Exclusive! Book Excerpt!

- Anna Porter


 Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming book to tantalize you and convince you to buy it!
 It’s Not Walking. Walking is a whole other thing.
I’ve probably said this before (and most likely will say it again) but if one more person says, “Look at you! You’re walking!” I’m gonna scream!  This, this thing that I do to ambulate from one place to another, this is not walking!  Not in any sense of the word.  This is getting around.  (as my friend/Operations Manager is fond of saying, “it’s a workaround; we’re really good at workarounds!”).  Walking is a whole other thing. 
Walking, in case you were unaware, is a complex exercise in which brain, muscle, tendon, nerve, bone, cartilage, and blood dance together, perfectly choreographed. Human walking is frequently described as “controlled falling.”  According to the American Physiology Society”…walking does not involve a simple sequence of alternating contractions in pairs of antagonistic muscles but involves complex and variable patterns of activity.”
Still not convinced?  Take a few steps and carefully observe. As you move forward you bend your knee slightly, pull up your foot starting with the heel rolling up to your toes and then using your hip propel yourself forward, generally with a great deal of grace and balance.  Take any of those myriad muscles, joints, etc. out of the equation and regular walking as we have evolved to do no longer exists.  It now becomes “getting around.”  In truth, I do walk with my left foot but I manage to drag my right foot along for the ride.  When I try to gently bend my right foot forward (which it doesn’t want to do) the action causes the right lower leg to jerk up marching style and the foot to curl inward resulting in putting the foot back down mostly on its side.  If I try to force the natural movements of a step I end up dragging my toes along the floor and if I’m walking on carpet that’s a recipe for tripping and/or stumbling.
I have a new appreciation for such a lowly activity as walking.  It is really poetry in motion compared to what I do.  And walking is only part of it.  I also can’t kneel, can’t squat down very well, have trouble rolling over in bed or on an exam table, crawling, and crouching under, and forget about getting down on the floor—at least on purpose!  Not only are these activities nearly impossible but painful as well.  So what you say?  Try picking something up that has fallen and rolled under a piece of furniture without squatting or kneeling.
Stepping over even a bump in the sidewalk or down from a curb can be treacherous. I do not have good leverage with my right leg so getting into and out of a restaurant booth or theater seat is tough. I lack the finesse to stand and just place my right foot into a shoe or even put on pants.  I get tangled up in cords, table and chair legs, and other would-be obstacles. We can’t park too close to another car as I can no longer squeeze out through a narrow passage, not being able to bend my knee sufficiently or slide my foot and let out smoothly. There’s definitely no scrambling up on a step stool or ladder to reach something above my head.  And of course, driving—at least using my feet—is out of the question. As my last PT put it: “You should not be driving; I’m glad you’re not driving!”
Perhaps the worst injustice: I am consigned to wearing only very flat, flexible shoes or “sturdy” ones which are large enough to accommodate my charming AFO.  No heels, slip-ons, boots or skimpy sandals for me.  And I have a pretty respectable collection of those! Every day I walk into my closet and am confronted by the Ferragamo’s, Eagles, Clarks, Italian Shoe Companies, and others that reside there.  It is as if their collectives eyes are gazing up at me; as if their collective voices are calling “remember”?  They are decidedly from before and as time goes on and more than one expert tells me that this is probably the best it is going to get I wonder if it isn’t the prudent thing to do to find a new home for them. But then I would walk into my closet and be confronted by sadly empty shoe shelves, looking as pathetic as when they were once filled with unused shoes.
At a friend’s birthday party I mentioned this in conversation with another friend.  Her advice (because it seems that everyone has some for me these days!) was that I start by giving up just my least favorite shoes and as I buy new ones that work I gradually give up the rest, eliminating the dreaded empty-shelf syndrome.  Sound advice except…I’m also “paralyzed” by something similar to what families of coma victims must experience: when do you pull the plug?  What if you pull it and then they come up with a cure?  What if you pull it and then spend the rest of your life wondering if it was the right thing to do?

It is fall…

- Anna Porter

although the weather belies this fact.
    the calendar says so.  And the activity in Port Susan does as well.
The boats, summer’s banner here, are gone, pulled from the waters before the winter storms come
    and bundled off to dry, safe storage until next summer.
In their place is a new armada of water craft.  Now that the water sports for humans are ended
the flocks of fall/winter fowl have arrived to moor here for a time: widgeons, loons, mallards
    geese, golden eyes.
Just as the neighborhood boaters know just the right time to “put in” for the season, so too the
    migrating floaters.

