Throughout my life, travel has repeatedly rescued me and lifted me to higher levels of enjoyment and fulfillment. Recently it did it again – big time. I’ll tell you how it happened.
Last year I developed a pain in my left leg, and when it got so bad that it was keeping me awake at night, I finally consulted my doctor. He told me I had an inflamed, strained tendon. I was grateful to find it was not a terminal condition, which is always what I imagine when I visit the doctor, and that in fact it was treatable with physical therapy. I had never done physical therapy before, so it was my introduction, and I went into it with happiness and hope of recovery.
I had been pretty freaked out because my condition was making it hard to walk. The pain was causing me to favor that leg, and that made me limp. The simple act of walking has always been one of my greatest pleasures. It is an inherent necessity for traveling, which is at the heart of my livelihood. If I were to lose my mobility, it seemed my life would be over. So I looked on the prospect of a cure through physical therapy as a way to save my life.
I was determined to cure myself. I had an incentive: an African safari and cultural adventure that was on my calendar for May, still three months away. I looked upon that trip with a combination of eagerness and dread, because in my condition at the time I knew I was not up to it. It would be an active trip, and I was having trouble walking from my bedroom to the kitchen.
So, I met with a physical therapist, she gave me an understanding of my condition and a plan for how to cure it. It involved a regimen of exercises designed to strengthen certain muscles that had become weak and were therefore causing strain on other muscles. It seems that during the Covid lockdown I had become too sedentary. When things started up again, I launched back into full activity and my condition was not up to it. We had gotten a puppy during the lockdown, and in the process of housetraining the dog I had to do a lot of running up and down stairs, sometimes in the middle of the night, and that led to a strain.
I launched into the program with great enthusiasm. The exercises were recommended four times a week, but I was so determined to get better I did them every day. At first I wasn’t getting better, I was actually getting worse. Then I realized that the exercises needed to be balanced with rest so the body could build itself up from the…
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