Effortless: What Walking Looks Like to Someone Who Can't Walk
A few weeks ago, when I posted a link to a HealthCentral post vaguely related to the Olympics, Valeria had a quibble. I said "[w]hen you have RA and live with pain and loss of ability, watching people effortlessly push themselves to places you will never go again…". To which Valeria, who used to be a competitive swimmer, commented "there's NO effortlessly about any of it. When I was swimming, I spent between 3-5 hours a day swimming endless laps until even my ears and toes ached and a 3 day swimming meet woould leave me as limp as an athletic center towel … when I watch those athletes up on the television, i haave a fair idea of the immense effort it takes to get to that level, because I know what it took to get to a couple of levels below them ..."
As quibbles go, that's a pretty valid one. And excellent blog fodder! Thanks, Valeria – I love it when you guys make me think! Although, must you do it quite so often? My wee brain is aching…
I was 14 the last time I walked on my own steam and I did so with crutches and what felt like knives slicing through my joints at every step. Thirty years later, walking no longer makes sense to me - I have no muscle memory of the things that have to happen in your legs when you take one step after another. It's quite possible that if I magically became able to walk again by next Wednesday that it'd come back to me like riding a bike, but I honestly doubt it.
I remember reading about someone who had been blind for a long time and had an operation to get their sight back. I remember reading how terrible the consequences of the successful operation were - they had no idea what they were seeing, had no idea how to put the visual cues together to make sense to the point that they became profoundly disabled and could no longer be independent as they’d been while blind. Their brain had changed and they had to spend a long time relearning what seeing meant (unfortunately, I can't remember the end of the story).
And when I look at athletes or dancers moving their body with such perfect synchronicity and precision, their bodies doing exactly what they have trained it to do, I cannot comprehend the ability to do so. Not just to do so painlessly - or relatively painlessly from my point of view - but the ability to do it at all.
Because it turns out that four decades of arthritis, three of using a power wheelchair and most of those years conditioning me, almost like a bonsai plant, to smaller movements, to no strength, to can't, has impacted more than my body. It has changed my brain, changed the link between my mind and body so significantly that making your body walk, slice bacon and all the tiny movements involved in swimming, gymnastics, soccer is a concept so alien as to be unimaginable.
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