Dr. O’s diagnosis, dated April 27, 2011:
Lumbosacral Spondylosis (ICD-7213)
Myofascial Pain (ICD-729.1)
Lumbar Disc Displacement, W/O Myelopathy (ICD-722.10)
Hamstring Strain
Precautions:
NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS
Prescription:
Modalities, Massage, TENS unit, Ultrasound Electrical Stimulation, Gait and Balance Evaluation and training, Stretching and strengthening of L/S paraspinal and abdominal muscles. Stretching and strengthening of lower extremities muscles, ROM of L/S spine and lower extremities joints, Lumbar Spine stabilization exercises, Theraband exercises for strengthening of rotator cuff muscles, proper posturing and body ergonomics training. Teach home exercise program.
And here, silly me, I thought Dr. O was going to launch into a praise-Larry soliloquy, drawing attention to my hard work since the injury, exactly one month ago today (April 28), and that sure I should, could continue to follow the able advice of my physical therapists not computer-tap a jargon-filled prescription to be filled by whom? A physical therapist who will have me doing body realignment and – gasp! – suggesting yoga for full-body health and renewal or face what Dr. O called not once but twice the “dangerous” consequences of following the path that I’m currently on, so I ask myself the question as Dr. O’s prescription includes, NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS, shouldn’t I just take this prescription and put it a little too close to a flame and watch it burn to ash, and go about strengthening on my own terms because, baby, I got to this season not by listening to doctors, or at least that’s what I tell myself, and if there’s one thing to come out of my session with Dr. O it’s that she convinced me that whether I start the blog, “Knowing Water,” or not that I continue this summer with the plan of getting into Water – Rat We – relaxing, let it lift me up and turn a weakness into a strength.
Running for Your Life: Keeping a Journal II
So you want to live in Park Slope, Exhibit D:
“Don’t you wish you had started doing yoga when you were twelve?”
– (Approx. language of a) message advertising a ground-floor business in a brownstone, Center Slope
“Don’t you wish you had started doing yoga when you were twelve?”
– (Approx. language of a) message advertising a ground-floor business in a brownstone, Center Slope
Running for Your Life: On Beshert
M’s mother Ro doesn’t bring much Yiddish into my life. But a long time ago she said that when a Canadian drives an unairconditioned car from the north into a heat wave in the US South and meets the girl of his dreams, the only non-southerner at a Richmond, Virginia, writers’ conference, it’s Beshert: Meant to be.
Ro never wavers in that belief, in that support of me. And I can only hope that I have, perhaps even in ways that she never at first imagined, carried that as a promise, never a burden. I know that now I think of her, finally a little feeble in her 98 years, that she has bestowed many gifts on me in my life, but perhaps none as generous and meaningful as that one. As that folk-pure belief in me.
Ro never wavers in that belief, in that support of me. And I can only hope that I have, perhaps even in ways that she never at first imagined, carried that as a promise, never a burden. I know that now I think of her, finally a little feeble in her 98 years, that she has bestowed many gifts on me in my life, but perhaps none as generous and meaningful as that one. As that folk-pure belief in me.
Running for Your Life: Keeping a Journal
I can’t remember when it was I started writing in a journal. Certainly not in childhood. That would be too much like school. Even in university, where I chose journalism – the science of journals? hmmm – as a course of study, not because I was especially taken with the idea of being a newsman, or had a strong desire to express my opinions on the issues of the day. Rather, I was first inclined to take up acting, but when I learned that greater than ninety percent of professional actors were out of work, the very idea of college as a place to find, feed and care a passion, if not more than one that you will cultivate for the rest of your life, maybe even make a living out of, all central to the experience, the college years as Odyssey, discovery, a track as foreign to me as cricket. In my case, think table hockey, a narrow shallow slot from center to just below the faceoff dot, no surprises; go to college with a task in mind, a job at the end, and although Carleton University journalism was nothing to be ashamed of, quite the contrary, I entered its halls with no illusions: come four years and I’d be working in a job, and sure, let it be writing and reporting, and no it couldn’t just as easily have been computer programming, or accounting, or surveying, not anything further afield because my mind was made up, like the right wing riding up and down the table-hockey slot, just staying the course, the very idea that there was anything more to say about what I would do with my life not exactly a sacrilege because I didn’t prejudge myself, didn’t allow myself the luxury. In small-town Canada that greater sense of self, or a higher destiny, might suit in a confession to a girlfriend, or in my best pals from childhood, but any specialness like that had best be hidden away, you didn’t write any of it down in a journal, because to do so, to feel that you were worthy of such consideration could only mean one thing, the dreaded: Who do you think you are?
Running for Your Life: Beginner’s Mind
They’ve redone the paving stones along the walk from the southeastern entrance to Central Park, today (April 9) finally a day that makes me think of summer, which if you were to ask me if that were possible last time I was here, Saturday, January 22, no one out the frigid morning of the Central Park Half-Marathon except us, rogue runners, the hardcore, in the many hundreds, I’d have to say it was unthinkable, and now as I sit here, finally not feeling sorry for myself, embittered by what seemed so certain to me once, the culpability of the physical therapist who worked on my hamstring muscles only twenty minutes before The Event, two weeks ago tomorrow, a grudge that’s vanished, as foreign in feeling to me as if it happened to someone else, this me on a different path altogether, not a runner’s one alas, instead, memory lane, the sun’s warmth, winter like a icy remote island, its ferocity past, truly past, a young man dressed all in brown, Kiplingesque braids, sweeping away the bits of trash, the evidence of now, so that as M and I go back in time, from the Strand book kiosk entrance at East 57th Street, behind us The Plaza, the scent of horses, birds chirping, the murmur of balloon-shaping clowns, a puppeteer, an Arab man sizing us up as tourists, declaring, “You are here!”, pointing to an illustrated map that opens before us like an accordion, and M, the more instinctive New Yorker, counters, “We live here,” and the man harrumphs as if to say, “Well, make it more obvious, would you, you’re wasting my time,” refolds the map as I feel only a twinge in my leg under the miracle Tiger Balm patch, a mental-reminder to buy stock in its maker, and try in the thickening crowds to keep an even keel so that we don’t talk about The Injury, engage instead the Beginner’s Mind, when each moment is lived as if it's the first and that is what we think, M and I, we think, “Where did all the time go?” We both feel and probably always will feel like young parents when we’re on these trash-swept-clean paving stones, “Where is she, Kate? Did she run off ahead of us.” Those years we would always come here, even the years after we moved to Brooklyn, M, L & K in Central Park, the animal musical band of the Delacorte Clock; here at 3:30 p.m., Saturday, April 9, a half-month of Saturdays since the day of the freezing race, and off they march with their instruments, the Penguin drummer, the Bruin cymbalist, my faves, also the Hippo playing the violin, best seen in profile as it rounds the carousel and M sings the final note of a number that is being chimed, something from “Oklahoma!” that in the sun’s warmth comes flooding back to her from the first movie she’d ever seen on the silver screen.
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