A brief summary for anyone new here: I am getting closer to 48-years-old every day. I have spastic diplegia cerebral palsy which is a bunch of fancy words that mean my leg muscles don’t relax, my brain and my lower body don’t communicate well, and my hips, knees and ankles don’t work efficiently or even have a normal constitution.

I walk funny— I have an abnormal gait where my leg scissors and I toe walk. Decades of walking funny can cause wear-and-tear on the body.

But the last six weeks have thrown some new challenges at me: high blood pressure, unusual falls and now atrial fibrillation with rapid ventricular response.

The Splinter

Last night I got a massive splinter deep in my foot, in a place so deep that we couldn’t dig it out without really tearing a hole in my foot. So I asked the Teenager to slap a raisin on it and she did.

This did draw the splinter to the surface more but I haven’t removed it yet. The start of my last raisin-splinter journey happened a little more than a year ago. Read about that here. Especially if you want to hear how my splinter improved my gait and my hip pain and how the raisin and my cockatoo got the splinter out.

The Chiropractor

I visited Nicole Jensen of Back in Line Chiropractor and Wellness Center today— where she commented how loose everything was and how my body parts were all facing the right directions.

She got me ready for physical therapy where I’d be the youngest person in balance therapy today.

Physical therapy for balance and fall prevention

I have spent a lot of time in physical therapy — about every two years I turn up for few weeks with a physical therapist because even though a lot of it tends to be a repeat and I know what to do, it’s important to have an outside professional evaluate my status so I know I am doing the right thing for the problem.

In this case, we discovered:

• The physical therapist approved of some of Nicole’s phrases for things— like “make my feet do feet things.”
• My fitness coach Andrew and I are doing all the right things at Apex Training, using my sense of my body and Nicole’s insights on what my innards are doing.
• The physical therapist is also impressed at my capacity to manage to take what could be catastrophic falls with relative ease. The Teenager says it’s because I “puddle,” relinquishing myself to the process instead of fighting it and tending up.
• My static balance is impressive, but my dynamic balance “throws everything off,” meaning standing still I’m good, but moving or on an unstable surface, the issues can occur.
• We will be working on exercises that open the hips and rotate the knees outward. And doing some gait work with a zero-gravity treadmill.
• The physical therapist was also impressed with my ability to self-correct my gait, but I don’t know if he picked up on how much focus and energy that requires.