I feel like I am fully competent in the "Activities of Daily Living" category after my ACL surgery. I hadn't seen this list until today, and I am still short on one or two of the categories: home maintenance and emergency responses. I could call 911 in an emergency, but I am not sure I could run out of my house if it were on fire. Anita and I did paint several rooms in my house this summer, but my garden is a mess. When I look at my plants, I think "What happened here? Why is everything either overgrown or mostly dead?"
The list of activities is long, and I can see how far I've come since the surgery. It took awhile before I felt comfortable going to the grocery store by myself. Cooking meals left me wiped out and it was months before I could walk my dog for the hour a day he needs to be walked.
The good news is that I am pretty close to being achieving all activities of daily living, which leave the next phase of my physical therapy: returning to sport. I go to a sports medicine clinic, which is good, so the goal should be to get me back to playing tennis and skiing.
Last Friday, I asked Evan what I needed to accomplish before I returned to skiing. He kind of laughed and said, "We aren't even close to that! You don't need to worry about that yet."
He saw the deflated/sad/frustrated expression on my face and took a deep breath, "Okay," he said. He rattled off a bunch of things I will need to be able to do so fast I couldn't keep track of it all: "Hop on one leg in a diagonal direction for about ten yards, hop on one foot on your injured leg as high as you can hop on your good leg..." and a bunch of other stuff that went by in a blur.
Now I am going to physical therapy every other week with a list of about ten exercises I am supposed to do every other day at home, in addition to my forty-five minutes of daily cardio.
This is hard. I don't think I was ever been in that good of shape in my forties as I am expected to be when I return to sports. I don't know if I can hop in a diagonal on my good leg, let alone my bad leg.
Which brings me to another point: should I have had the surgery if getting back to sport is going to be super hard, as in harder than I've ever worked before? Even if I work hard, will I get to a point of being successful, or will I plateau and never reach the desired objectives?Am I willing to push myself to the point of being uncomfortable just so I can ski and play tennis? Should I have left my ACL disconnected and done physical therapy to get back into a space where I could function doing activities of daily living, just as I am now?
I've been able to push myself intellectually and in working with teams in work settings, but I've had limited experiences pushing myself physically. I've biked more than one hundred miles in a day -- that was hard. I've climbed the Grouse Grind and Mt. Ellinor. I've never been a full blown couch potato, but nor have I ever had any desire to run a marathon or climb Mt. Everest. Am I willing to work super hard to be a moderate, middle aged athlete? Are these goals realistic, or am I just comparing myself to Armando, the twenty-something soccer player I see every day at physical therapy? Clearly, it will be impossible for me to ever be in as good as shape as he is in. I don't need to be that good, but can I be good enough for tennis?
This is a fork in the physical therapy road, and I have to decide if I am going to take it.
This blog is about the little and big thoughts that pop into my head. I once read that when Flannery O'Connor walked into a bookstore, she would want to edit her published works with a red pen. In the digital world, we have the luxury of tweaking things up after we've hit the publish button. I can be a perfectionist/procrastinator, where waiting for the ideal means little gets done. Here I will share what is not--and likely will never be--perfect.
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