Yesterday was my first day back at physical therapy. This morning, I am remembering why I renamed it physical torture (at least at first). We did nothing really strenuous yesterday as the PT had to do a new evaluation to have a baseline for therapy so it was a lot of range of motion and stretching, and some walking with a walker. Yet this morning my legs and back hurt so badly that they had the audacity to wake me up at 6:30am because there was no comfortable position to lie in to sleep. So I had to get up and eat a decent breakfast before I could take pain medication, because taking that on an empty stomach is about the same as drinking a bottle of acid with a chaser of Ipecac syrup. Charming, I know. I had just managed to fall back to sleep in what has got to be the oddest contortion ever in the once-upon-a-time-recliner-but-now-just-a-chair and ottoman when my cell phone received the daily weather text message. Yes, I signed up for this service but they did not warn me that the text would arrive at 7am. Ugh! I was unable to recreate the odd contortion that had been so comfortable, so I surrendered and am awake for now. I joyfully have PT again today, which means that tomorrow my muscles will most likely establish rebel armies and stage guerrilla warfare against my body. Something tells me that they will not accept a peace offering of bananas either. :) Right now in physical therapy, since the neurologists are still working on a diagnosis, we are stuck doing pretty much the same things as before. Stretching, range of motion, maintaining strength, balance, loosening up tone as much as possible. The PT finally realized something I have known for months - when I am able to pull my foot upward (usually when under the impact of a medication), my toes pull significantly tighter. This indicates that after months of being "stuck" in their contorted positions, the ligaments in my ankles and feet have shrunk and so in order to pull my feet upward they have to contract my toes even more tightly. To which I say "duh!", this is one reason even attempting to try to stand or take a step with any approximation of a flat or neutral foot does not work - pull foot inward and up to that 90* angle and my toes are so tight they feel like the bones will snap. So I think we are going to work on stretching the tendons out as well. Sometimes I really wish I could do something textbook because PT would be so much easier if they knew what they were treating; the PT has told me that in her 30 years she has never seen anything quite like my symptom presentation. Why can't I be the horse whose hoof beats you hear instead of a zebra with a purple mohawk in a tutu wearing ballet slippers and dancing the dance of the sugarplum fairies? I know I am one of a kind, but it gets old after a while.
Good news, yesterday's preaching bus driver will not be an issue and I do not need to be concerned with him driving any of the buses that provide my transportation to/from PT or anywhere else. My final two comments on that incident (which really upset me, had me in tears, and left me feeling assaulted and violated) are "before you even try to touch a speck in someone else's eye you may want to check out the 2X4 in your own" and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone".