The things you think of during physical therapy

I sent a letter to my subscribers several days ago, and I’m going to share a section from it here. I hope you enjoy this excerpt:

While watering shrubs in our garden a few months ago, I tripped, crashed into a planter on my way down, and landed with both knees slamming concrete. I wound up with a huge bruise on my chest, torn pajamas, and knees so swollen I could only creep like a slow leak when attempting to walk our dog.

My husband and daughter urged me to see a doctor. So I visited my primary care physician at Kaiser, a woman who is my favorite doctor ever—that is aside from my grandfather. He was an old-fashioned MD in Chicago who made house calls, had an office in a section of his basement (where we grandchildren were kept away by an uncle who told us the Boogie Man lived down there) and left home daily at 5 a.m. to do his hospital rounds—all with the gentle pace of the Canadian island boy he once was.

What I like about my doc is that in addition to being upbeat, she makes me feel like I'm her favorite patient. I'm sure she makes everyone feel that way, but I still bask like a puppy in her goodness. At her office, she asked a series of questions to ascertain if a stroke or something along those lines had precipitated the fall. But this was not the case; it was a case of sheer clumsiness. Based on my recollection of the incident and symptoms, she determined I probably had a slight concussion from the impact to my chest (yes, this can actually happen), which would heal on its own. She also referred me to physical therapy because, she said, as we age, balance tends to become more difficult. Her goal for me, you see, is to help me gently through the inevitable aging process, keeping me as healthy and fit as possible.

Now I have twelve exercises to tackle at home. When doing them, I experience just how weak my core muscles are and how off my balance is. The exercises will make a difference. Alas, however, I've never been the best at follow-through. Some days I finish all of them, some days only a few, some days none at all.

Most of the exercises get me standing or sitting up straighter than usual. And when I do those, I think of Charles Butts, a dancer I knew only briefly when, in 1976, I enrolled in a modern dance class he taught at Dance Spectrum in San Francisco.

Now, I'm no dancer. But I had studied at Columbia College in Chicago, a creative arts school where we were required to take classes in disciplines outside of our chosen major. So, in addition to writing, my main focus, I bumbled through music and stumbled through dance.

Before class with Charles began, I mentioned I might not be able to keep up. And the class was a challenge. Charles and the lithe woman assisting him, as well as the other students, were so graceful they seemed to float through the movements. I was awestruck, feet firmly on the ground. At the end of class, however, Charles came up to me and said, "You're just fine. All we need to do is slim you down and lengthen you out." So, I was in. I left with a punch card good for several classes.

But then, I contracted hepatitis A. My life became like a moldy cottage that never dries out after a flood. Hepatitis A, which is transmitted through contaminated food and water, is lightweight compared to B and C, which are transmitted through bodily fluids. Typically, a person with hepatitis A is acutely ill for a time but is not saddled with any ill effects afterward; B and C are more serious and can lead to chronic infection with severe health implications.

But for some unlucky individuals stricken with hepatitis A, the infection triggers chronic fatigue, which remains long after all traces of the virus are gone. And that happened to me. This was a handful of years before chronic fatigue became widely known as a syndrome affecting young women, in particular, at the time. Doctors didn’t know how to care for me. I was on my own. A bird with broken wings, I would watch with longing as my friends flew by. I was lucky, though, to not become bedridden. I plodded, paused often when walking up hills I used to scale easily, napped a lot, tried all kinds of bodywork and remedies, some of which were helpful, and gradually figured out how to pace myself and have a productive, happy life within certain limitations.

I never took another dance class and never saw Charles again. A light in the dance world, he succumbed to AIDs in 1984 at 31 years of age—a tragic loss for the dance community. Yet today, though he is long gone, words of encouragement from a kind artist I barely knew encourage me. All these decades later, I’m finally slimming down and lengthening out, while sending gratitude into our mysterious universe for Charles, wherever he is.

(Citation for the photo above: Sohl, Marty, “Charles Butts and Peggy Davis in Carvajal's 'Wintermas', circa 1970s,” San Francisco Bay Area Digital Dance Archive, accessed January 15, 2025, https://mpdsfdance.omeka.net/items/show/3559.)

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