Walking back to happiness (as Helen Shapiro once sang)
At the beginning of the year – approaching six months after my hip replacement operation, the point at which medical savvy had it that someone in my position should ordinarily be ‘back to normal’ – I made a commitment to both my regular Rust readers that I would provide updates from time to time on my health and fitness.
Two points here.
First of all, on the definition of what is exactly meant by ‘back to normal’. What I wish to get at is best illustrated by a visit to the doctor that my father once made with my mother who was then in the mid-stages of the dementia that eventually killed her in 2007. At a previous one the doctor had prescribed some new pill or another for her designed to ‘pep up’ her brain and/or slow down the progress of the condition. Thus the doctor’s opening question to my father was “Have you noticed any improvement over the last few weeks?”, to which my father replied “Compared to what?”, his cheeky point being that (clearly), because she’d been taking the tablets, he had no idea as to how she’d have been if she hadn’t been taking them.
I suspect that what the medics are getting at when they tell a hip replacement patient that they’ll be ‘back to normal’ in six months is that the hip will feel as it did before they ever had a hip problem in the first place.
I hope so, because – in the three years prior my operation – ‘normal’ for me was actually constant discomfort from the effect of an arthritic condition in said joint which caused me not to be able to sit in one position for more than ten to fifteen minutes without having to move to a new one; to be only able to get to sleep in bed properly by adopting an unlikely position; and to walk, which I did with a pronounced limp a la Long John Silver, no further than a quarter of a mile without having to stop for a rest.
In my case, by six months after my op, the improvement was semi-revelatory. I could walk without discomfort and I could sit and also go to sleep in any position I chose. There was still a slight degree to which I had to think what I was doing in commanding my right leg to walk and then executing it. That is to say, sometimes it did it automatically and sometimes, e.g. when starting off after being at rest for a while, there was a degree of breaking the motion into a series of actions that needed a conscious effort. Overall, while I’m in a way better place than I’ve been for the past four years, I’m still not quite back to ‘normal’ (if ‘normal’ is how I was before I ever had a hip problem at all).
But then again, I’m also four years older than I was before I ever had a hip problem so I wouldn’t have been getting any younger in the intervening period. If I hadn’t had to curtail my activities (sport etc.) as was de facto the case because of my hip problems, who knows if somewhere along the line – by continuing to try to act like a forty-something – I wouldn’t by now have keeled over with a heart attack playing squash, or had a quadruple heart by-pass operation, or even a stroke?
The other point I wished to make involves a part-confession.
Having made my above commitment to report regularly, I haven’t done so – in fact I think that since I made it I’ve only reported further once.
This is my attempt to rectify that failure.
I’ve been operating for about six months now with a Garmin fitness wristband strapped permanently to my left arm. This purports to tell me all sorts of things about the state of my body over the past 24 hours which-I-don’t-know-what-they-are, however the one thing it does tell me that I value is the number of steps I take each day. Right after buying the wristband I set myself a daily target of 10,000 steps which, besides being a nice round number, was also the sort of figure that I had been advised an active person over the age of 50 might usefully try to aim at.
Dear readers, in the 96 days of 2017 to Thursday 6th April I have failed to complete 10,000 steps in a day only 21 times and gone beyond 15,000 steps on 31 occasions (four of them exceeding 20,000).
I reckon that’s not too bad a record when – in all our lives – we have days containing domestic and other commitments which mean that, before a specific day has even started, time and schedule-wise it would have been physically impossible to amass 10,000 steps in that 24 hours anyway.
The other thing I’ve done now for the past three years– designed by me as a reminder of exactly what I am shovelling down my gullet in the hope that it will encourage me to eat less and exercise more – is keep a diary of what food and drink I consume, what exercise I take, and what I weigh first thing every Monday morning.
For posterity here I now state that on Monday 2nd January 2017 I weighed 13 stone 12.2 pounds – and last Monday (3rd April) I weighed 13 stone 10 pounds.
So. All those delicate salads I have forced myself to eat, that restraint upon myself buying ice creams, those times I’ve deliberately gone out for a several miles walk or trudged up to the gym when I really didn’t feel like it.
Just 2.2 pounds difference!
It’s hardly been worth the effort, has it?
At times like this I go back – as I usually do – to Marlon Brando’s famous one-liner at a Sydney press conference when he arrived there once to make a movie. A local reporter listed his famous early films, when the Brando body had been as god-like as the quality of his acting, and asked why he had left himself go.
Brando leaned forward, taking the mike in his hand, and mumbled “Listen … I’m fifty-eight fucking years old. If I cannot let myself go now, when can I? …”
Way to go, Marlon!
I feel like joining all those others who bravely stood up and shouted “I’m Brando!”
[Oh … er … that was Kirk Douglas in the Spartacus movie, wasn’t it? ….].
