It’s that chapter in life where many of my friends in their sixties and seventies are having hip, knee, and shoulder replacements. Some are younger than me, most older, but all of them so far have seen the benefits of getting a bionic body part, aka titanium.
One girlfriend mentioned that she is allergic to antibiotics and therefore cannot have her hip replaced. She still dances a little bit, and I suggested she get in a hot bath the mornings after. She doesn’t have a bath tub. Hot tub? Nope. But she does like to swim and that’s easy on sore joints since water takes the weight off of them while exercising.
I haven’t swum in a decade, and that was to recover from my then-boyfriend tipping me over in a kayak to make sure I could swim. We were in the Russian River and that was just a tad bit rude. He was an ex-lifeguard so I’m not sure why he had to test me like that, get me wet and expose me to the filth of the river. But I digress.
I have a hip that hurts while dancing. It’s usually from partner dancing where someone else is deciding when I will do a spin. It’s the sudden stop that hurts. Then the next day, when I bump into stuff in my overly full house, it hurts again. The massage dude at the chiropractor’s office, where I have a standing appointment every two weeks, always asks if I have any new spots to work on. My mantra is the same every time: right hip, right foot, neck.
Yes, I wear orthotics in my shoes. They changed my life three decades ago, because they stabilized my right knee and flat feet for the first time in my first 39 years of living. If only I’d had them when I was hiking in the Rocky Mountains and blew out my knee, or when I learned how to ski, roller skate and ice skate. I might’ve been better at those things. Getting off the chair lift was a nightmare because of my unstable right knee. No one could understand how such a young woman could be such a klutz.
A word or two on being a klutz. When you’re 5 feet ten inches with long arms and legs and short body, your center of gravity is much higher than everyone else’s (females). You have to factor that into everything you do and not necessarily listen to a shorter person telling you how to do stuff. It doesn’t always translate. I’ll never forget the weight-lifting and chair classes where I couldn’t do certain things because my arms were just too long. I was not an athlete and grew up in a family that didn’t do any physical activity except some of us rode bikes.
Modify, modify, modify. Instructors have gotten better about that in these days of inclusion. I have a flashback of being humiliated by a tennis instructor because I hadn’t taken the plastic tape off the handle of my new tennis racket. He started the group class with putting me down. What a jerk! Or the softball coach who told me not to even bother with the game because I couldn’t catch a pop-up to save my life. What he should’ve said was, “Buy yourself a baseball cap, and it will help immensely with the sun in your eyes.” I have digressed yet again.
Time to stop. Suck it up, buttercup is what I’ve been doing for almost seven decades. I just wish someone would’ve helped me figure out sooner all of the above. If you have knee, foot or hip pain, go get some orthotics. See a podiatrist or chiropractor. It might change your life.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 