Garden Therapy vs. Physical Therapy, and Quad Awakening

This weekend was miserable weather-wise, and otherwise. Claire Adele was out of town for half the weekend on a band trip to Canada, and Jack was working Friday night and Saturday on pager call. The Boy was around, which was a mixed bag. At times, he is fun and pleasant. At other times, he is a major grumpus. We saw a bio-pic of Pele, which got panned by reviewers as a boring bio-pic, but we liked it. We also ran some errands, like going to the library to pick up some books and stopping at City People's Mercantile.

There is nothing worse than a long weekend with no plans and mediocre weather. Boredom and her brother, the Black Dog of Depression, started to visit me. It is easy to get a little despondent with feeling trapped by a mediocre knee. It doesn't help that I just started reading Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, a novel about suicide and depression.

It was rainy and gray Saturday and Sunday--not good for getting outside, not that I could do a whole lot. I guess I can, but as one of Jack's colleagues said about recovering from an ACL repair -- first comes the range of motion, then strength, then confidence. I am stuck between the second and third. I still am working on my strength. Suppose I could go kayaking, canoeing, hiking and biking, but I have to think about my knee so much that I am not sure if I would have fun or spend more time thinking about how to move my knee. Canoeing would be fine--once I got in and out of the canoe. Golf, tennis and standup paddle boarding would be out of the question.

The Boy, as much as he hates his sister, actually missed her. If nothing else, they give each other something to do, even if it is argue and bicker. He'd rather argue with her than talk to us. I helped him download music from my computer to his phone. He plugged his earbuds and was tuned out for half of the weekend. I am not sure what will happen when Claire Adele is gone for four weeks this summer.

I needed to push the Black Dog aside, give it a kick in the ribs. The weather was finally beautiful on Monday, so I got out to do my favorite kind of therapy: working in my garden. Like the cleaning the Boy's lego room, I needed to bend and squat to garden. I didn't plan to work on the whole yard for half the afternoon. It started out small. I saw a weed that needed to be pulled. It is just one weed, I thought, and then two hours later I'm covered in scratches and bug bites and have a large tub of yard waste filled, raspberry bushes pruned of dead branches and all forms of non-invited plant species gone. And that was just the backyard. I thought about starting the front yard, but that would require far more bending and squatting. My neighbor across the street knows I haven't been able to work on the yard. She offered to have some of her friends who do charity gardening come and take a whack at my parking strip. Like sorting Legos, gardening is one of my favorite mindful/mindless activities. It makes me feel productive and like I have accomplished something. Unlike sorting Legos, there is a visible reward for my efforts and I get Vitamin D.

Like many of my physical therapy activities, I feel fine while I am doing them--it is the aftermath that kills me. This morning I woke up and instead of my knee not wanting me to get out of bed, it was my lower back. I slept just fine--thankfully no problems there. I had an 8:00 a.m. physical therapy appointment, and I couldn't move much. I continued to sleep, then got up and took a fifteen minute epsom salt bath for my back as well as two ibuprofens. It seemed to work.

I needed the garden therapy, though, even it messed up my physical therapy. A day in the sun succeeded in chasing away the Black Dog for now.

I went to physical therapy and complained to Evan about my back. I also told him Jack isn't thrilled that I can't walk down stairs properly yet. He booked a place on Mt. Saint Michel in France that has seventy steps to get to the hotel. I have more than two months before we go, but he is very interested that I can easily navigate the steps. I asked Evan about it.

"You are a little behind in that since you don't have enough quad strength yet," he said. " Your knee cap isn't moving fluidly enough to manage the stairs."

Evan seemed to take it easy on me at first, but was still concerned about my left quadricep not firing properly. I practiced going down stairs with their double handrail steps. Each week, we run through new exercises to see what will work on my thigh. Thanks to many years of dance and yoga, I can easily recruit other muscles to do the work of my thigh. The problem with that is then my quad doesn't build the strength it needs to be do things like walk downstairs or run. Today, we hit the jackpot--I hope. He had me hang on a ballet barre, take a deep squat and stand.

"Use your quads, not your hips," he said.

Voila, I felt my quads working! I felt like Hellen Keller when she first understood Ann Sullivan making the "water" sign in her hand. Evan seemed happy. This was what I was supposed to be feeling for all of those other exercises. Now I am supposed to do a million of these exercises everyday. The only other time I have felt my thigh so fully engaged was, ironically, when I ski, which is what got me here in the first place. I thought about telling Evan, Hey, I can ski to get my quad back! Then I imagined his smile, common to those raised in the Midwest when they hear something ridiculous, the smile that is a combination of "Oh you are so cute so say something so absurd" and "WFT -- You are crazy."

And the double bonus: the same exercise that helps my quad also helps my back. The moral of this story is I need both mental health and physical therapy to get where I need to go, even if one kind of therapy temporarily sets me back in the other.