to coffee shops, instead. Still, I was feeling Tookish enough to want to go to the library, go to the coffee shop.

* Here is your ear worm for the day, thanks to Eric Idle and Monty Python from The Life of Brian.

"When chewing on life's gristle, don't grumble, give a whistle..."