The “new” prescription for R and R:

                                               

Repairing and recovering

An injury, an illness, a recurring pain, a fall or a misstep.  One minute age doesn’t matter; you move with ease, remember names, complete crossword puzzles with little help from Google. The next, you may be flat on your back in hospital, or nursing a torn ligament.  You may be in pain or have shortness of breathe without knowing how this happened to you. .  You can go from a healthy, agile senior to a patient in need of care or surgery or a cast in minutes.  So yes, I am still limping around, eying my winding staircase with dread each time I realize I forgot something upstairs, or downstairs. 

Suddenly, along with the pain or medical tests and treatments a wave of anxiety overtakes you.  Is this the beginning of old age? Is it the inevitable slippery slope downward towards disability?  Will I recover enough to regain lost skills, lost memories, the opportunity to eat whatever pleases me without thought of irritating an ulcer, or raising my blood sugar level to dangerous heights?  Am I ready to do less, to be less?  Words come to me, words I dread: being “confined”; or “resigning” myself to the inevitable.  No, this is way too depressing and may even become a self fulfilling prophecy:  I feel old, impaired; I can’t do much of what I enjoy most, like tai chi and long walks and dinners out.  ENOUGH!  There is an alternative between doing it all, and consigning myself to “sit out” the rest of my life.  So I offer my version of R and R: repairing and recovering.

My ankle, if I take special care, will heal: it will repair itself.  So how can I partner with my body to support this process?  Resting works, but used with meditation, and some basic biofeedback I may open myself up even more to healing.  Ice and a compression cast help too.  Ordering on line food delivery lets me stay off my feet needlessly wandering the supermarket aisles.  In a way, these are all forms of “assisted healing”.  Alternatively, frustration and anger and depression only add to the pain and slow down the repair needed to heal. My resistance may well act in a counter-intuitive way, creating more tension, anger and anxiety.  Not a good mix.

Recovery seems to require a different mind set.  Critical to full recovery is the body’s ability to heal and serve as a well tooled engine: ingesting food, digesting, managing healthy balances between satisfying hunger and remaining stable; moving more slowly and deliberately, especially up or down stairs and on uneven surfaces.  Ever notice how many parking spaces abut tree roots?  So, in spite of a natural tendency to do more, and do it more quickly, perhaps being only as active as your heart or your lungs or your energy allows offers a compromise.  And in the meantime, take a deep breathe, hold it, hold it, now slowly let go, breathe out, and then breathe again.  Now, curl up with a good book or a not-too challenging crossword puzzle and relax.  

Any other advise/ideas/solutions you have found that work?  Please share them.  We’re in this together.