Well…crap!

- Anna Porter

I know I haven’t written for a while but I think I have a pretty good excuse this time:  I broke my hip.  I didn’t intend to,  mind you.  It was “just one of those things…”  And apparently more likely to be one of those things that happens to someone with a) hypertonia as a result of stroke, and b) osteopenia (perhaps now osteoporosis).  And lucky me, I have both.

A month ago I was working in the kitchen while my granddaughter was happily playing near the dining table.  She called to me and I, like a fool, thought I could just walk around the kitchen bar counter to see what she was up to.  Silly me.  One wrong step and down I went.  And 3 weeks later I finally got the diagnosis of a femoral neck fracture (i.e. broken hip).  Except at my age I probably should not have actually broken it simply by falling from a standing position.  No, bad bones were probably on my side as well.

Apparently I “moved too fast.”  I didn’t think I did but I keep being reminded that since I have post-stroke hypertonia I have to learn to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n.  But see, since my stroke and my inability to move very well anyway I thought I had slowed down.  Turns out that I haven’t slowed down enough.  Now I must move from turtle to slug.  Which seems appropriate since I already feel like a slug.

Seriously?  I have to slow down even more?  Instead of just calculating every step in the outside world I now have to do the same in my own house?!

So for now I am definitely moving slower–walker and wheelchair at the ready.  Having a bout of dèjá vu.

Excerpt from book

- Anna Porter

Okay…time for another glimpse at my book!  Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite:

The Princess Pass
There’s a charming little phrase I’ve seen printed on towels and decorative signs that goes, “You never know how many friends you have until you buy a beach house.”  This is also true, I think, of being in possession of a disabled parking placard.
I’m not naming names here or coming to conclusions but some of my family and friends seem absolutely giddy when taking me somewhere over the fact that I have this magic little piece of blue and white plastic that grants special privileges, namely the permission to park up close—and in some cases, for free.  And every time I climb into the car to embark on a trip that will lead to parking I get asked the same thing, “do you have your parking permit with you?”  Seriously, if one more person asks me that I’m gonna backhand ’em!  Yes, yes, yes already!  I have my stupid placard, I have my stupid placard.  Don’t I always have my placard?  Have you even known me in the last 14 months to not have my placard with me??  Geez!  You’d think that they were the ones with the disability!  Like they just couldn’t handle actually walking a few more feet!
I mean, I will admit that it does come in handy but it also carries that old stigma with it: disabled person aboard.  Person-with-inability-to-walk- independently-who needs constant supervision and-must-abide-the-constant-refrain-“do-you-need- help?” parking here.  Frankly I think the people who really should have to display that placard are the ones who apparently have a parking disability!  You know the type, can’t seem to stay between the lines or park so close you have to suck your stomach up against your spine to wedge in or out of your car!
And while we’re on the subject…some disabled parking spaces have their own disabilities!  I mean, those of us with physical disabilities that prevent us from walking well—or far—are most likely afflicted from the waist down, meaning that getting in and out of the car can be a chore.  And yet, we parked in one on-street handicapped spot which was alongside a regular curb with no curb cut for wheelchairs or those of us with stepping up issues.  The closest curb cut was down the street a full block at the corner!  Other spaces are no wider than—and side by side like—non-handicapped spaces meaning that you not only have to focus on how in the heck to get that knee bent enough in order to get your foot out the door but you have to mind that the door doesn’t open so wide that it scraps the car next door!  And can I just say that places like hospitals and rehab centers should triple the number of disabled parking spaces they have?  I mean, seriously, if you are going to look for a place where us disabled folks are going to hang out in large numbers it’s most likely going to be the rehab center more than the local Target store!
Anyway, as handy as that little placard might be at garnering primo parking places and new friends, it still is a stigma symbol.  Unless I rethink it the way my friend did recently who called it my “princess pass.”  That’s right!  It’s not a stigma symbol, it’s a status  symbol! It’s my pass because I’m the princess and require royal treatment and special privileges.  Yeah!  I’m the Princess!  Outta my way!  Now, if it could only be recreated in a lovely shade of pink!