The smiling girl with the ski poles in the opening photo visited the doctor on Thursday and he advised that he would delay the rehabilitation exercises and manipulations for another fortnight. Cass was like a fish out of water as she struggled to lie on her stomach for the examination and the doctor's minor manipulations of her pelvis and surrounding muscles was very painful, from which she only fully recovered about a day later!
However, in reporting this, I need to also advise that her daily condition seems much on the improve. Each day she is able to put just a touch more weight on her left side and for longer. Cassy is also insisting ( to my very weak protests only!) on getting into the kitchen and cooking and heating meals with my assistance. It's so much better than my shambolic efforts over the past fortnight have been!
She is a very stubborn human, a trait which I have noticed becomes more pronounced in direct correlation to her frustration level and "stir craziness"! She is very insistent on doing as much as she can within the great confines of her injury, so I've let her "push the pace" a little.
I did, however, spend what I considered an inordinate amount of time in washing, cleaning, preparing, shopping, transporting etc. again this weekend. It wasn't all drudgery though, and I quite enjoy the stripping, washing and replacing of bedsheets, transforming toweling into crisp clean versions and all those little triumphs associated with finding all the right foods in the supermarket doing the weekly shop!
I took the car around to a colleague's house on Sunday afternoon to pick up a wheelchair and with that ensconced in the back seat, I parked it round the corner from our place in another colleague's carpark. This morning we did the whole get the car, bring the car, load the car, get the cripple downstairs, drive to school, then unload and wheelchair to the classroom routine. We got up at 5.30 a.m. and only just made it to work on time! I'm sure we'll be a little better at it tomorrow after our initial experience.
I snuck out in blazing 36 degree noon heat on Sunday to do the "thousand steps" and the landscape was in sharp relief. The sun hammered and sapped throughout, but the overhanging branches did dapple its intensity in many parts. The critical incline in sections made my calves howl in protest after a bit of a layoff, and they're protesting a dull ache under the desk as I write this now. I have a strap that supports my kneecap on my right leg, a legacy of my medial ligament problems, but I was pleased that it seemed to hold up alright. I ran into neither colleagues nor monkeys on the big hike and I was able to meditate a little on the beauty of nature while pondering my lack of aerobic fitness!
It will be interesting to see how Cass survives her first day back...she seemed pretty exhausted when I did a quick check-in at 9 o'clock! She has a relatively easy day tomorrow, so hopefully it won't be so bad. She'll have to wait around for me for a while this afternoon: I have a team meeting which I'm sure will be filled with waffle and prove to me yet again that any meeting over 10 minutes in duration seems to be gratuitous, or at the very least, too long-winded.
Photos: crutch girl!, street sculpture, various shots of the stairs and the path at the top.