Being very athletic most of my life, I counted on the strength of my legs and the coordination of my body. My confidence arose from being fit, capable, and agile.
Getting certified in Therapeutic Massage in 1980, involved learning lots of correlations between specific areas of the body and what they typically represented.
Head; thinking imagining, dreaming... Shoulders; carrying the weight of the world...Knees; standing on your own... toes...
As a teenager... aiming toward independence... it would seem my legs could carry me anywhere... from hiking over a few rolling hill ridges from Indian Valley Colleges in Novato to home in Lucas Valley instead of taking the bus... to dancing every single song at the Sleeping Lady Cafe in Fairfax for about 3-4 hours straight.
My knees and feet took me anywhere I wanted to go – walking was comfortable, easy, normal, back then I had strength, a fantastic gate and lots of endurance... so having to do a lot of walking while hitchhiking or taking buses to get around never phased me.
The day I hiked home from IVC thinking it would take about an hour and a half... which was nearly the same time as the buses - I discovered once up the first ridge, my neigborhood was many ridges over and I was better off hiking up that ridge to the highest peak in those ridges where radio station towers are located and then down the long fire road on the crest of the ridge to our neighborhood face of the hills...a hike that took 4.5 hours - the whole afternoon, yet also faster than up and down repeatedly traversing steeper untrailed canyoned hills loaded with vast sections of dense manzanita - a sturdy low to the ground bush that often prevented passage forcing repeated back tracking.
I felt invincible. I had the energy and ability to course correct and get anywhere I intended to go.
Yet, at the time in a larger picture of my life... I was also absolutely conflicted about the idea of suddenly moving out to live on my own for the first time as soon as I turned 18, so I didn't until I was 21 and finally aligned with finishing my college degree. Though I was eager to venture out on my own, I also could not quite wrap my head around earning enough money cover all the cost of my life and all I would need from that point on... including ongoing expensive dental appointments... cause I had weak teeth. My $3.30 an hour minimum wage job at a healthfood store was not going to cover an apartment and food. much less the cost of a vehicle, gas, maintenence or any medical or dental costs.
In my teens, I was lanky, I had a few growth spirts and the connective tissue in my knees seemed too loose. My knees gave out a bunch of times, they were prone to dislocating during vigorous activities such as while chasing the dog in the backyard when I would lunge side to side. The top part of my leg veered off of being above the bottom in an extreme unsupported dislocation. Eventually, Kaiser docs in the mid-seventies... put my right leg in a cast from my ankle to my upper thigh.
Being confined again in order to heal brought up all the tender emotions packed away in my cells about being in a full body cast at 4.5 years old when my left femur acquired a spiral fracture, and it was rebroken and doubled up on itself for a "better mend"... which led to being bedridden for months in traction, then a full body cast for another two months. That confining cast contained my whole left side from my toes to my chest, as well as my right side from the top of my knee to my chest just below my arms. My young cast had a bar at my knees to keep my legs wide with an open area at my crotch to allow defication, and zero modesty. I was flat on my back confined to a bedroom with no ability to do anything for myself. Someone else had to lift me up and carry me into another room to join others. It was an intensely lonely time that made me want to crawl out of that cast to free myself from that restriction.
When my first cast was finally removed, my biggest surprise as an active ranbunctious kid was the lack of coordination and strength. I had to slowly rebuilt muscles and relearn how to walk again. Like a toddler.
My confidence was shot. I could not trust my body nor my abilities as I had until then. Much of my focus was forced to be on trying to realign my feet and hips forward to correctly aligning my knees and feet from turning out like a duck in the direction the cast had set both legs. It became my meditation. If I forgot, I would revert to a very awkard clumping gate with toes pointing out to each side.
As a teenager, I pondered for weeks, while unhappily confined in a second cast: the correlation between my weakened knees... and my not wanting or not being ready to stand on my own.
Each night I dreamed of ways I would remove the cast, with tin snips from my dad's tools in the garage, to soaking it off in a hot bath of soapy bubbles. I even dreampt about a progressive healing camp where people wore removeable splints and traversed through the woods on stiltz and were very active as a way to encourage healing, versus being confined and limited.
I can't help reflecting on this again now... as we are now three years into the Covid19 Pandemic... Isolation and all the life-scrambling gobble-dee-goop that has gone on, (health issues, OsteoArthritis, cancer surgeries... tons of mental emotional suffering on top of enduring insane pain daily and especially unrestful nightly bouts of ongoing overstimulated nerve pain... ) that led to serious depression and disillusionment about life and how in the f-n to survive or (preferably) THRIVE.
It has been devastatingly humbling to realize and acknowledge, my health issues put me out of the running for supporting myself. I am no longer the fittest. I am exhausted And I can't know if I will ever function any better than this. That is depressing.
I am headed for a difficult surgery to replace both knees at the same time. It was a terribly difficult choice to make to even have any surgery at all due to not recovering very well from two other recent surgeries.
My life became so degraded by dysfunction and pain in my knees it forced the issue... of either trying for betterment via surgery or surrending to less and less activity as well as an eventual wheel chair to not have to stand or walk.
Yet I do not have a good leg to help recondition a replaced one. And both have intermittently been the one I coud not put any weight on for days at a time. One needs to walk a lot after surgery to regain mobility and range of motion. If the other leg cannot accommodate that the first surgery recovery will be compromised. And if the first knee surgery and recovery is insanely difficult for one, I might not ever have the dare to do the second, and that defeats doing any surgery for restoring function.
This route though seemingly all about getting to walk and hike again without pain - eventually... also feels a bit like walking blindfolded down a gang-plank... only to LATER discover what I could not have known now.
