22 March 2005

I had to go to the self help group (hydro) this morning. Tim dropped Lillian off at the childcare centre and then gave me a lift to MECRS. Again, I had plenty of time to do my exercises twice and then I realised I still had 10 minutes left so I decided to use a noodle for support and do some breast stroke. I wasn't going around in a circle but I still felt I was using my right arm and leg more than the left ones.

In the afternoon, I attended the Bobath course again. I missed out on yesterday's session but so far we haven't worked on the arm yet. Today, the instructor noticed that when I walk, I don't have my weight forward enough and she was telling the physios who work on me they need to get me to do something to bring my weight forward more and take more risk. She also mentioned that because I was not very active before, I'll need to have a 120% recovery to get to a normal level. The physios wanted me to do some exercises kneeling but I felt very uncomfortable with that because my ankle kept inverting. They checked my ankle and my calf and noticed that when I was sitting I couldn't put my left heel on the ground. I told them that it has been like this for a while and I was told that my calf muscles are tight. They checked and told me that the problem is not the tightness but because I cannot control it to relax the muscles so the muscles are active the whole time. They tried to get me to lift up my heel by pushing through my toes and then relax to drop the heel. After some assisted movements, I could actually do that myself. The physios told the instructor that Tim and I used to do competition ballroom dancing. She told me that I may never be able to get back to the level I was before but she told me to bring some waltz music CDs tomorrow. I'm not sure what she has in mind, without Tim being there, I'm not sure who is going to dance with me.