The Home Stretch

JANUARY 11, 2010

When my doctor first prescribed physical therapy twice a week for six weeks, I balked. “I have a fifty-dollar copay,” I said. “Twice a week for the next six weeks comes to six hundred bucks. I can’t possibly swing that right now.”

“How about once a week?” she said. “Talk to the therapist and see if he can show you things to do at home. Maybe your wife can help with some of it.”

Fifty bucks a week still sounded rough, but I knew that if I ever wanted my arm to be more useful than a limp chicken wing, I’d have to pony up.

Just beyond the locker rooms, the facility opens up to a huge white room equipped with a bank of massage tables, a rack of free weights, a couple of stationary bikes and treadmills, some weight machines, a pile of rubber bands, and several pulleys attached to the walls. All together, it looked like a cross between a private gym and an unusually well-lit fantasy room in an S&M parlor.

In self-exile for the past two months, protecting myself from the cold and the crowds, sleeping in fits and spurts all night, and all day too, totally uninspired and unproductive, I felt like I was dying. I was, of course, but I’d never felt so keenly aware of it before. Physically, I ached all over. My broken arm ached most of all, and the awkward positions I’d been sleeping in because of it made the rest of me ache, too. I felt like I’d been folded into a wooden postal crate and was being shipped to the other side of middle age. Farewell, sweet bird of youth, cue the violins.

Thankfully, physical therapy has allowed me out of the crate and off the bus. Well, okay, not really, I mean I’m still not getting any younger, but at least now I can stand up and stretch along the way.

Hurts so good.