Rocking the creek

Returning from a photo op among some boulders along the creek that bisects the garden.

Tumblr pics: Conejo Valley Botanic Garden.

It's gotten so that stair-climbing doesn't always merit a photo on our rehab walks/hikes. Ho hum, Stephanie climbed another flight of stairs.

On our first visit to the Conejo Valley Botanic Garden in early January, 2015, I very carefully made my way over the steps inside the garden. Not long before that, it would've been impossible for me. The steep stairs going up the garden were hard enough, even though they have rails.

I couldn't have managed the stairs in the picture below it weren't for my then-new hiking sticks. Now I can take steps far more easily. Still, I wouldn't have been able to traverse the broken rocks in the pic above without them.

Keith scampered along the boulders like a kid, but I stayed below, carefully making my way along the rubley ground. The resulting photo op can be found in my Tumblr, as can a photo of the great blue heron who settled down by the creek soon before we reached the outcropping.

You can't immerse yourself in nature if you can't make your way through it.

 

We wisely decided to leave behind the wheelchair on our first trip to the botanic garden.

No pain, no gain, no sustain

Doing a little mugging during a walk. We have our own exercise bike at home.

Skating was the first thing I gave up after my lungs became damaged when I was 11. I loved nothing more than to skate...and skate fast. And I would skate until it was time for me to come home.

The first time I tried to skate when I was supposedly recovered, after several weeks of battling what was diagnosed as pneumonia, I returned home after only a few minutes. I couldn't understand how I could be so exhausted already. I tried a few more times, but those attempts ended the same way. I didn't yet know that I my lungs had been permanently damage, so I thought I would eventually take it up again after I fully recovered.

The bike went next. I could barely pedal up the slightest of inclines, so I was walking the bike more than I was riding it.

I thought I would return to the bike one day too.

I was still sickly for years after that, and there's a lot we may never know about what was happening to me. I suspect there was still some continuing disease process involved.

But the exercising I've been forced to do for my coma and stroke recovery has shown me how much strength I could've maintained if only I hadn't completely given up my formerly active lifestyle.

I didn't appreciate the profound impact of inactivity.

After my lung damage was diagnosed, the physical therapist I was assigned by Children's Hospital gave me aerobic exercise program to build my endurance back. But the PT greatly overestimated my ability. I could barely make it through the warm-up exercises, and that reinforced the idea of my new weakness in my mind.

I think I can't. I think I can't.

Even though I'm much stronger now, I still have difficulty with that kind of fast, sustained, vigorous exercise. Perhaps it has to do with the nature of my lung damage, which was later worsened by my two Legionnaires' disease bouts and repeated pneumonias.

Thanks again, prednisone!

I've always known that I could improve my stamina by exercising, but I never realized how much until I was forced to do it.

Not being able to walk is a great motivator.

The home physical therapist I was assigned after I left the nursing home used to take me for walks around our street. I liked Alan a lot more than I did walking along the suburban street. He advised me and Keith to find somewhere to walk. That was the best rehab advice he could've given me. I never would've built the endurance I now have by walking in our neighborhood. It's way too boring.

We started walking in the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve, with its abundance of Pacific Flyway birds, and branched out to various gardens. My attitude changed, as I began to push myself to walk ever farther.

Though I was pushing myself because I knew it would help my recovery, I never would've gotten as far as I have if weren't also enjoying myself.

Spinning is less fun, but we make the time pass by playing lectures from the Teaching Company. I love learning. Instead of concentrating on how tired I feel, I focus on the absorbing the information. When we can't watch a lecture, the time passes slowly and it begins to feel like a slog.

Hopefully, most people won't need Legionnairesacise to motivate them. But I think my experience holds some lessons for the people who haven't been through the kind of medical traumas I have.

It's not that exercising is too hard; it's just that you're weaker than you think. I can't emphasize enough how weak inactivity can make you. According to research, it only takes a few weeks for muscle atrophy to begin.

Make the exercise fun. Don't pick an exercise routine just because it's trendy or simply because you think it would be good for you. If it feels like torture, you'll eventually quit. If I had been assigned the exercise program I have now--fun, gradually advancing, and sustainable--I would've been much more likely to actually have stuck with it.

In short, do what I do now, not what I did!

The Chaplain's Cat Logic

The Secular Spectrum: The Chaplain's Cat Logic

I had interviewed Keith and my mom about the lying hospital chaplain I've nicknamed the Prevaricating Preacher when I first wrote about him in Coma Chameleon. But the one person I had neglected to ask about him was Joella because she isn't a nonbeliever like the other two.

I finally did so the other day, in preparation for writing "The Chaplain's Cat Logic.

Joella confirmed what I had expected, that PP had prayed for me while she was there. But as I was talking with her, I explained what Keith and my mom had told me about the cleric. I realized that he had apparently adopted cat logic after he promised Keith repeatedly that he wouldn't bother me.

In PP's mind, he didn't have to obey Keith if he wasn't there to catch him...just like a cat.

I had my hook for the SecSpec post!

