I opened my physical therapy session this week by telling the therapist I had been alive and breathing for eighty years and one month that day the tenth of November. Something about adding the one month bit made me feel like the parent of an infant or toddler on the age of their offspring by including the number of months. She grinned when she heard that and we high-fived.
She asked what I wanted to work on and I shared my osteopath’s suggestion that we work on turning around.
After I was treated in 2017 for Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH), one of the first tests the neurologist gave me was to check how quickly I could walk in a straight line before turning around and walking back. Walking was okay but I found turning around difficult. I still felt dizzy and unsteady on my feet. Eight years later, it’s much better, but still bothers me. My osteopath also noticed the difficulty and prescribed physical therapy.
The PT put me in a corner and told me to pivot my feet and turn around, clockwise and then counter-clockwise. Then she left the exam room to set up our next exercise, while I continued turning around. It was almost fun! I was alone and relaxed as I moved my body back and forth.
The PT stepped back in and pulled a chair out into the exercise room, instructing me to follow her and sit down. She had placed two cones about twelve feet away. My job was to stand up, walk toward the cones and make a figure eight between them before returning to the chair. Something about this test felt really hard. There were people watching and I was nervous about looking foolish. After I did it once, to my chagrin, the PT said, “Oh, that must have been too complicated.” She took away one of the cones. I was now supposed to sit down, stand up, walk around one cone and come back to sit down again. She had me do the circuit several times. I had to admit that it was difficult for me to do it smoothly and I was getting a little worked up. I thought to myself, “A toddler could do this.”
The PT asked, “Are you breathing?”
Was I breathing? I stopped dead in my tracks. I suddenly realized that I had been holding my breath, something I tend to do when I’m stressed. I fessed up.
She suggested walking around the cone while concentrating on my breathing. I sat down and looked down at my tennis shoes, grounding myself before standing up and taking a breath. Walking toward the cone, I took another breath. I almost effortlessly turned around the cone and took another breath as I headed back to the chair, getting in another inbreath followed by an outbreath as I sat down.
It was exhilarating. I really was 80 and 1-month and conscious breathing had helped me turn around more easily. She gave me another high-five, and we both gave a sigh of relief that we had witnessed improvement.
Walking to the car, I continued paying attention to my breathing and thought about the miracle of how much I have to learn, even as a one-month-old eighty-year-old.
IMAGE: Sometimes you take a picture and it’s a long time before you understand why. Such is the case with this kind young man in 2018 whose shirt expresses how I feel sometimes in PT.
