Sunday, August 14, 2011

Blessings, and Recovery

It's great to live in a country so prosperous that the vast majority of us can, like I did today, just hop in a car and drive to a nearby city solely for entertainment. There was a small coin show happening in Fairfield today, and having nothing better planned....

I didn't buy any coins, but I did buy a few notes--a Nazi 20 Mark note, complete with swastikas; an East German note; and a French note printed for Free France as American troops headed towards the Rhine in World War II. Not bad, and there's another show in Carson City in a couple weeks. I may go to that one, too, just because.

It was a small show, and I probably wasn't there much over an hour. It was a long way to drive for just an hour or so, so I stopped off at the nearby mall afterward, just to burn some time.

The mall has a couple of floors, and in addition to escalators there were stairs--and I chose the stairs. I'm a long way from those dark days of May, when shuffling a few inches was the best I could accomplish without crutches, but I've still got a long way to go. I can walk now, without too much of a limp, but stairs are my latest challenge.

My left leg muscles are still so weak that they can't support my body weight when trying to go down stairs--or even down a gentle slope. It's funny to be on a stair, looking down, willing my right leg to move and the left leg to gently lower me to the next step, but nothing moves. It's like my subconscious knows I can't do it, and it countermands my conscious instructions to my legs. So I stand there, with this fierce look of determination on my face, and I try, but I can't make the legs do what they clearly don't want to do, so I eventually give up and just go down the steps with my good leg doing all the work--frustrated, but with the knowledge that this improvement, too, is only a matter of time.

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