fat half recap

Hey all! It's been a while, no? Here they come.

First of all, massive congratulations to Jonathan Roche on completing last Sunday's Ironman triathlon! Wow. That's a lot of miles of self-propulsion.

Next, thanks to everyone for contributing to Mr. Roche's efforts, and therefore mine, in whatever way possible - I'm secretly a real softie, and reading so many notes saying that you've been thinking of me (and Jonathan, too!) the past few days is and has been extremely touching. BTW, it's still ok to send a donation to Jonathan until mid-August; check out his site or one of my last few posts for the address/method. You're not too late ;-) Again, both your contributions and thoughts are so incredibly appreciated. Try as I might, I don't think I can say that enough...

On to the therapy updates.

OT has been grand. Lots of picking up and moving, of course. My Fri session was moved to Thurs. We played Scrabble for almost 2h. It was beautiful. Then Monday saw some stacking of washers and such, as well as folding towels to work on two-handed coordination. As it turns out, I still can't do laundry. Today (rather than Friday) I went for about 2h again, picking up blocks, putting together a disaster of a pipe-and-joint sculpture, playing some speed Scrabble, and wrapping up with some back/shoulder e-stim.

Since the last update, there have been all sorts of the usual Giger, e-stim bike, weights, and sitting balance in PT. Some changes have been coming around, though. This week I have started spending the "lunch hour", 12p-1p, at rehab on normal therapy days (Mon/Wed/Fri), extending sessions unofficially to four hours at a time. During this extra hour, which comes after my "official" time on Mondays and before such on Wednesdays and Fridays, I can go in and use the e-stim bike semi-unattended if one is free. This is a fairly popular thing to do, as it means patients can do other therapeutic stuff during official session time without missing the benefits of the zap bike.

So what am I doing instead?

Ironically, I do the e-stim bike. Starting last Friday, to be accurate, I've been working on an upper extremity FES cycle, exercising my arms, shoulders, and back muscles. The idea is the same as the leg e-stim bike - synchronized muscular stimulation to pedal a cycle - but this time with arms instead of legs. Many muscles may be stimulated, from forearm/wrist to upper arm to shoulder to back areas; so far, I've been doing biceps (elbow benders), triceps (elbow straighteners), and traps (trapezius: muscles that go from the neck through the shoulders to the back, moving a lot of stuff). While the leg bike runs a full warm up/exercise/cool down in a little over 1h, the upper extremity cycle goes through a complete workout sequence in around 30min (which, trust me, is plenty).

For me, it's definitely a hardcore neck/shoulder task. On one end, the traps are mostly in charge of holding my head up, which is a fair load of work on its own, as they are weak and I have an enormous melon. But then they are also being zapped into submission and expected to help out in the cycling process! eek.

However similar the two may be, though, the uppers cycle is much different from the leg bike. To be honest, the leg bike is a fairly passive exercise; fire it up and then play Wii or something, not exactly putting in a lot of effort because I can't move those muscles on my own. But not so with the arm cycle. Instead, here I'm expected to pedal like crazy to maintain a pretty fast pace, and the electrical stimulation kicks in to keep me from slowing down too much. That is, the leg bike does all the work, but I actively do the work on the arm bike. It's doable, but by the end of the sequence (if I haven't lapsed into "passive" yet) I'm getting shocked at full blast and still not quite keeping up to speed.

Overall, it's pretty much awesome. Sure, it tears my shoulders/back to painmed-justifying shreds. It works my biceps super solid, though - I do basically no stimulation power to them because I have good sensation there, so shocking hurts - and I think the stimulation to the triceps is very important to regaining their strength and control. So in summary, simultaneous ouches and yays I suppose.

Ugh! There are still a few more points to cover, but I'm spent for now. Feel free to go back to doing something useful, and I'll distract you again soon.