Author: mriverswright

5/9/18: Back in the Game

Den of Positivity, 5 mo. PO:

Back in the game after Backpack Stumble 2018. At my PT’s suggestion I self-massaged the hammies with a rolling pin between each lap, and it loosened up my tendons & reduced the pain in a miraculous way. No idea why I didn’t try that sooner, since I use a roller on my quads all the time. Maybe just afraid to go too hard on Hammy LaRue. Or just part of being the smartest idiot I know. 🙈 Onward.

5/2/18: 5 Months P.O.

Den of Positivity, 5 months PO:

I tripped over my son’s backpack in the hallway back on April 14th, and it set my recovery back by about a month. Back to pain, back to tight tendons, back to less elasticity & range of motion. I have Hamster-howled my anger & grief to the skies, cleared the hallway hooks of extra coats to make room for bags, rested, iced, written, connected, and gone back to the high school track to restart on stamina. There is only one way forward: Yes.

Yes, I am one who stumbles.

Yes, I move too fast.

Yes, shit happens.

Yes, I am learning.

Yes, it hurts.

Yes, it’s hard to gain weight when you teach other women how to take it off.

Yes, opportunities to learn & share new knowledge abound.

Yes, I am hopelessly in love with all my caregivers.

Yes, I will likely be fully healed in less than a year and need only be patient.

Yes, dammit. Yes.

Yes helps. What we resist persists. Allow. Kicking & screaming if I must. Okay, not kicking, Melissa DelRossi. ☀️

And P.S… Yes to love.

4/29/18: You Live, You Learn

“You live you learn, you love you learn
You cry you learn, you lose you learn
You bleed you learn, you scream you learn
You grieve you learn, you choke you learn
You laugh you learn, you choose you learn
You pray you learn, you ask you learn
You live you learn.”

-Alanis Morisette

4/24/18: Post-Backpack Stumble

I saw my PT yesterday for the first time since my scary backpack stumble ten days ago. She gave my hams a long & careful exam, and is confident they’re still attached – no divots or gaps anywhere, and tension is still palpable on all three. She thinks my pain is from having had to contract the hamstrings so suddenly & forcefully when I landed. They just haven’t had to do that in a long time. (Probably all that deadlift demonstrating I did at work on Friday – albeit without weights or a deep hip hinge – didn’t help the pain, either. It’s hard to put training moves into words at 6:00am before the coffee has kicked in…Word retrieval nightmare…”Okay, so bend there and put your…thing on that…thingy…” I got better at it as the morning progressed and stopped demo-ing so much.)

Melissa said when she’d gotten my email about tripping over my son’s backpack she’d thought, “Oh, NO,” because she’d had a client several years ago who had torn off just one tendon, but who had the telltale bruising down the whole back of the leg. “Guess how she tore it,” she asked me. “Oh, my god,” I said. “Backpack stumble..?” -“Yep.” I’m thinking we were both relieved to find my tendons still intact.

She put her supercalifragilisticexpialidocious hands on them and released a lot of the tension & pain to the point where I was able to get up this morning and walk for a mile again at the high school track. Woo-hoo! I’m still taking it easy with the PT exercises by doing just one set of each instead of my usual three. Two steps forward, one step back, one big (and careful) step forward. Resilience, resilience, resilience. And…hang up those backpacks, kids.