Splendid Progress at Synaptic
16 days in and I’m making splendid progress at the Synaptic clinic in Calgary. I was hoping to have this update written and uploaded before the two week mark but I needed six more naps.
Have I mentioned that neuro rehab is exhausting?
Walking is going great. I’m already walking easier than I have in over a year. And stairs! For the past year, going up and down stairs has been like an 8.5 out of 10 effort. Like, I get to the top and I need to sit down.
Well, I struggled so much getting up and down the stairs without dying, (the last year has included several falls down the stairs, which has really been the most efficient way for me to get where I needed to go) that I never noticed that I’d started pointing my feet outwards and my knees were all over the place.
I feel bad for Jill and Matt because the first couple of days at the clinic, they’d point out the inefficient (and sometimes just plain weird) things my body parts were doing that didn’t make for good walking and I’d stare at them in utter disbelief and say, “What? No way.”
Which isn’t that I thought they were making stuff up, it was just stunning to hear that I’m a dumpster fire of ambulation. And that I was unaware of it! Like, how does one walk with feet turned out and rolling all over the place at the end of stiff legs and a torso that isn’t moving the way it’s supposed to and never really notice?
The only theory that I have, given that at one point I was decently fit and aware of my body thanks to dance, that once my brain broke I was just focused on staying upright, not falling over, not falling into things, and struggling just to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen. I don’t think I had the mental bandwidth to notice all the splendid issues with my walking deficits. I was busy trying to brute force myself from one location to another.
However, I sure wish I’d known to turn my damn feet back in sooner!
There are days I still can’t walk worth beans, and it gets harder as the day goes on but I’ve also had a couple days where walking feels pretty normal. There are days I don’t have decent balance, but I’ve had a couple sessions where my balance is pretty good.
It’s one normal step forward, then two wobbly steps backwards.
Yesterday I struggled with balance during my morning session. I despise tandem standing. Think roadside sobriety tests, the one where the cops make you walk a line, heel-to-toe. That’s tandem stepping, and I have to do that too sometimes. Forwards AND backwards.
There’s hope maybe I’ll be able to pass a sobriety test by the time I’m done the program.
Tandem standing is awful. You line your feet up, front to back, heel to toe. And you stand. And it’s hard.
Then the Synaptic folks make me do it on a squishy foamy pad!
Yesterday evening, I was finishing my gait training on the treadmill and I was watching my feet in the mirror that we set up in front of it. I have to watch my feet to make sure my toes are pointing straight ahead when they land and that I step straight ahead instead of kicking my lower leg out to the side before stepping. (Who added a whip kick to their walking at some point? This chick.)
It looked like I was lifting my left toes slightly when I stepped onto my left foot, and I thought that was really weird because it was the end of the day. I was also at the end of a 20 minute gait training session of continuous walking and usually I lose the ability to dorsiflex that left foot pretty quickly. Once I can’t lift my toes anymore, I slap my foot flat on the ground like a giant size twelve flipper. If I persist, my knee starts slamming into hyperextension with every step, which becomes very painful,
Splendid side note: the knee slamming is becoming more and more infrequent.
Eventually if I keep trying to walk, my left leg decides it’s not participating anymore and I end up dragging my left leg along with my toes pointed all the way to the side for clearance.
But yesterday!
I slowed the treadmill all the way down to half a mile per hour and I really focused on what I was doing and what I saw my feet doing in the mirror.
Right hip flexed and knee bent…right foot dorsiflexed and I landed on the heel first before rolling through the toes.
You know, like you’re supposed to when you walk.
As I’m rolling through on my right toes, left hip flexes and left knee bends as left foot starts to come through. I pull my toes up and land heel first instead of my whole foot slamming flat onto the treadmill deck.
Granted, I couldn’t keep my left toes up as long as I could on the right but I definitely landed heel first and rolled through my left toes.
I did it 46 more times to be sure it wasn’t a fluke, then I called my husband downstairs to confirm that I was actually dorsiflexing my left foot after two sessions, ten hours awake, and a twenty-minute continuous walk that should have left me with a fairly useless left leg.
“Hey, you’re still able to lift your toes!” He nodded. “Yup. Definitely.”
Splendid!
I walked up the stairs without much issue and even once I was upstairs I could still lift my toes and land on my heel.
But progress isn’t linear. Today I fell over just handing my husband a bread stick at dinner and ended up on the ground. You win some, you lose some.
I’m excited for the progress I’m seeing already, but it brings up another question that’s on my mind a lot.
What am I going to be when I grow up, aka finish the program at the end of February? Maybe I won’t be disabled then. So then what?
