Still Got It

Today, before the crowds that usually come with Mother's Day, we went out to breakfast at a restaurant we've been meaning to try for a while.  I have to very carefully watch what I eat ever since I had my gallbladder out.  I have a tendency to get very, very ill if I eat too much of foods too rich in fat.  So I had a half-size portion of biscuits and gravy with a couple of eggs and breakfast potatoes, and didn't finish it.  But it was delicious.  The kids got nice and hyper off their choices of french toast or chocolate chip pancakes, and today is a beautiful cool, sunny day, so I decided we should all go to the park after breakfast and work off a bit of those yummy calories.  And by work, I mean play.

We brought my manual wheelchair and my canes into the park.  I knew I wanted to take advantage of the wide open flat spaces to do a little bit of walking.  But first I let breakfast settle a bit while I sat in the shade to watch the kids, wrapped in a warm fleece blanket.  Ever since the nerve loss in my skin I get cold or hot very easily, so I was quite chilly in the shade.  I'd go sit in the sun to warm up but my diabetes medication makes me very sensitive to the sun, and burn very quickly.  Always so many complications to manage!  But we manage them just fine.

My hubby and I watched the kids play and climb on the playground equipment for a while, and then watched them run around through the cute little buildings of the miniature town inside the park.  Then I felt like it was time to walk.  When I'm trapped in the house or only have the carport to move around in, I can only walk short distances, a few feet at a time.  So today at the park I wanted to find out if I still had what it takes to put some serious distance on these legs.  For safety, I had my husband walk behind me with the wheelchair while I walked with my canes, in case I needed to quickly sit down to prevent a knee from buckling.  

It felt great to stretch my legs and walk.  I'm so tired of being cooped up in my corner of the living room, with hardly anywhere to move because the furniture I need to have near my bed i.e. commode effectively traps me at the side of my bed with no easy, safe access to the other parts of the living room.  So today I wanted to walk far.  I walked a long section of sidewalk, turned right, walked up a very slight upward incline, turned around, walked back down, and walked the whole long sidewalk back to where we started, before I finally sat down.  As we got to the end I was quite tired, and breathing slightly heavier than normal, but thrilled because I knew I had walked pretty far.  

Hubby congratulated me on a good walk and I laughed a little and said, "Now walk it again and count, please!"  So while I rested in the wheelchair and caught my breath, he paced the path we had just taken, and came back to me.

"Guess!" he said, grinning.  

"Hmmm... 150?"  He shook his head with his thumb up in the air, urging me to guess higher.  My eyebrows perked up.  "200?"  Again his thumb waggled upward.  "250??" I asked, fairly surprised.  

His thumb jerked up again.  I couldn't believe it.  "Whoa... a lot more, or a little more?"

His grin got bigger.  "A bit more."

"275?" I asked, not really expecting it to be that much.

"Close.  280 feet, babe.  Way to go!"

If I wasn't sitting down you could have knocked me over.  I don't recall walking that far without stopping to rest even when I was in therapy several times a week.  That was the kind of number I saw when you added up several shorter walking stints with rests in between them.  I had been so afraid that being penned in and not going to therapy for regular exercise to push my muscles to their limits would have resulted in a huge backslide in my capabilities.  But clearly it has not.  What few exercises and stretches I manage at my beside are obviously helping maintain my legs.  

A year ago this month I took my first six steps in the parallel bars at the rehab hospital.  They were the first steps I had taken in five months of recovering from what cancer did to my spinal cord.   This weekend we are celebrating that I am home with my children, that I can walk at the park with them, that I am so lucky to love and hug them every day.  It is a happy Mother's Day, indeed.