Physical Therapy

So, last week I started in physical therapy. It's good. I mean, it hurts, but it's not much worse than a big stretch-day in ballet classes. Kind of like straddling the wall, and at first your crotch is a good twelve to fifteen inches away from the wall, so you have to keep pushing with your hands, and working until you think the rubber-bands that are your muscles will finally snap and break, or maybe your legs will pop off altogether. But you keep working on it, and after five years you are finally only one inch away from the wall.

It's kind of like that. Except that after every physical therapy session I feel like I need to cry, and I feel exhausted, and like I just want to sit quietly or take a nap for an hour or two. That never happened in ballet...but maybe that was because I was twelve years old, not (almost) fifty.

My physical therapist, Jerry, is a nice guy and I trust him. We are working on bending and straightening my elbow, and twisting my wrist, palm up; it's a lot of hard work. Sometimes we bend my wrist forward and backward too, which is kind of awful. He will help me to move my arm one way or the other, and I tell him when it's gone as far as I can stand. What he doesn't know about me is that I won't say anything until I feel like it's a little more than is uncomfortable. Then he pushes me a little further and we hold that nasty position for ten seconds. Repeat; repeat; repeat. My whole body tenses up, resisting it, while my brain is focusing hard on making that arm work again. My homework is to do the same set of exercises four times each day until my next appointment.

Here's the thing: I hate doing my exercises at home. It's not because they are really hard, or because they hurt, or because they wipe me out—which they do. It's because I feel like I'm not really accomplishing anything. I don't feel like I'm bending or extending any further than the last time I tried; I don't know if I'm making any progress at all; sometimes I wonder if I'm even doing the exercises the right way. It's just darn frustrating—and sometimes it makes me really sad and discouraged.

I don't understand people who have told me that they had this-and-such injury (and a lot of people—strangers, even—who see my fabulous arm-brace talk to me about this now), but they say that they couldn't stand the physical therapy, and after one or two sessions they quit. Why??! Even though it's difficult and painful, I like to go; I want to go! It is the only time I feel like maybe I am—or could be—accomplishing anything at all.