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.

Surface Tension, Part 2, and Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Elliptical Time: 15 minutes

Bike Time: 30 minutes

When I was in Ohio visiting my parents two weeks ago, my friend Betty asked hope I was coping with all of the stuff in my life right now. Last night when I was at dinner with a friend, I figured it out.

1. Forty-five minutes of cardio everyday, seven days a week.
2. My dog, Fox.

Today, I was on my way out the door to workout when a friend called. I haven't talked to her in a while, so I picked up the call. We chatted, but by the end of the call, I was getting anxious: I needed to workout. I was surprised by the feeling. In my pre-injury life, I would have been happy to have a phone call from a friend to distract me from working out. I thought I was working out just because I had to to get my knee fully functioning. Nope. I now need it for my sanity.

Last week, I added the elliptical into my daily physical therapy work. The surgeon told me to add five minutes at a time. I took him quite literally, and added five minutes a day. The elliptical is supposed to be a more advanced workout for my knee because I am bearing weight, not just spinning my legs around like I do on the stationary bike. The stationary bike is good for recovery for exactly that purpose: it gets the leg moving without the stress of having to carry the load of my body. I forgot the advice Jane from my physical therapy team gave me earlier in the year: when adding a new exercise, don't increase the amount you do by more than 50% a week. There must be a sweet spot between what Dr. Tex recommended and Jane's advice, but I passed it.

This Monday, I did twenty-five minutes on the elliptical. I felt fine while I was working out, and I did the remaining part of my forty-five minute cardio routine on the bike. I thought my leg was fine with adding the elliptical. I am now able to walk downhill while bending my leg, and Jack says my gait has noticeably improved since last week. Monday afternoon, my left leg was exhausted. It refused to do the weight lifting exercises and isometric exercises at home. Enough! is screamed at me. Give me a break! 

I told Evan about how tired I was and my elliptical experiences. I feel like I took two steps forward and one step back. I am usually cautious and take a conservative approach to healing: I am not comfortable pushing myself to the point of pain. Evan was sympathetic. "It is okay to push yourself hard, but your leg will get tired," he said. I am back to icing my leg three times a day, and I've pull back my elliptical riding to fifteen minutes a day for the next week. 

There is another upside to riding the elliptical in addition to the fact that I walk better: the time between the elliptical and the stationary bike is a great time to lift weights.

Surface Tension

While I was in Ohio, I visited one of my closet friends from high school, Betty. We went to a coffee shop after dinner and talked for about two hours. I saw her in January when I visited Ohio, but we hadn't really talked since then. Betty has a job, two young children and a husband who travels. Between her limited time and a three hour time difference, it isn't simple to keep in touch.

I talked about my life; she talked about hers. Betty is everything you could want in a friend: funny, empathetic, a good listener, caring, and intelligent. She asked me how I was doing with my mom's illness, my knee, and losing the School Board election last fall. She asked how my dad was coping with my mom's illness and his subsequent loneliness. She asked about Jack and how we were recovering from his betrayal that I first learned about two years ago. She asked about Claire Adele and the Boy. I talked about dealing with the Boy's reorganization of his teenage brain and his frustrations with friends. While the Boy is generally pleasant, he is capable of epic mood swings. As my friend Sarah says, "The Boy has a large emotional range." Yeah.  And it is awful to be on the receiving end of his tantrums.

As we were talking, I didn't think I was being excessively whiny or complaining. I was more or less giving her an inventory of my life, as we commonly do when we haven't seen each other in a while.

"How is the job search?" Betty asked.

"It has been on hold since the knee injury," I said. My daughter's piano reminded me of the emotional and physical energy required for healing. It is one thing to continue to work at a job you already have when you are injured; it is another thing to look for a new one while recovering.

"What about getting back into education?" she asked.

"The entire new School Board except one director campaigned against me," I said. "I have no clout with that group. I can't return to advocacy in the current environment. Nor do I want to. I decided to go big or go home when I ran. I lost, so now I am going home. I can't go backwards. It is really difficult that I spent nearly ten years in that arena and I really can't go back."

"Have you looked for a job at the university?" she asked. She works in a university setting and she knows we are close to UW.

"There was an opening for change management position to support the new payroll system roll out," I said. "I applied for that."

"You sound perfect for it!" Before kids, I had worked in Change Management.

"I didn't hear anything back," I said. I didn't tell her there were probably 300 other resumes that came in for that job.

"Oh," she said. I didn't tell her about the other half dozen jobs at the university I applied for. Betty paused.

"How are you managing all of this?" Betty asked.  Translation: Wow, your life is in a bad place.

I imagined myself being a tightrope walker being unaware I was 300 feet in the air, and then having someone tell me. I looked down and saw the people looking like ants while I was floating above them and freaked out. I thought, She's right. This is really hard. How am I coping?  

Betty is a dear friend and meant no malice. Her only fault was being empathic, which is the opposite of a fault. I have other empathetic friends, but this was a high density conversation about all that is going on in my life. When she asked, "How are you managing?" the surface tension which was keeping the liquid from overflowing burst. My cup was overfilled, held together by exceptional laws of physics. When the tension was released, my emotions poured out, not at that exact moment, but slowly: when I got back to my dad's empty house, when I was flying home, when I went to dinner Saturday night with Jack and the kids and the Boy decided to have a snit fit which then expanded into full blown tantrum by the end of the evening. By Sunday, I was a wreck.

It is a minor testament to resilience that I could manage to keep moving and maintain a reasonably positive outlook. At the same time, a little pessimism doesn't hurt. It is what inspires and motivates us to makes changes. Okay, I can't end on this Pollyanna note. I want to say my life is a mess and I need to clean it up, but sometimes life is just messy, and there are things that can't be cleaned up. I can't change my mom's situation. I can't go back and re-run the School Board election. I can't change that I have a teenage son who is at times my favorite person in the world and other times my least.

While on the stationary bike this weekend, I read Roz Chast's Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?* It is her graphic novel memoir about her parents' slow deaths. She had no control, but she could collect her insights and write them down.  I laughed in recognition when she wrote and drew "The Aisle of Tears" which sold adult diapers, adult wipes, pureed food, and other things my mother needs. She talked about the dining room at the Assisted Living Center being like a high school cafeteria with its cliques and unofficially assigned seats, which I also saw where my mom now lives, but on a much smaller scale.

Reading Chast's book made me realize that there are parts of life that just suck, and there is very little we can do about it except get through it. There is no shortcut through suffering: it is part of the human condition. Reading her book, I felt like I was in a conversation with a friend who was guiding me through the wilderness of aging parents. For now, my experience with my parents' aging is not up close, but from a distance. She turned her and her parents' suffering into art, a story that resonates with people like myself who are going through something similar.

Sharing coffee with a friend, telling her how I feel, that is good way to make it all a little more bearable.


* I used to like Roz Chast but now I love her.