Staying Strong at Work During This Mess - 2
If you make it your business to get enough sleep and you eat reasonably well, you're halfway to staying strong during this mess. What's left? Exercise. For what it's worth, I'll share what I've done in the past, and what I do now that's specific to our current situation.
First, a disclaimer: I'm not an expert in the area of physical fitness. I'm just a guy who was forced to find ways to get into shape. Yes, forced.
When I was a kid, my joints were subjected to an unusual degree of what was then called "growing pains." I remember my mother taking me to the doctor because of the pain I experienced. He basically said not to worry, it was just a particularly intense bout of growing pains. That was reassuring to my mother. For me, it still hurt.
Once she knew there was no serious condition to worry about, my Mom pretty much left me to my own devices - for which I'm grateful. I wasn't doted on, so I just learned to suck it up. And I learned how to play with my friends despite what sometimes was pain, but was mostly discomfort.
As I grew, the growing pains subsided. But my knee joints were always a bit tender. And I was the farthest thing from an athlete. Sure, I lifted weights for some spell as a young teenager. A group of us did this because one of us actually did it seriously and convinced us we should all be doing it. That lasted less than a year. I was never good at it. Thankfully, everyone lost interest. I could return to my non-athletic laziness.
Then came manhood and my first serious bout with a serious physical affliction. Just married, at the age of 24, I was shopping in a supermarket. I was placing the items from my cart on to that moving belt that pulls them to the cashier. In a flash, I experienced excruciating pain in my upper back. There were still items in the cart, but I couldn't lift them up - the pain was that intense. But I was so embarrassed about being "stuck" there, I somehow figured out how to empty the cart. Once the bags were filled, I had to get them into the cart to walk them to my car. At every stage, excruciating pain continued unabated. Somehow I got home, walked the groceries up to our second-floor apartment and basically collapsed, as I remember it, into a chair. The pain was too excruciating to lie down.
At the time, part of the way I earned a living was to play in a wedding/bar mitzvah band on weekends. I was a guitarist. The guitar I played was a Gibson Les Paul model. If you know guitars, you know how heavy they are. There was no way I could play with the pain. For the first and only time in my weekend musical career, I had to call the bandleader and tell him I couldn't make the weekend gigs.
Fortunately, the boyfriend of my wife's friend was a chiropractor. I called him. It was a Saturday. He didn't have office hours. He set me up for a Monday appointment. What to do until then (the intense pain throbbing incessantly)?: "Drink wine," he suggested. Seriously. No drugs, no aspirin. Just "Drink wine." I complied - all weekend. It didn't really alleviate the pain. But it got to the point where I didn't care. I guess it took off enough of the edge so I could eventually sleep and move about - with great effort.
Monday I began chiropractic treatments. They helped - enough so that I could play the next weekend's gigs. But I had to go just about every other day for treatments - for months - just to be able to function. It occurred to me that I couldn't live that way forever. So I began to think about what I could do to combat what I learned was a misalignment of my spine that would never be fully "fixed."
For the first time in my life, I took physical fitness seriously. I had to. Of course, that was the first step - taking it seriously. Then came the actual exercise. That was the beginning. While my initial efforts did not result in instant relief, or even any extended relief, I could function - which was my first goal. Just get to the point where I could perform my work, and try not to dwell on the pain. Since then, it's been a hit or miss process of trying various exercises to alleviate pain and address other physical challenges I had.
Next time, I'll lay out the various exercises I've tried and those I'm doing now in the midst of our current mess. To wrap up for today, a couple of thoughts:
My relationship with God wasn't all that great when this disabling pain suddenly hit me. My best recollection is that I wasted the chance to offer it up. Too bad. But as I was thankful that my mother didn't dote on me when I had growing pains, so here I was eventually thankful for the pain because it literally forced me to improve my overall lack of any physical fitness.
Those initial efforts and subsequent explorations of various ways to get and stay physically fit yielded some good results: First, my chronic pain became manageable and, while never completely gone, after decades of effort no longer disables me for any period of time. Second, compelled to do so, I learned a lot about my body and the kinds of work-outs I could do, as well as what sorts of work-outs would ultimately cause a pretty reasonable improvement to what could have literally been a severely limiting if not disabling condition.