Parambulating with peacocks

Watching a passing peacock at the Arboretum.

Rehab walk Tumblr: The Los Angeles County Arboretum.

The LA County Arboretum is enormous, filled with a huge variety of exotic trees and plants. Peafowl roam the grounds, imported by a rich former owner, Lucky Baldwin in 1880. Hummingbirds, Canada geese, and other local wildlife take advantage of the Arboretum's lakes and abundant flowers. It's huge expanse always makes for a beautiful and tiring walk.

Keith told his mom as we walked back from the relocated 1890 Santa Anita Depot, which is now a period museum (see Tumblrs for pics), how exhausting it was to push me up the hill on the way back in my wheelchair. He compared it to the Bataan Death March.

Those days are long gone. We walked almost two miles, and I could've walked further. I climbed the

steep stairs to the living quarters of the depot with relative ease. On our first visit, on my birthday last April, I clung to the banister for dear life.

Here are two photos taken on my first walk at the Arboretum on 1/4/14.

And one of me walking the opposite way at a pedestrian and (that day) peafowl crossing.

Why did the peahens cross the road?

Walking the straight and narrow

Hiking through the rough back trails of Descanso Gardens.

At breakfast Wednesday, I remarked to Joella that it felt almost weird to be walking straight. I had gotten so used to wobbling when I walked that I can't help marvelling at what it feels like to be walking nearly as stably as was perfectly natural since I was a toddler.

Now, when I say walking straight, I don't mean completely so. I now look like I might have some mobility issues, instead appearing drunk. The difference, however, is marked.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was despairing, as I was doing my physical therapy exercises, over when I would finally get rid of the unsteadiness and vertigo. It had slowly improved, but the advances had, um, stabilized.

Some of the exercises are clearly aimed at preventing falls. Now I wobble but I don't fall down, like a weeble. Others improve balance, and I think those are the ones that are best for retraining my brain.

As we've learned in recent decades, brains are plastic. Right now, my brain is rerouting functions around my stroke damage, just as an electrician might bypass a damaged circuit. Synapses are a bit different than electrical circuits, though. Everything I do to encourage those synapses to fire actually improves the strength of their connections.

But I think the main catalyst of this great leap forward (okay, so I'm not doing a lot of leaping just yet) is more active exercise. My six-days-a-week spinning is very important part of this, improving my strength and stamina. I spend an hour on the bike, and once a week we advance the tension one notch. I'm the strongest I've been since before my lungs were damaged when I was 11. Then I could roller skate as fast as I could for hours on end.

Still, I believe that the main driver of this current improvement is our rehab walks, which have become more and more like hikes lately. I had two strenuous hikes in the span of two weeks, and suddenly I began walking better.

That's no coincidence. I have a history of improving after a leg strain has healed. Exercise creates micro-muscular tears. When they heal, your muscles strengthen. That's how exercise works.

But that doesn't explain why my vertigo has lessened, you may say.

Recently, Luminosity was fined $2 million dollars for it's overinflated brain training claims. But every time I balance on uneven ground, climb up and down hills and stairs, and maneuver around obstacles, I perform another kind of brain-training exercise. Just as my physical therapy exercises help strengthen those rewiring synapses in my brain, so do my hikes.

It's fun...and it's free.

With all my concuritant problems, many of which are out of my control, it's gratifying to know that some of my remaining physical impairments are in my power to overcome.

There may be no higher power aiding my recovery, but I have the power in my hands...and feet.

Isn't There Something in the Bible About Lying?

The Secular Spectrum: Isn't There Something in the Bible About Lying?

When I first wrote about the Prevaricating Preacher in Coma Chameleon (here and here), I had to interview Keith and my mom about their encounters with him because I was too busy being comatose at the time these events occurred.

We all learned something.

Keith learned that the clergyman had visited me at least two other times after he promised Keith for the second time to stop bothering me. My mom had no idea that he had promised Keith he would stop coming around.

Far from giving my non-religious loved ones comfort, he made them feel uncomfortable. He also provoked annoyance, frustration, and anger, all in the guise of giving consolation.

Walking through a wintering wonderland

Tumblr pics: Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve

We took our very first rehab walk at the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve in late November of 2013. Keith had to roll me most of the way. The walker was hung on the handles of the wheelchair (see photo below).

Keith would park the wheelchair at the entrance path to the observation areas. I would get up and walk to the concrete bench and sit down again in the wheelchair to watch the birds. I would get up again and walk back to the concrete circle at the end of the path, then plop down once more in the chair.

On our walk through Sepulveda last Sunday, I walked the entire circuit around the wildlife lake, only sitting down a few times to rest while I watched the magnificent display of birds. There are no benches on the backside of the artificial lake, so I stood while I watched the hundreds of birds in this stop on the Pacific Flyway.

We walked less than half of the way with Keith's mom Joella, but she was tired. So after we had circled our way back to her, we headed home.

A panorama of pelicans viewed from the backside of the lake.

Yet I still had some gas left in the tank. Joella used to be the stronger one, but no more.

And here's the Fitbit map of my last round trip around the wildlife lake.