Adventures in Physical Therapy

Welp, I dodged out of the physical therapy gig after a week and a day–that would be four sessions. I’ve never been the gymmy type. In fact, it would be fair to say I dislike even visiting a gym, much less messing around in one. My idea of exercise is a mile-long hike up a mountain, a hour of biking, or a spate of yoga. But my foot and back hurt so much, hiking was out of the question. So, I begged a referral from Young Dr. Kildare (who is, it must be said, coming in handy now and again) and went to a sport and physical therapy outfit near my house.

Launching this endeavor just as 89 tons of work were falling on my head did not help the attitude, I’m afraid.

The athletic young(ish) therapist, who seemed to very knowledgeable and was kind and patient, showed me a few stretches that seem to help the plantar fascitis a bit. They were the same things I’d learned off the Internet. Then she taught exercises for the back pain: except for this one, most were basic yoga poses.

I took yoga classes from a certified trainer for 18 months or two years, so I do know how to do those exercises and don’t need to traipse in to a gymnasium for the infirm three times a week to be guided through them. And yes, they do help: many people find a lot of back pain relief from doing a regular yoga routine.

The issue, though, was not that the instruction was so basic. The issue was the usual one that afflicts American medicine: access to care. As a practical matter, it surely is helpful to have the moral support of someone who knows whereof she speaks or even of a group of people who are working toward the same goal: freedom from pain. But that was obviated by the young woman’s workload: at any given time, all day every day, she was trying to deal with three or four people at a time. Even though she had an assistant (a startlingly dumb assistant), about all she could do was tell you what set of exercises to do; then go off and attend to others while you did that routine; then come back and tell you to do another set of exercises.

But you understand: one set of thirty-second hamstring stretches should take you 180 seconds: that’s three minutes. Add another minute or two for resting in between, and you’ve got maybe five minutes to get through those exercises.

Of course, each person she had to coach required more than three minutes. She would be doing well to finish with one person in eight or ten minutes, and some people who were in really bad shape deserved a great deal more time than that.

All told, she had me doing about 10, maybe at the outside 15 minutes of exercises, plus 10 minutes on a very poky, very easy stationary bike. That’s 20 or 25 minutes of work.

On Monday I was there from 9:30 to 11:15: an hour and forty-five minutes to do 20 minutes of exercises! Exercises that I already know how to do. For me it was an incredible waste of time, when I had no time to waste. And I felt that I was absorbing time of hers that would be better used working with other people. The old guy who’d had knee replacements in both legs and was suffering serious pain obviously needed her attention in ways that I did not.

Back here at the Funny Farm, one set of basic yoga exercises, which includes more stretches than she had time to demonstrate, takes about 40 minutes; add the plantar fasciitis stretches, and you’re at 43 minutes. I quickly found that a round of mild yoga (and getting rid of the bone-crushing office chair…) left the back feeling a lot better.

The foot still hurts a lot, though it’s better than it was. If it’s ever going to get better, presumably it will require tincture of time in large doses.

But in the time department, my gawd! Adding two hours for that to the already wacky schedule just about drove me over the edge. Monday it was out the door at quarter to seven, teach a class for an hour and a half, cope with some bureaucracy; race back to town, change clothes, race to the therapist’s; race home, change clothes again, fly to Scottsdale; schmooze for an hour and a half at a Chamber meeting; traipse all the way back into town again; stop by the grocer on the way home; throw off the “professional” rags, plop down in front of the computer, work till 10 or 11 p.m. trying to catch up with all the work I’m missing while I’m batting around the city all day.

Two established clients resurfaced this week with new projects. As fast as I clear the work off the desk, new work materializes—a good eight or ten hours a day of it, all told. Monday I spent seven or eight hours in meetings, class, therapy, and interminable driving. Add it up, and you get a sixteen-hour work day.

So. Any (16-hour) day, I’d rather do 40  minutes of yoga and hamstring exercises on the living-room floor than spend an hour and 45 minutes sitting around a physical therapy gym.