More next time...
First, a disclaimer: I'm not an expert in the area of physical fitness. I'm just a guy who was forced to find ways to get into shape. Yes, forced.
When I was a kid, my joints were subjected to an unusual degree of what was then called "growing pains." I remember my mother taking me to the doctor because of the pain I experienced. He basically said not to worry, it was just a particularly intense bout of growing pains. That was reassuring to my mother. For me, it still hurt.
Once she knew there was no serious condition to worry about, my Mom pretty much left me to my own devices - for which I'm grateful. I wasn't doted on, so I just learned to suck it up. And I learned how to play with my friends despite what sometimes was pain, but was mostly discomfort.
As I grew, the growing pains subsided. But my knee joints were always a bit tender. And I was the farthest thing from an athlete. Sure, I lifted weights for some spell as a young teenager. A group of us did this because one of us actually did it seriously and convinced us we should all be doing it. That lasted less than a year. I was never good at it. Thankfully, everyone lost interest. I could return to my non-athletic laziness.
Then came manhood and my first serious bout with a serious physical affliction. Just married, at the age of 24, I was shopping in a supermarket. I was placing the items from my cart on to that moving belt that pulls them to the cashier. In a flash, I experienced excruciating pain in my upper back. There were still items in the cart, but I couldn't lift them up - the pain was that intense. But I was so embarrassed about being "stuck" there, I somehow figured out how to empty the cart. Once the bags were filled, I had to get them into the cart to walk them to my car. At every stage, excruciating pain continued unabated. Somehow I got home, walked the groceries up to our second-floor apartment and basically collapsed, as I remember it, into a chair. The pain was too excruciating to lie down.
At the time, part of the way I earned a living was to play in a wedding/bar mitzvah band on weekends. I was a guitarist. The guitar I played was a Gibson Les Paul model. If you know guitars, you know how heavy they are. There was no way I could play with the pain. For the first and only time in my weekend musical career, I had to call the bandleader and tell him I couldn't make the weekend gigs.
Fortunately, the boyfriend of my wife's friend was a chiropractor. I called him. It was a Saturday. He didn't have office hours. He set me up for a Monday appointment. What to do until then (the intense pain throbbing incessantly)?: "Drink wine," he suggested. Seriously. No drugs, no aspirin. Just "Drink wine." I complied - all weekend. It didn't really alleviate the pain. But it got to the point where I didn't care. I guess it took off enough of the edge so I could eventually sleep and move about - with great effort.
Monday I began chiropractic treatments. They helped - enough so that I could play the next weekend's gigs. But I had to go just about every other day for treatments - for months - just to be able to function. It occurred to me that I couldn't live that way forever. So I began to think about what I could do to combat what I learned was a misalignment of my spine that would never be fully "fixed."
For the first time in my life, I took physical fitness seriously. I had to. Of course, that was the first step - taking it seriously. Then came the actual exercise. That was the beginning. While my initial efforts did not result in instant relief, or even any extended relief, I could function - which was my first goal. Just get to the point where I could perform my work, and try not to dwell on the pain. Since then, it's been a hit or miss process of trying various exercises to alleviate pain and address other physical challenges I had.
Next time, I'll lay out the various exercises I've tried and those I'm doing now in the midst of our current mess. To wrap up for today, a couple of thoughts:
My relationship with God wasn't all that great when this disabling pain suddenly hit me. My best recollection is that I wasted the chance to offer it up. Too bad. But as I was thankful that my mother didn't dote on me when I had growing pains, so here I was eventually thankful for the pain because it literally forced me to improve my overall lack of any physical fitness.
Those initial efforts and subsequent explorations of various ways to get and stay physically fit yielded some good results: First, my chronic pain became manageable and, while never completely gone, after decades of effort no longer disables me for any period of time. Second, compelled to do so, I learned a lot about my body and the kinds of work-outs I could do, as well as what sorts of work-outs would ultimately cause a pretty reasonable improvement to what could have literally been a severely limiting if not disabling condition.
More next time...
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