... and if it comes back, great is the rejoicing!
I blogged before about arthritis issues in my knee. I thought I'd never again walk without a limp and definitely never thought I'd run again. When I realized that it wasn't going to get better, I went back to weightlifting, thinking it was my last chance at it.
Well, after about three months of serious work with the weights, going to the gym almost every day, the knee pain is not only completely gone, I can also jog again. Booyah!
I think there's a lot to be said for getting in shape to stay generally healthy, but I never really practiced it before. Having been given a reprieve, I won't take this for granted again.
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| Never again. |
Yeah, something similar happened to me some years ago. It was getting to where I hurt whenever I stood up or walked, and it was starting to get unpleasant to do anything. Then, I read a study where the investigators measured how long it took people to get up from sitting on the floor, and they found that people who stood up faster lived longer than the people who stood up slowly. Which sounds like a sort of a "well, duh!" result, except for one thing: the people who stood up quickly did not initially appear to have any physical difference from the ones who stood up slowly, except that they *did it whether it hurt for them to stand up or not*. They just bulled through the pain and got up.
ReplyDeleteSo I decided to do that. Just stand up normally and walk normally and do whatever I was going to do, whether it hurt or not. And it turned out not to be that difficult to ignore the pain with practice. But then, after about a month of this, I realized that I didn't hurt anymore! The pain comes back from time to time, but if I just ignore it and go ahead, it fades away again instead of getting worse.
I suppose this won't work with severe arthritis, where there is actual joint damage. But for general old-age creakiness I think that giving in and letting the pain change the way you move just allows it to get worse, until finally you are in constant pain and can't do anything at all.
Tim, you make some really good points. It worried me that changing my gait by limping was going to cause other problems as well, so I did my best to stop that. Still, I couldn't help it for the most part. I attribute my recovery to weightlifting. In the last three months, I've been pushing myself and my leg day weights are probably close to double what they were when I started.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing that the muscles are supplying some structural support to the knee.
Or maybe it was never arthritis at all, but some kind of joint pain that went away with exercise. Whatever, all I know is sitting around typing comments on a blog is ...
A great thing to do! Yes, that's it! :-)
I have always believed that the lion's share of my mother's health problems, and the reason she died at 60, was due to being crippled from birth ... and to eventually just surrendering to living in a wheel-chair.
ReplyDeleteIlion, I'm sorry to hear that. What a brutal life. It's not hard to see why you would eventually just give up the fight.
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ReplyDeleteOh, I totally understand why my mother surrendered to the wheel-chair. Nevertheless, we are healthier, in all our parts, when we *move* and use our bodies.
ReplyDelete==What a brutal life.==
The real brutality was what the medical industry, in connivance with some government bureaucrats, did to her in the 1930s, when she was a child.
Somehow, the ubiquitous "they" convinced my grandmother that my mother wouldn't be allowed to attend school unless my grandmother consented to ... allowing them to use my mother as a human guinea pig.