Standing is Sometimes Harder than Walking

This is a photo of me taken not too long after my surgery. In it I am standing `tall`and `straight`. I am quite proud of that picture, that pose. Being able to stand `straight`has been a life long goal and a hard stance to accomplish. We may not give much thought to walking but for the most part we give even less to standing. Or at least that was true up until about a year ago.

Sitting is the new smoking, standing is the remedy, well actually movement is the remedy but standing is apparently better than sitting but not as good as moving. But standing can be hard. Especially if you are like me and have a default stance of resting my wight on my right leg, which has always been the longer stronger leg. And if your weight is to one side, things can go awry, can get painful, can be wearing. Ask my physio therapist, ask the woman who gives me massages.

When I walk, as I have mentioned, I pay attention to my walking and I am getting pretty good about paying attention and thinking about other things at the same time, which is being on the road to walking 'normally' if I can ever figure that out. But when I stand, I admit I seldom pay attention to my standing and that lack of attention is troublesome,

Yesterday, we went on a garden tour, a marvelous fun-filled exploration of 13 relatively magnificent gardens scattered around the 'old-town' of Niagara-on-the-Lake. In addition to a multitude of different walking surfaces - sand, gravel, uneven grass, slight dips, uneven paving stones - there was much standing and looking. As a consequence, by the end of the day I was worn out. Physically and mentally. Physically because the muscles in my legs were throbbing. Mentally because we are going to India in 6 months and the challenges of walking about in India are significantly more complex and I was getting irritated with myself that a garden tour was wearing me out.

After a rest, I went to our back yard where I did some raking.  After mowing comes raking. Raking has its own challenges but one of the rewards of raking is that it actually makes me confront a number of my nemeses. Our yard, like most yards, is uneven. It is not a parking lot or a lawn-bowling green; it is simply a yard with sometimes almost imperceptible dips and rises. So our yard forces me to attend to unevenness and unevenness forces me to think about how I am standing. Thinking about how I am standing forces me to stand straight, standing straight forces me to balance my weight across both legs which makes everything slightly better, slightly, because there are no miracles here.

No miracles, just one constant reminder after another. Stand straight, pay attention and be in the moment. But the other thing that paying attention teaches me is to be kinder to myself. Getting tired, getting worn out are things that simply happen to us all. Navigating all the different obstacles in 13 vastly different gardens wouldn't wear out everyone but it can wear me out. I just need to pay more attention to what is wearing me out and why. I can manage the physical wearing out much better if I learn to manage the mental wearing out. And I can learn to manage the mental strain if I keep in mind that I am learning to overcome 5 decades of ingrained behaviour. It takes time, and I need to cut myself some slack.

Trying to stay balanced...it is harder then we think...

The other day, in our kitchen, I stepped back from the granite island towards the stove. In doing so, my legs moved in order, right leg first followed by left leg and I was now in a significantly different spot and I turned to open a drawer filled with spatulas and ladles. As I picked up the slotted long handled spoon that I often use to scoop out rice and beans from a pot, I suddenly froze as I remembered that I had just stepped back from the granite island, without using the cane I normally have nearby, without any mobility aid at all.  Stepping back, not looking at the direction I am moving in, trusting my brain-body combo to get me there in one piece and upright. I had to chalk that one up in the win column.

Yesterday, on a streetcar travelling south on Broadview heading to a wedding, I ring the bell and stand, with my cane in hand, to head for the door, one leg moving confidently ahead, the second leg not quite finding a firm footing in the sliding shift movement of the street car and there I am almost tumbling down into the lap of a small child. Her look of terror at what might be about to happen and my sense of chagrin and embarrassment at not being able to stand steady on a moving streetcar resulted in me silently adding one to the loss column. But then I thought, well, maybe a tie...I didn't actually fall and no small children were injured in the construction of this life lesson.

Another week in my seemingly never-ending effort to conquer a very particular part of walking, maintaining my balance. Balance is about more than not falling though not falling is a big plus.

Trying to stay balanced is almost like using a yo-yo...it's harder than it looks and easier if you don't think about what you are trying to do. Sometimes, when I am walking, I catch myself in a stumble and when I do, I try and understand why I almost fell, why I almost lost my balance. Balance is about much more than a single activity, it is more like a process. It involves muscles and nerves in the legs and feet, eye and ear coordination, a highly tuned sense of space, some very complicated, very fast calculations by the brain with extensive feedback between the brain, the nervous system and the entire musculoskeletal system.

