Escape from Colditz on a sledge

I read Melanie Reid's column in the Times magazine pretty much every week, as do many people in the UK. It is a compelling chronicle of her daily life coping with the physical challenges she has following her catastrophic accident when she fell off a horse. Now wheelchair bound, she describes in detail the minute progress of her gruelling physiotherapy, and talks frankly about her evolving thoughts on the nature of disability. When I read it, my heart aches for her and her open style makes her column a riveting and empathetic read. But when she talks about her physiotherapy I have a glimmer of an insight because I have been doing physiotherapy regularly, and by regularly I mean a minimum of 5 days a week, for at least the last 2 and a half years. The nature of my injury is not in the same ballpark as Melanie's, it is barely on the same planet. I ripped a ligament in my right knee in a trampolining accident 3 years ago, and went on to have unrelated reconstructive surgery on my left foot a year ago. For both I needed to commit to physiotherapy to get the full range of movement back in both the knee, and in the foot. The gruelling nature of physiotherapy is what prompted half of this blog's title - Baking on One Leg started when I was on crutches after my foot surgery and defied gravity by baking while standing on one foot and kneeling on a chair with the other leg to keep stable. The baking was about reaffirming my control, and finding an emotional release at a period when my body was not able to keep me mobile. As I have gone on blogging about baking, meeting strange people on the tube, hugging grieving nurses and chatting with bus mechanics etc, I have also been going about my physiotherapy while holding down a full time job. And this is what I want to say about physiotherapy. Physiotherapy really, really hurts. It is profoundly different from exercise. The difference is that when you exercise, if you feel pain or you  are a bit tired or can't be bothered or it all just seems a bit too hard, you stop. Or you do an easier version. Or you just don't go. Bad night? Skip the gym today. With physiotherapy the equation is a very simple and brutal one. You want full range of movement in your foot again? Do those exercises, 5 days out of 7 minimum, and if you feel pain when you push your flexibility range, you don't stop. You push harder. You keep going, and if you do keep going, you win yourself a millimetre more of movement of your big toe, or your heel bends just that tiny fraction further. And that tiny fraction can mean the difference between being able to get out of bed on your own and being pulled up out of bed by my husband. Being able to on tiptoes in my brand newly shaped big toe is the difference between walking upstairs, and bottom shuffling up them. It is hard bloody work and it reaps results only if you stick at it. I never fail to be amazed how high the drop out rate is at outpatients physiotherapy. People have surgery, then get bored with their exercises, stop half way through, and then hey presto, they only get back partial movement. Or they go on to develop new problems. I have kept up these exercises, tough as they are, through some seriously difficult times in the last year, and my reward finally came with the snow. Not only was I able to walk through it properly for the first time in three years, gripping the ground through my boots with my toes, as most of you will do without thinking about it, but also, I went sledging. Sledging is the ultimate in liberation. Sit on the sledge. Push off. Whizz downhill partly out of control. Out of control!! for a person who has been fighting hard, daily, to get control back, this is a dizzy experience, like escape from an imprisonment of injury.  I head straight for the steepest incline, resisting the calls of both husband and eldest son to go easy. Go easy!!! I have been risk averse for so long it has trapped me. Sod risk. I stick my legs out in the air so they won't catch on the ground, shove myself off and shoot down the scarey slope so fast I am a white blur as snow is thrown up by the speed of my sledge and sprays all over me. Fantastic. Amazing. Brilliant. I pick myself up at the bottom of the slope, something else I couldn't do a year ago without the aid of a stick or a Husband, and want to shout my joy very, very loudly. But I don't. My Eldest is already excruciatingly embarrassed by my very presence on the slopes and I can see why. Every other woman there appears to be in the role of Coat Carrier. The slopes are only there for kids and for their Dads who are covertly competing. Well, maybe those Mums should be reading Melanie Reid's column, and grabbing this opportunity. Because mobility is a huge gift. I've worked hard to restore mine. And now I'm enjoying my reward.