Sometimes It's Okay To Glide Through Life

Oh, calipers... how I love thee and loathe thee at the same time.

Today I spent both Physio sessions focusing on using my calipers to walk. For me, walking consists of shifting my weight to one side and flexing my stomach and hip in a way to pull up the hip toward the stomach. With this movement my leg is free from it's gravity trap and can now swing fairly well from it's ball-and-socket joint--especially being as externally rotated as I am. If I do this with little control my leg will swing around to the side and then rotate in, sort of the way that a child would draw large half-circles in the sand with his feet when fearful of getting his hands dirty. In order to properly move across the runway and make Vandana and everyone else happy I have to concentrate and glide my foot on the floor in one solid forward motion. If I mess this up at all and bring my leg too high or try to make to large a step, that stupid leg will take the chance at freedom and circle through the sand.

After sort of successfully gliding my way down the parallel runway I was told to now do it in reverse. The girls were excited to see me moonwalk. I was worried that I didn't remember the steps nor the song. It's sort of like a dance that you learned when you were a kid, maybe the kind that came with paper footprints numbered for your efficiency. After only a few jagged baby back-steps I was able to regain a sense for what I was to accomplish and the movements became a lot easier. In fact, when it was all said and done the moving backwards part is much more preferred to that crazy forwards motion that is so overrated.

This part of Physio is extremely tiring. I sort of used to wonder how Dr. Wheelchair got so sweaty when he practiced walking, but now I totally get it and want to give him a big high-5. (Dr. Wheelchair is a pretty cool story: He is a doc at the hospital and was involved in an auto accident about four years ago and currently overcoming his paraplegia with some shiny new stem cells of his own).

Having had walked both forwards and backwards in the morning, I was really surprised to see that I was expected to do it again in the afternoon. I am not one to say I am tired too often, but I think I uttered it a few times in the afternoon amid a shaky voice. At one point Vandana asked me if I had any control over the movements that I was making. For some strange internal cerebral abyss of a reason, that hit a nerve--figuratively speaking. I was so taken aback by the fact that I had just sweat out 20 steps forwards and backwards and she actually had to ask if I had any control! It's funny. At the time I was in mid-glide so I told her that I couldn't talk about it now, fearing that I couldn't dare lose any energy to unimportant things like talking and breathing. After I finished my wobbly steps I attempted to reassess what Vandana was asking... to be honest, I am not sure that either of us really got the response we wanted. But nonetheless, there was a truce involved, I think.

I've got it now... so tomorrow will be a new day for gliding, and I have decided to envision the perfection of Olympic figure skating (too bad it is the wrong season for this) all the while. Watch out control, here I come.