Sunday, January 9, 2011

Goals For My Health Part 2


Drag Myself Home!

So I made myself walk roughly a half a mile, at a pace fast enough to make me breathe hard, and actually felt really good on the way out, but man, did I have to drag myself home! It took three hours to recover from that, which suggests that I’m really out of shape, doesn’t it? Two hundred and ten pounds on a woman who is only 5 foot 4. I made myself go out every day and walk half a block more, drag my butt home and spend three hours recovering. 

And you know something? After only one month, I feel a whole lot better, my recovery time is down to about 45 minutes, and the brain fog does seem to be clearing. It’s easier to create now, and I can do it longer than I’ve been able to in a long time. 

That being said, January and March around here is usually cold enough to freeze skin and lungs in pretty quick order, and is often icy, making it too dangerous to walk outside, even if I walk on the plowed and salted road. But waiting the six weeks before it starts warming up again will make it really difficult to get back in the game, both physically and mentally. So I’m going to try something. I ‘m going to walk around my front yard for half an hour, where the snow is usually pretty deep and therefore not slippery. If nothing else, I’ll climb up and down my steps twenty or so times. Pretty boring and will make me look kind of dorky to the neighbors, but it’s sure better than sitting inside for six weeks, letting my lazy little brain take over again. 

What Forced The Issue

I think what really forced me to address this issue was taking care of Liz, whose family is friends with my sister. Liz’s husband Ben has been taking care of her for years because she’s slowly going Alzheimer-y; forgetting where and who she is sometimes, and she’s heavy enough so that she can’t get out of the chair by herself, can’t put herself to bed, etc.
 Ben was going for surgery, and needed somebody to take care of Liz while he was gone. 

He’s strong enough to lift her by himself, but a woman isn’t, so Liz’s sister Clair and I went to spend the day with her. And quite frankly, Liz scared me. Oh, she was coherent the whole time I was there, and she’s actually a fun lady; we were picking on each other all day. No, what scared me was not her personality, but the condition she’d slowly let herself get into. She probably weighed more than four hundred pounds; she couldn’t even go to the bathroom by herself, she keeps falling and hurting herself just because her muscles are not strong enough to hold her up for long, and she’s probably heading for the nursing home soon. I realized that if I didn’t start doing something now, I’d be exactly like Liz in twenty years or less.

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