Time To Rest

I have been ‘fighting’ with my body for years. It hasn’t been a ‘surprise’ that I am having physical problems, I have lived a very physically active life, although not in the ‘usual’ way of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

While I worked hard to minimize the damage from the physical toll of weaving for 5-6 hours a day, pretty much every day, other things happen in one’s life and my body has taken a few ‘hits’ that meant I needed to take time to rest and recover from.

This latest has been the hardest ‘hit’ of them all. The brain bleed nearly killed me, but it didn’t, and so I have tried to recover from that and the fall out from being out of energy to keep going for a big chunk of the past two years.

As soon as I was feeling ‘better’ enough to notice, I tried to deal with the toll on my physical fitness, but it seemed there was something ‘wrong’ and nothing I and my care team were doing was actually improving things very much.

I am fortunate in that I have found a really excellent care team in my small city and they have done their best to try and get me functional again. But I also have injuries, mainly due to falls or car accidents or ill health, that have weakened my body. Now age is creeping up on me and I had been feeling, for lack of a better word, hamstrung.

My massage therapist and physiotherapist have been absolute gems and each of them is working on the current issue – my legs, hips, pelvis. I have damage to my spine and SI joint, but the pain I have been having has been ‘extreme’ and very little has been mitigating the pain. Over the past 6 months, between those two therapists and my repeated description of what I was feeling being ‘my legs have forgotten how to leg’, and they have worked on the muscles that allow locomotion.

One of the reasons I started seeing the physiotherapist is that she said she does ‘dry needling’. I had had dry needling in 2019 and had good results, so I thought, what the hell, and asked if she would try it on me. She was reluctant, but agreed, and she has been proceeding conservatively with that, plus giving me stretches and low impact strength exercises to do. My massage therapist works on the same muscles to try to get them to come out of spasm and increase range of motion.

Last week he requested the physiotherapist dry needle two muscles – the TFL and the gluteus maximus. She not only did those two, she did two of the smaller muscles of the gluteus group. When she did the last of the smaller muscles, she literally gasped and said that that particular muscle was atrophied.

Have we finally stumbled on the final road block to my achieving some additional mobility? Range of motion? Increase in physical fitness?

TBD.

So I have some more stretches to do. Very conservative stretches. Stretches that will, hopefully, also encourage the atrophied muscles to begin to grow, build strength, and even (one most fervently hopes) improve the quality of my life.

I had arranged for a ‘rest’ day yesterday with the intent to weave today. But I am feeling wrung out and have a zoom presentation to give this afternoon. So instead of weaving, I’m going to just take another ‘rest’ day, get ready for the zoom, and call it a day. Tomorrow I have two appointments in the afternoon, and that may turn into another rest day.

My stubborn self wants badly to get to the loom, but the message I’m getting from my physical body is ‘please, let me rest’.

So I am going to.

(photo of my ballet shoes that I wear when I weave on an ‘ordinary’ treadle loom showing the wear and tear on the shoes)