Last night I needed to use two crutches. I felt like my right glute was a knot of muscles and it hurt more than I've felt pain in a very long time. It really hurt when I put more than about 40% weight on it and when there was no weight on it, it just was a regular type of pain. That's the strong side that I don't normally use a crutch to assist, so I ended up back with two for a while yesterday.
How did I get to this point?
Well, probably a little bit of stupid mixed in with a little bit of stubborn. After so many years of 'managing', I really thought that I understood my body enough to have a handle on finding where the limits fall on a day to day basis. I thought that I had learnt the lesson to listen to my body a long time ago. I was pretty good at working out how many spoons I had each day and figuring out early if I've dropped any throughout the day (Check out the The Spoon Theory if you don't know what I'm talking about!). With change happening every day, it is difficult for me to work it out with any accuracy at all and because I want to keep pushing forward, we have the ingredients for a 'stop work'.
Today has been a very slow day. Muscles ache and I'm limping pretty badly. I have done my stretches today and some of my exercises but now where near the level of activity that I have been doing over the last few weeks. Slowing down is not really that great for my mood. I'm going to have days like this where it feels like I'm going backwards when I am still moving forwards and just need a break. The last few days have been the busiest that I have had since the op and I did ok.
The burst of activity started on Wednesday when I went back to the office for most of the day. I ended up being in there for about five hours which normally wouldn't seem like a lot. It's not that I didn't notice before how much activity this new office requires because I did. How far things actually are, how many steps I need to walk up and down, the distance to the bathroom, driving home in traffic and where the car was parked were all part of the considerations to go back. I was ready and it was a full day. I didn't really think about how sitting for that long would affect me and I was really tired by the time I was finished for the day. By the time I got home I was totally exhausted but not sore.
I slept well and started early the next morning. Life is getting back to normal and I had to do normal things like taking my car in for service. I could have done with another few hours sleep to recover from the previous day and my muscles were still tired and a little tight from the previous day. I felt pretty good though and we headed out after dropping the car off. We ended up walking around a shopping centre and looking at elliptical machines. The first place that we looked at was a no go. The girl that was a manager couldn't seem to comprehend that I was looking at the elliptical for rehabilitation purposes not for burning calories. I'm not quite sure whether there was a subtle underlying dig there or not as she kept going back to increasing the heart rate and a proper work out. It seemed like she might have been in love with her own voice to, though that impression really could have come from my irritation at being told that I needed to burn some calories more than I need to build up my muscles and get my hips moving. I'm still on crutches and I made it quite clear what my rehab requirements were and it didn't sink in. It is possible that she was just a bimbo and meant nothing by it.
We went to another fitness store and tried out quite a few of them out. The guy there was able to listen to our requirements and help out without being insulting. He was actually pretty cool and helpful. I probably spent 4 or 5 minutes on different machines which helped loosen everything up. I wasn't using any resistance at all and that was enough to start out. We made the decision to get one and it gets delivered on Monday. The rest of the day included finishing off some more of the work that I'd started the previous day, baking and some more chores around the house. I was on my feel for most of the day and was really ready for sleep by the end of the day.
Friday started with a hydro session. It went for about an hour and a half which is the longest that we have had so far. I felt pretty good when I got out of the pool but by the time that I got home, I was pretty well wrecked. Hydro can kind of sneak up on you like that. It doesn't feel like you've done that much until later. Sometimes it doesn't even hit until the next day. I thought that I felt somewhat rejuvenated later in the afternoon so I figured that I would start on the to do list again and headed back to the shopping centre to go to medicare and MBF to sort out refunds for the surgery. This involved a fair amount of walking and where at some point I hit the limit and ran out of spoons.
I'm not sure if it was a cumulative effect of the activity of a few days in a row or just that one day with the extended hydro session. It could also have been one of those unexplained losses of energy linked in with something completely unrelated to the amount of physical activity that I have been doing. My body may have just decided that it wants a break, just because.
Regardless of what the reason is for my enforced break, it's where I'm at today. Using two crutches and going as slow as I was a few weeks ago. I'm better than I was when I went to sleep last night but the muscles still aren't happy. My husband was some what amused by my request to massage my ass to try and get the knot out. Amused but he still assisted. I would have just about asked almost anyone to massage my ass last night. There is no dignity when it comes to pain.
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