Physiotherapy

Monday:

I had my first really good night's sleep in a while and I could tell the difference this morning, I was bustling around in the kitchen instead of zombie-walking doing the minimum to get my children off to school. I used the dustpan and brush to sweep up something then decided the dustpan was filthy so I cleaned it! And the sink. And tackled the ant incursion, they always come in when it rains. All before my morning cup of tea.

I haven't done any exercise aside from the occasional walk for a couple of weeks now, and my troublesome shoulder has settled right down and is hardly bothering me at all. It's great that it feels better, but bad that it took stopping exercise.

I had my physiotherapy appointment this afternoon. We went through my history, looked at my shoulder movements and she did some massage. It wasn't too painful and she always eased back when something hurt. She said she didn't see value in doing something that hurt the patient. I wish she'd told that to all my other physiotherapists over the years! In the past I was usually trying to slide off the other side of the massage table to get away! And after she'd finished we did the shoulder movements again and I could do a lot more with less pain than at the start of the session so that was great.

Then we went into their little gym and she showed me what moves she wanted me to practice before she saw me again on Friday. I have to stay away from other shoulder movements in the meantime because my muscles and other tendons have got into bad habits to compensate for the broken tendon. I need to retrain them to move in the right way before strengthening them. Working on form! The way my shoulder moves at the moment the bones pinch other things.

Aside from the shoulder exercises I can walk, including on the treadmill at the gym in this nasty weather. Or she said I can use the elliptical if I'm careful to let that arm go along for the ride rather than doing the work. It's good that I have some guidelines now.

The uncertainty about where we want to live continues. Just when we'd more or less decided we didn't want to go to Sydney after all, it seems there is a possibility of work there for Tim (same high stress level as now). We really need to do some thinking. My favourite option is a sea change if Tim could find a lower stress job in a small town on the coast, but it occurred to me on the weekend that that makes future tertiary education for the kids more difficult. I'm assuming one or both will go to University. There is some accommodation at campuses for country students, and of course some teenagers move out of home into share housing which means finding a part-time job, but most kids here live at home throughout their University years. Much easier if you live in a city, and both Sydney and Canberra have great Universities. Do we just stay where we are, maybe renovate? I just don't know yet.

Because of time zone differences Tim and I will weigh in tomorrow morning for our dietbet. It is also our 13 year anniversary tomorrow and we are going out to lunch at our favourite super-fancy restaurant that we only go to once a year. Very elegant and refined. We'll have three courses but it's one of those places where each course is one pea (actually organic tea-smoked sous-vide of peas crushed by virgins and reformed into a pea shape) placed delicately on a micro-thin shaving of Venezuelan beaver cheese made from milk sourced from the prize-winning beaver "Royal Velveteen". Not too fattening.