Balance is actually much more than a mere physical activity; it is a vital indicator of health and prospect. There is a reason the notion of balance gets used in so many contexts. It is about keeping things (mental, social, physical ) on track, on an even keel, so to speak. If you lose your sense of balance, in any one or all of the senses of the word, bad things can and do happen. As you can imagine, and as I have learned, there are all kinds of ways that balance can go wrong. But there is some very encouraging news about how balance can be improved through exercising and challenges.

This is something I learned in physio. Almost from day one Vaiva had me standing on foam, wood, and plastic boards, mats and beams. Some were pivoted on balls, some on half balls, sometimes she put me on trampolines. The idea was, learn to walk,step, balance and move back and forth by challenging the mind and body to conquer all of this. Improving balance is like most exercises; you get better through the doing.

Alex Hutchinson is a writer and a runner and he had a fantastic column in the New York Times a few days ago where he laid out his own experience and some of the fascinating new research going on in the science/medicine of balance. It is a fascinating read and as is true of much of scientific research, the news is good, change is possible.

I know that is true because a few days ago, I stepped back without thinking from the granite island in our kitchen....

The Right and The Left of Me: A Tale of Two Bodies

" I could cut your body in half, and it would be like two different people, the two halves are so different"

Throughout much of my life I have experimented with various ways of treating the soreness, stiffness and pain that has to greater and lesser degrees helped define my waking hours. Years ago, the pain and discomfort were extreme and forms of self-medication were as common, sometimes more common, as visiting a specialist in managing or ameliorating pain. And when not self-medicating or meditating I often tried a personal version of stoicism, believing that ignoring the pain might make it magically vanish. Needless to say, none of these were the most effective or soundest of choices.

In the past couple of years, since my last surgery, I am much more attentive to finding the best, the optimum treatment of whatever pain and discomfort I am feeling. Let's just say I have matured. I pay serious attention to all the various alternatives and try and choose the ones that seem most likely to be the healthiest, the most practical.

On Thursday, just five days before the launch of my book I went for a massage, a 'deep tissue' massage, sometimes called a sports massage, similar to a Shiatsu massage. My right shoulder hurts, my right upper thigh muscles throb, my daily exercise routine is at times debilitating and I knew that I needed some way to lower the physical anxiety if for no other reason than so that I could better cope with the emotional anxiety I was experiencing on the eve of the book hitting the shelves.   

It was by no means the first time I had had this type of massage but it was the first time in Niagara-on-the-Lake and the first time with Breanne Schultz who has very conveniently set up her practice right around the corner from me. In many ways it was my classic first encounter with a medical person. Quick recap of a complicated history and a fast summary of what concerns me at the moment. Her reaction, 'well quite a project then' and a question about deep tissue and how much pain I might be used to.

The hour goes by fast and the pain of the massage and the pressure is both extreme and welcome. I can feel the impact and appreciate the partial temporary release and accept the knowledge that this is going to be a longer term thing than I might have thought. At one point while massaging my upper thigh her hands feel like a knife cutting the muscle. At another point she is massaging my upper back and she asks if I feel that hardness like bone, I say yes and she says yeah but it is muscle; it should not be hard like bone. At the end she gives me a sense of what we are dealing with.

She tells me she could cut my body in half and it would be like two different people. My right side is tight, tense and hard bound in ways that are difficult to describe, the left no where near as much. It makes perfect sense to me, the right side has always taken the brunt of keeping me moving, keeping me going and that hasn't diminished since the surgery, since the straightening of my body since the lengthening of my leg. One of the tricks, one of the things I struggle with daily is reminding myself to shift weight so it is evenly balanced. You tilt to the right for 60 years and it takes a bit of reminding, rewiring, to stand even and spread the weight and the burden.

We discuss treatment options. I choose the more frequent visits, I choose confronting this head on. One thing I keep learning is that attending to these things is almost the equivalent of a full time job, but it is the work I have taken on.

Now if I could find a deep tissue treatment equivalent for the emotional tension I am feeling.