The house my wife and I own sits on the longest road in the United States. US Route 20 runs from Boston, MA to Newport, OR, one mile from the Pacific Ocean. Route 20 is an old road and, at least the part of it that runs through our small Upstate New York village, and was an old Native American trail. Our home sits on the western edge of the village and is one of dozens of older homes built from 1810 on. It is barely a mile from one end of the village to the other and we do have a traffic light to break things up a bit. We collect our mail daily from our PO Box at the little Post Office that occupies the same building as the village grocery store. Not exactly quaint New Englandy. Normally, I would include this mile long part of Route 20 as my regular exercise walk and making it the 1/3 mile from my house to the Post Office was just my warm-up. Monday, however, was my first outdoor venture since the surgery last Friday. I didn’t write about it…I was probably too tired to even think about it, much less write. That first time I nearly overdid things, as there is a (slight) hill that leads down to the Post Office, one that I had to climb to return home. My wife works from home and we were both reachable via the ever-present cell phone, but I had pride on my side. I made it back to the house and collapsed in a chair for a long, long time, with a noticeable flare-up in shoulder and arm pain. Overdo things, me? Never!
I repeated the same walk every day so far this week. Today, three days after that first walk, I made the same trek, only this time I added a short trip inside the grocery store. I only bought a few items, not so many that I could not handle things on my return, but enough to give myself the satisfaction of not only making the trip without problems, but being of some sort of help to my wife, who has been my loving but total caregiver. (Gad, I love that woman!) It felt very good to be back on track.
All of this comes none too soon, as as over the past few days I watched an entire season of Top Chef (On Demand). When you watch things On Demand through cable, each episode replays the SAME few commercials throughout each episode, sometimes repeating the same commercial during a single break, you are unable to fast-forward On Demand programs. I can tell you a few things I did learn from this: Lexus has saved 300 million gallons of gas since they first introduced their hybrids ten years ago, Swiffer really will take care of that pet hair, I will NEVER watch the new fall NBC series “Bad Judge”, and I really like Pharrell Williams song “Happy”, which was played about a thousand times for the commercial for the upcoming season of “The Voice”.
Thanks everyone for your public and private “best wishes”, they have meant a lot to me.
For now,
Walt Fritz, PT
Foundations in Myofascial Release Seminars
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