Friday, August 21, 2009

Let's Start with the Limping

I am too lazy and frustrated to look back and see if I mentioned the falling down the stairs at work incident.

But yeah, on a normal, not-rushing, holding on to the damned hand-rail even day, I not only slipped, but TUMBLED (hard) down almost an entire flight of stairs. I slammed both knees, my hip, my back was scraped, my tailbone, my butt...my elbow...what am I leaving out...just, everything got hurt...except my head. I am nothing if not schooled in protecting the noggin, it would seem.

I filled out the accident report and then just waited for the swelling and bruises to come and go. They were doozies, all the colors of the bizzaro rainbow: blood red, jaundice yellow, gangrene green, just-wrong black. I did mention hitting everything hard, right?

What hurt most, aside from my pride, was the fact that I'd just run the course of treatment with my Osteopath and could happily say that my hips were almost (never will actually be) matching again! Nothing hurt when I walked! Life was good! And yet, like some perverse Ken Follet novel (more on that later) or twisted 6 Feet Under episode, everything goes to shit in an instant.

Sorry, no real other way to put it.

I decided to wait until the swelling and bruises died down before I ventured back for another appointment, as the last thing I wanted anyone to do was touch my owies, much less manipulate them.

Three weeks later only the most tenacious of the bruises were there, but I'd say 90% of the swelling was gone, but my hip and knee were starting to bother one another, and me. As an aside? All this time I was doing the treadmill/bike/elliptical for 15-20 minutes + the leg extension torture device every morning.

So off I went to get adjusted.

Except...my butt doctor did not like the look of my once "good" knee. It was still swollen, and in all the wrong ways. He thinks I might have slammed it in just the right way to tear/cut a bit of my patella tendon. Yes, that would be the tendon that keeps you kneecap from shooting up and sitting on your thigh. (Yes, I too got the extreme heebie jeebies when he explained the situation.) I was BANNED from any exercises that involved bending my knee more than say 30 degrees as ANY such exercise might keep it from healing and/or TEAR IT MORE.

No bike, no elliptical, very careful with the leg extender as I kinda need to keep building up my thigh muscle. But walking was fine, dandy, no problem!

But as I found out last Saturday? Maybe a limit of less than 3 miles at a time and NO HILLS.

Yep, see, friends came up and we wandered. There was no forced marching as I was setting the pace and we were all happy not to try to break a sweat because, hello, wandering! All over Belltown and into the Sculpture Park where there was a hemp fest going on. It was free entry, so we decided to check it out.

As another aside: I miss Santa Cruz. They had hemp fests and they were cute and safe and not filled with millions of people...and more to the point? No scary young guys screaming at the top of their lungs, "WHO HAS BROWNIES!" one second and then the very next in a very threatening tone, "WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!" Yeah, we left shortly thereafter...

But not before we got stuck in a bottleneck of people that I felt was moments away from becoming one of those panic run-away scenes in the movies. Only the fear was palpable. And some of it was coming from me and my inability to deal with such large crowds of people. (Mental note to self: DO NOT DO THIS AGAIN, EVER.) I think it might have been in that congestion of people where I might have hurt my hip or knee again...you could not see where you were going and were were all clasping onto one another so that we wouldn't get lost in the shuffle/shoving. And there was shoving.

Once free? we made it for home...up these really really steep streets that I kept climbing more and more slowly. Nothing hurt, but it felt like my hip and my knee just didn't want to cooperate anymore.

When we finally got home and sat down and I really looked at my knees? My right one was clearly twice the size of the left one. No pain, mind, but everything was just wrong. And that's when I noticed my right hip seemed to be pushing against the fabric of my shorts. Yep, it too was joining in the swollen game.

Did I mention ice and ibuprophen are my bestest friends in the world?

For the next 5 days (today would be #6) I got into a rhythm of stretching, trying to walk, but failing and going for the limp, and icing at my desk (those cool-paks made for lunch bags are the bomb. Do not sit on them if they are starting to melt though, just saying).

I am now officially tired of it all. Can you tell?

And this is not the worst part, but it hurts me nonetheless, I've gained two pounds since I stopped with most of the exercising, and having dropped 9 of the 20-ish I gained since the first of these bike accidents? It just doesn't make me feel all that great about anything. I know you all know this but I will reiterate, losing weight when you're in your 30s is bloody hard.

Okay, I'll stop now.

Up next: What I'm doing to keep my spirits up.

5 comments:

tana said...

Oh my gawd that's awful and I cannot even imagine how frustrating!! Here's hoping you heal quickly...or heal...again... :(

erin said...

Oh yuck, that sounds awful! I hope you get a break this weekend from the constant ice packs and such. What a pain. Literally.

Bezzie said...

Sweet mother of Fatzah...OUCH! I hope you pop back together smoothly!

JessaLu said...

ohnoes! That's awful...here's to hoping you heal quickly...

erin said...

I have a question! What is an osteopath? Versus a chiropractor, for example?

All of this yoga is causing me some pain in the shoulder/clavicle area and I would bet good money that my shoulder is out of whack. I can pop it in ways I feel like it should not pop. I want to go to someone who can tell me whether that is true or not (and then pop it back into place if it is out). :)