Much of my therapy consists of ordering basset hounds to move out of doorways and hallways and then laboriously stepping over their brutal indifference.
Their refusal to clear a path may be due to the transfer of their allegiance from me to the fellow who arrives daily at 7 a.m. to exercise them, lest they grow vicious.
Their canine apathy also extended to the loud noises that I made twice a week when the home-visit therapy lady stood at the end of the bed and pulled my arm up over my head.
It turned out that there's no safe word for occupational therapists, who ignore what some would call screams while they feel for what they call a hard stop, where my muscles pitch in and help me beg for mercy.
Having bid farewell to my cheerful occupational dominatrix last week, I now await the first opening for out-patient therapy, scheduled for October 25th.
Meanwhile I hobble around a block or two three times a day and spend a lot of time planning how to avoid getting up from wherever I'm sitting.
When not on parade for two hours, I cross off one damned exercise after another--three 30-minute dynamic splint sessions, ten minutes with an overhead pulley trying to improve my arm and elbow, a ridiculous 45 minutes running through the silly-putty hand and finger exercises, 30 minutes waving embarrassingly tiny weights with each hand, fifteen minutes of one-legged routines, half an hour pedaling against faint resistance while one arm dangles with a weight, and a single trip up and down the basement stairs while pretending that my bad leg is doing the work, not both hands on the railing assisting a heave-up with the good leg.
Then I sit on a shower chair under the hot water and do half an hour of further arm and hand exercises.
Oddly enough, all the hand exercises have given me trigger-finger syndrome.
However, there's measurable progress. Apart from longer walks, I can now lift my bad arm enough to spray under both armpits in the shower, a clearer benchmark than the therapist's 155-degrees-of-motion estimate.
