… Without Resembling a Rum-Addled Pirate Who lost Her Peg Leg somewhere.
At least once a day, I take a step and the entire right side of my body buckles. My hip and knee give out and I stumble like toddler learning to how to use the stairs.
Is this what being 46 is about? Wonky joints and never being guaranteed you’ll walk in a straight line?
For awhile I blamed the floor of our house. We live in an epic fixer-upper that continues not getting fixed. (Probably because the first thing that needs to happen is replacing the foundation. The estimate was $400,000 in 2016 dollars. So now, in post-Pandemic, current-tariff inflation, that would be what? A million dollars?)
The floor slants, is my point. A lot. If you drop an orange in the kitchen, it will roll into the living room. You may never see that orange again.
We had circus performers for Brandon’s 50th (as you do) and the fire show in the courtyard went without a visible hitch, but the poor dude performing on his circle thing-y in our wildly slanted living room couldn’t keep the wheel going to save his life. We just watched his ego sink into the core of the earth as he kept toppling and having to re-start when the floor didn’t behave as expected. In retrospect, we should’ve warned him.
Unfortunately, my unreliable right hip and knee don’t seem to be location specific. They just merrily collapse on me no matter where I am.
Because I like walking and want to do some of the things my former self enjoyed, like dance classes and maybe running (maybe), I am doing my utmost to sort out this issue.
There’s a theory that our body absorbs the impact of our poor* decisions.
*More accurately, our misaligned decisions. The decision itself was probably neutral but it may not have worked for us at the time. And the body says “aw HELL no.” And then I guess you stop being able to walk like a normal person?
Meaning, my movement issue - like so many issues - has multiple prongs: learning the internal mechanism to making the best decisions for myself in each moment as well as strengthening my body so it can do normal body things without all the drama.
A combination of physical therapy and going to the chiropractor a few times a week fixed it for awhile, but then I made the mistake of thinking it was fixed and stopped doing what were apparently the only things keeping the right side of my body from wobbling like an air sock outside a car dealership.
After I doubled down on my bad decisions by deciding to go for a run (despite the fact that the physical therapist said very specifically “no running”) and thereby messing up my knee (which swelled up like a balloon, that doesn’t seem right), I am now in a bit of a perambulatory pickle.
It’s amazing how much work it takes simply to regain the use of my legs, limbs that used to do their job without all the melodrama. I’m doing my daily physical therapy exercises again with a few additional mea culpas. I’m seeing a trainer, because it has been solemnly sworn to me that they can get me dancing again in a few months.
I’m also crossing my fingers that all this works, because I really want to start dancing again. Also, I enjoy, you know, WALKING.
I miss the days when being out of shape meant suffering through a few dance classes and then being fine. Now, it takes months of work to even be able to consider setting foot in a dance class.
If you’re wondering how all this happened - I mean, I’m not that old - I suspect the combination of the pandemic plus perimenopause massively screwed me over. Some people got in great shape during the pandemic. Others, like myself, simply shaped their couch cushions into something that better cradled their butts. I also watched every single thing my TV had to offer, a decision I regret zero. Add that to majorly spiking cortisol (thanks, hormones) and some wild stress, and my adrenals were toasted like a marshmallow dropped in a campfire. It took two years of no exercise (and lots of other things) to address the burnout. Unfortunately, in the process of healing my adrenals, all my muscles atrophied.
So now I sway down the street like a pirate with a peg leg and no parrot. (I should really get a parrot.)
But because I’m stubborn, and willing to do the work (especially when I know what the work is, which isn’t always the case when you’re trying to fix something), I plan to be in dance classes by the summer.
SO MOTE IT BE.