Your Humble Blogger has an arthritic knee. Chondromalacia, in fact. Whoo-hoo.\n
I am told that my splay-footed gait is a substantial factor in this—my feet tend to roll inward on the ankle, so to compensate my toes point outward, knocking my knees together at enough of an angle to take the patella off its normally even keel and scrape it along the cartilage. What’s left of the cartilage. Anyway, to reverse this, I will need to wear a thing in my shoe, which shouldn’t be a problem once I purchase the funny thing (perhaps tomorrow morning).\n
I also need to forget how to walk.\n
More accurately, I need to train my muscles to forget exactly how I used to walk in order to reset themselves to my new gait with a thing in my shoe. Muscles have very good memories. They are creatures of habit. Like people, actually. The first step in the whole no-longer-crying-in-pain process is to confuse the fuck out of my muscles by stretching them to hell and gone twice a day. Once the muscles are sufficiently confused, I will walk around with a thing in my shoe and my muscles will develop a new habit that won’t involve cartilage-scraping. Or that’s the idea, as presented to me by an attractive young physical therapist with a calming voice, who I trust with my muscles, if not my cockles. Ahem.\n
So. Forty-five minutes or so in the morning and another forty-five minutes or so in the evening of holding absurd and uncomfortable postures has been added to my daily maintenance. Now, I don’t do a lot of daily maintenance on the body, certainly compared with other people. I wash, I brush my teeth, sure. I brush my hair, mostly for cosmetic reasons as I keep it short enough these days that not brushing it for a day wouldn’t be a health hazard. Also my hair is short enough that the cosmetic hairbrushing takes less than half a minute, most days. I eat, although most of my eating time is probably not accurately described as body maintenance. Taken all together, the half-hour of daily stretches for my chondromalacia patella probably doubles my usual daily body-maintenance time.\n
I do not have a daily exercise regimen. I pretty much don’t ever exercise as body maintenance; any exercise I do is part of some other task, either amusing myself, moving myself from one place to another, or accomplishing something I want done for other reasons. It’s a moderate amount of exercise, taken all in all, most of it walking around the library that employs me, but it isn’t deliberate. Other people go to the gym three times a week, or jog in the morning, or otherwise spend some hours devoted to exercise. Some Gentle Readers have been doing stretches of this kind for years, just as a maintenance routine. Some have more elaborate systems of dental hygiene. Some prepare special foodstuffs as body maintenance aids, or have some cleansing ritual. Some do a sort of mental body maintenance (I know a woman who does crosswords defensively against the prospect of memory loss; she doesn’t enjoy them, but then she doesn’t enjoy her treadmill walking, either) or meditation or visualization intended as maintenance. I don’t.\n
I do believe that it’s reasonable to put some effort in to maintaining the physical plant. I reject the whole mind\/body split thing, but if I can use it’s terms for a moment, I’ll say that I am on good terms with my body. I certainly accept that the limitations on my body are limitations on me—I can’t fly, and I can’t both drink caffeinated beverages in the evening and sleep at night. If I eat the wrong things, my digestion will be bad; if I sink to the bottom of the ocean, I’ll drown. Eventually, I will die. I accept those things. Many of them are easier to accept, I’m sure, because I am so physically average in so many ways. I’m of middling height, middling weight, middling looks. I can run, but not quickly; I can sing, but not on key; I can see, but with glasses.\n
This, though, this sudden requirement that I spend an hour and a half or more every day on body maintenance. I don’t know. I’m having trouble accepting it. It seems like such an unreasonable demand. I mean, I like to watch movies, but it wouldn’t occur to the movie-watching aspect of me to hold myself hostage, that if I don’t devote an hour and a half every day and watch a feature film that I will put myself through incapacitating pain. Frankly, I’m disinclined to negotiate under these conditions. On the other hand, my Best Outside Alternative is… excruciating pain? Surgery, followed by either more rehab or vastly reduced mobility, and more pain anyway? This knee has me over a barrel, doesn’t it?\n
And yet… I am wondering whether what is really going on is just an ordinary adjustment to my having had abnormally low levels of body-maintenance in my routine for so long. What about you, Gentle Readers? How much time (over a week or so) do you spend doing things you think of as body maintenance?\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger is screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse mistakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19563,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14096\/revisions\/19563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}