Whoa

Monday: Yoga 30 minutes, walk 1.5 miles
Tuesday: Weights 20 minutes, walk 1.2 miles 

I have been faithfully using the Thumper on my Achilles and calf and have also been pretty good about taking a slow walk every day. Yesterday a miracle occurred and my Achilles stopped hurting.

I’m not sure exactly how to say what I’m about to try to say. But I think when you’ve lived with a pain for long enough—no matter how mild—it just becomes part of your life and actually starts to condition you. So I might say my Achilles feel pretty good today, and that’s true in relative terms, but in the back of my mind of course they’re still going to hurt when I get up after sitting for a while. Or go down stairs. Or walk for any distance. That’s just a given. Only yesterday some of those things didn’t actually hurt at all, and I started realizing that I have been avoiding or delaying standing up, using the stairs, and walking because of the anticipated pain. My pain was slowly training me to be more sedentary.

So yesterday was fantastic and eye-opening. And just to be clear, my Achilles do kind of hurt again today, but nothing like this has happened in four or five years, so surely it points toward healing.

A fresh hell

Friday: Walk 1.2 miles
Saturday: Walk 1.5 miles
Sunday: Walk 1.5 miles

Yesterday the first day in a while that I haven’t been migrainey, but I’ve still decided not to push it (see definitions). That’s partly because I haven’t had a day off work in weeks, and that seems enough stress. 

I’m not sure what happened to me last week—probably a hormone freakout, because on top of headaches I was having terrible hot flashes, which is an exciting new symptom. My strategy for survival was desperately avoiding getting hot, even a little, because a little hot would turn into a lot hot, which would then blossom into a headache.

Definitions:

push it (v): Do literally anything physical beyond a very slow morning walk. 

Bad night

Tuesday: Rest 

I call it “rest” but really it’s: horrible night of sleep, very early morning, and tons to do today.

We went to bed super-early last night because we had to be up at 4:30 to take Mik to the airport. But the power went out sometime before 11, causing a fire alarm to start making a horrible noise, which woke me up and started me worrying about all the food in the freezer, whether we’d be able to cook Mik breakfast, global warming, etc. So I slept on and off after that, but then starting around 2 the power turned on and off three separate times—and every time it did it would cause M.H.’s phone to light up the room, the Sleep Number bed to make a loud clunking noise, and the fire alarm to switch from its horrible but relatively quiet growl to a loud “low battery” beep every 30 seconds. I must have eventually gotten back to sleep because when the alarm finally went off I was in the middle of a nightmare.

(Obviously M.H. slept peacefully through it all. Not jealous.)

But then I had to give my baby back to his college AND I theoretically have to work all day. Grumpy face.

Transitioning

Saturday: Walk 1.2 miles
Sunday: Walk 1.2 miles
Monday: Walk 1.3 miles

Mik goes back to college tomorrow, and I WOULD go straight back into Whole30ing, but we have a refrigerator full of leftover taco bar at the moment, so it’s going to take a few days. I also really want to do more on the exercise front again, but I haven’t really been feeling that great. I’m not sick, but I definitely don’t feel 100% well either. Hopefully it’s just from lots of gluten and time at my desk, rather than a virus. (Actually, as I think about it for a hot second, I kind of hope it’s from a virus and not just from a week of worse eating/movement, because that would mean there’s absolutely no margin for lifestyle error anymore in my life, and that would be RIDICULOUS.)

The tiny bit of extra walking this morning was because as I was approaching my house, I saw two kids run over to our Little Free Library. I took a detour so they would have a chance to look without me scaring them off. :)