Physiotherapy appointment

Image: Pixabay

For one hour a week
us hip surgery survivors
meet on the fantasy island
of the physiotherapy gym.

A technician in orange T-shirt
butterflies from one cot to the next
sets a wedge under knees
straps a weight to an ankle
harnesses a foot in a stirrup
links the stirrup to a spring
places a heel into a red stretchy strip
along with quick instructions
of what to do next.

I raise and lower
stretch and relax
in and out
back and forth
up and down.
I’m good at this!

She reminds us of the rules:
Wear your shoes
Don’t bend past 90
and asks, What do you look forward
to doing after this is over?
Here that rainbow is practically touchable.

Then the hour is past
and it’s back to a cane-stump
down the hall
awkward clamber into the car
and carry on
with my limping life

© 2017 by Violet Nesdoly (All rights reserved)

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Prompt – Inspiration:

This is another poem I wrote while recovering from hip surgery in 2014. The prompt: on April 16, 2014 the Your Daily Almanac poem has the poet’s impressions / epiphany after time spent at the drivers license office.

The challenge to me is to make a poem from an everyday experience. The prompt poem begins:

Renewal
by Jeffrey Harrison

At the Department of Motor Vehicles
to renew my driver’s license, I had to wait
two hours on one of those wooden benches
like pews in the church of Latter Day
Meaninglessness, where there is no
stained glass (no windows at all, in fact),
no incense other than stale cigarette smoke
emanating from the clothes of those around me,
and no sermon, just an automated female voice
calling numbers over a loudspeaker…
Read the rest…

~*~*~*~*~

This April I’m celebrating National Poetry Month by posting some not-as-yet published poems from my files, along with what inspired them. If the prompt inspires you to write a poem of your own, you’re welcome to share it in comments. Whether you write or not, thanks so much for dropping by!

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Domino train (Limp – 4)

Posting my Limp sequence has been interrupted by a project that is now all but done. So it’s back to these poems about the mishap I had this spring.

If you’ve ever experienced one event, followed by another, and another, you’ll recognize the feeling of a domino train. This was my experience way back in early April this year. The episode below turned out to be nothing serious, but we do imagine the worst, don’t we!

Photo from Microsoft Clipart.

Domino train

It was minus 15 with a windchill
I was planning another session
on the treadmill

the day I hurtled down
some stairs, broke something
and thought

What will happen next?
Hope this isn’t
only the first domino.

Surgery left me
with one leg shorter
than the other

Now doomed
to orthotics, a fat-soled shoe
or a forever limp

today I felt a bruise-like
pain, deep
in my calf.

Could it be DVT?
Will this be
the death of me?

© 2014 by Violet Nesdoly (All rights reserved)

 

Two weeks after surgery (Limp – 3)

Introducing my best friends during rehabilitation: cane, picker, long-handled sponge, shoehorn, sock dresser, and two-wheeled walker (and I thought only little old ladies used these–oh wait…)

Two weeks after surgery

(March 17, 2014)

Why does it hurt so far from the incision?
My muscles are a straitjacket of pain
to natural walking unseen, inner prison.
Will I ever walk easily again?

Deep in my hip a tremolo of weakness
that frightens me when stepping with a cane.
At physio a modicum of redress.
Back walker-creeping I feel old and lame.

Violet Nesdoly © 2014 (All rights reserved)

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This poem is the third in the series of poems I wrote about a mishap I had this spring. Click on the “LIMP sequence” category below to view all.