Saturday, September 05, 2009

Unbraceable Me

For the first time in four months and sixteen days (but who's counting? LOL), I ventured into the outside world without the aid of a knee brace today. Although I'd been going without it most of the time around the house (including, thankfully, while sleeping and showering) for the past week and a half, this was the first day that I had done so for the full day and outside the house. I picked a day when I was going to physical therapy anyway to try this, and there have been no issues whatsoever.

I still have a way to go before I can bend my knee completely back, and it'll take a while to regain a normal gait (which I may not have had for a while before the accident; I've noticed over the years that my shoes wore out at the heels before anywhere else, which is obviously not supposed to happen), but I feel more and more like I'm joining the "regular" world again.

So while I'm not yet able to run, jump or play racquetball quite yet, it's still great to be free of yet one more assistive device (having gone through crutches, a walker and a cane in addition to the brace, only the cane will accompany me for the foreseeable future). It's a challenge to do the menagerie of exercises prescribed by the therapist as teaching gets busier in the fall, but the results I've seen from one session to another make it all worthwhile.

The multitaskmaster: One of the things that amazes me at physical therapy is how the therapist manages to juggle up to three people at a time without anyone feeling neglected. It's timed just right so that as one person is being worked on, the other(s) are doing, say, thirty reps of a particular exercise or spending time on some sort of machine.

I pondered whether or not such a skill could ever be transferred to what I do, but I realized that there was really no way I could teach three people music lessons at once. Sure, my equivalent of the thirty reps could be "practice your Dorian modes for ten minutes," but therapy takes place in a big open room, which means that the therapist can still observe everyone while working on one person. In order for me to do that, I'd either have to have practice studios with clear front walls, or a big open space that would be N-O-I-S_Y. So I guess I'll stick to the traditional method for now.

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