I’m in therapy… Physiotherapy

So yesterday afternoon I hurtled off to Ripon to my appointment with the physiotherapist. I was ushered into a cubicle behind a curtain and the physio asked if a student could sit in and observe. No problem. And did I bring shorts? What? No. Was I supposed to? No one told me. Ah well. Just take off my T-shirt and shoes and socks.

What? I’m not going paddling. Well ok then, but my feet have been in trainers all morning and will smell. Incidentally, I wonder why we call them ‘trainers’. They don’t train us. Still stranger is the American ’sneakers’ since I suspect they’re rarely used for real sneaking. So I remove my protective layers and the room slowly fills with the green miasma of feet.

She then proceeds to ask me all sorts of peculiar questions, and some not peculiar but verging on the seemingly irrelevant.

“Have you noticed any unexpected weightloss?” was my personal favourite. I looked down at the protruding, distended huge beer-filled stomach that threatens to overbalance me and tip me off the table. I look like a small moon with legs.

“You are kidding, right?”

So next she wants to see me walk. Now walking is the most natural thing in the world, even if you’re limping. Until someone asks to watch you do it. Then something inside gets all self conscious and stops your natural walk. Instead you become acutely aware that you are being carefully observed and you instinctively try to display the problem that they are checking for. I walk with a limp and a slightly stiff leg most of the time at the moment. The result of my efforts was some laughable, camp, bandy-legged, mincing lurching puppet with a broken string.

I must have looked like Igor the assistant on his night off when he stars as Loretta at Les Boys.

She then began to test the limits of my bones, muscles and nerves by twisting, pulling, bending and stretching me in directions that I don’t even let wifey try. At the end of the hour, I shuffled/limped/hopped/lurched/minced out of the physio department and to the car. I was getting a lift both there and home, just in case I wouldn’t be able to ride my bike after. And I wouldn’t.

I have several long, painful exercises to do three times a day. I added up how long they could take and it comes to almost 10% of my day! I hope that my next visit next week will allow me to drop some of them. But… It is vaguely possible that if this all works I could avoid surgery. And that sounds good to me.

So last night I did my exercises while we watched Priscilla – Queen of the Desert. It was making me vaguely uncomfortable watching the film, as the drunk drag queens in high heels reminded me too much of how I looked at the physio! And I did my exercises again this morning. I am now walking like Hans Moleman from the Simpsons. 

And in the last 18 hours I have discovered the other, hidden downside (upside?) of physio. Because of the ways they have bent and stretched me I have done nothing but fart for 18 hours. Some of this air might have been trapped since the 70s!

Happy Wednesday and don’t come near me with a naked flame.

Ciao