"You will have to help me up"...I can remember when we were teenagers and my mom would say this if we tried to get her to sit in the floor. I always laughed and agreed to. I just thought it was because she was "old". Looking back on it, she was in her 50's when I was a teenager and already couldn't get up from the floor. As I say, I knew this, but it never occurred to me to question why. It didn't dawn on me that it hurt her to get up, and it certainly was beyond my comprehension that possibly, she could not actually get up by herself. I just thought she wanted help because she was, as I mentioned above, old.
I will turn 65 next month and for at least the past five years, I haven't been able to get up from the floor. For instance, when I went to Williamsburg the spring of 2013, I couldn't get out of the soaking tub in the hotel and finally desperation and adrenaline kicked in and I was able to get out. It felt like thirty minutes, but it was probably no more than three. Last year I sat in the floor to work on my computer cables and had to crawl over to my treadmill and painfully pull myself up. In fact just last month, my sister and I had a wager and she bet me I couldn't get out of the tub at her house, I was in clothes and shoes and thought, I'm healthier now, this will be a cinch. It was not. It hurt quite a lot to flip over, from a bathing position, onto my knee and push myself up, but I did it, and shook it off.
All of this is leading up to just now when I decided to get in the bathroom floor to look under the sink. I thought I was prepared, I had my glasses on and my phone near by and I said to myself (actually I said it out loud) that all I had to do was roll over onto my knee and push myself up and I would be fine. When finished, I went to roll over on my knee (on the extremely hard and unyielding) bathroom tile floor to push myself up and I quickly had two thoughts...first was, wow, this hurts like Hades and the second was "why am I wearing only socks and no shoes on this tile floor"? It did hurt, apparently enough that my sense of self preservation kicked in and didn't want to let me push off on the other leg. Was this a temporary battle of wills with myself? Would I soon be able to push myself up? No I would not. Nope said my body. Nope not today. So, enter plan B...I had to then balance on one knee and awkwardly pull/claw myself up on the edge of the wall/shower stall. Hindsight, being 20/20, now laughingly reminds me that it would probably have been easier to sit back down and skooch myself two feet into the bedroom and get up from the carpet, but no I didn't do that. Damn you Hindsight, you really deserve your name.
Anyhoo, I'm up and no worse for wear, but determined to get some strength back in my legs. I have been doing some water exercises, and my flexibility is really good, but I'm obviously not building much muscle. But Ahaa!!! I do have a hallway that is over sixty feet long and it's the perfect place for some traveling squats and eventually maybe even some modified lunges. I am fairly stable when wearing my stabilizing athletic shoes, so for now I'm thinking about adding squats to my current routine of marching in the hall.
So that's what happened to me this morning. I went in the bedroom to get socks because my legs were cold, got distracted (Squirrel!!!) and ended up flopping around on the floor like some sort of a nut.
I hope you all have a fun day and if you are shoveling out from the latest winter storm, be careful and don't fall!
Happy Spring from California, by the way!
