With a post title like that, can you tell I just saw the movie Happy Endings? It was a pretty good movie, and I'd recommend it. And no, it is not p*rn and it is not much about massage.
What I mean by the title of this post is that I have been fully released from physical therapy. Actually, the orthopedic surgeon, the same one who sent me to physical therapy, specifically said, "Don't waste your time with more physical therapy." I was going to relay those exact words to PT, but I didn't have to bother because the doctor wrote him a note. Strangely, in this day of e-mail and faxes, I hand carried a progress report from PT to the doctor, who wrote a note back and had me hand carry it to PT. I felt a bit like junior high, passing along a note asking if the recipient liked the writer. I did my share of that in junior high, though I was always the go-between and never the one with the crush or the one who was the object of the crush. That suited me just fine.
In any case, my life is PT-free now. We were getting along a lot better during the last few weeks of therapy, although it was not without its rocky moments. At the end of the day, my back is feeling better and I am incredibly grateful that we were able to make that happen.
People always say that you take your health for granted until you don't have it any more, and I guess that is really true. I feel more motivated to take better care of myself now than I ever have, most likely because I know how easy it would be to reinjure myself and go through more months of agony. I've broken bones before, gotten really sick, and had tendonitis, but none of those situations ever made me think that I needed to get my act together before my physical health really impeded me from living my life. Perhaps that is just the nature of back injuries, given the way that a back injury can really affect almost everything that you do. So, I'm going to keep doing my back exercises, and I'm going to try to be more active, even through the upcoming winter. Once spring rolls around, I plan to hit the road and eventually run a 5K next Thanksgiving. My parents (one of whom could run a 5K and the other who could not) think that my goal is laughable, as in that I will never do it. My husband has told me that if I can do it, he will get me a surprise, and he has strongly hinted that it will be some sort of body art. . . I think in his mind this is going to be quite the challenge for me -- first the running and then some sort of piercing or tattooing. Good grief, I'm married to a sadist!
The sadist and I have recently taken up cigar smoking. I know, that's Bad for you. However, a few weeks ago, as I was eagerly anticipating a visit from my brother, who only comes home every two or three years for a few days, I mentioned that I wanted to smoke a cigar with him. I love the smell of cigars, but I'm not a huge smoker of them because, unlike Bill Clinton, I have a difficult time not inhaling. Turns out the night I was with my brother it poured out so we couldn't go outside to smoke. The spouse was more than willing to do that with me last week. While we were outside smoking our cigars and drinking beer, I saw our two year old downstairs sneaking around the house, hours after his bed time. I gave my cigar to my husband, put down my beer, and ran inside to chase the kid back to bed, and the little weasel stood his ground and told me he wanted to kiss me. When I related this story at work, people looked seriously confused that I would smoke a cigar.
I've indulged in a cigar every now and then since my mid-20's. I can't figure out whether people are that surprised that I would smoke a cigar or whether there's another reason for their surprise. It makes me wonder how well people really know me, and whether that's my fault or theirs. Today at work my boss was quite beside herself that I "got" some things that were related to a specific program area at our company. She said she wondered if I wasn't turning into one of "them", meaning the people in that program. She thought it was quite funny, so she wasn't disparaging me. It did make me think, again, how well she knows me after all these years we've worked together. In her case, much of that is deliberate on my part because I don't think that a lot of my life is relevant to be shared in a work setting. For example, the fact that I have a good sized tattoo on my back has nothing whatsoever to do with my ability to do my job. Therefore, I don't reveal it at work because it's not necessary and appropriate workplace attire covers it. There is also the fear that once people see it, it will become some sort of barrier or change their perception of my effectiveness at my job when really it has nothing whatsoever to do with my ability to perform.
When I was younger, I used to think that relationships were an all or nothing kind of thing -- either we like everything about each other and are friends or we have differences and are not friends. With maturity, I have come to realize that friendships can exist on many levels and that having friends who have very different views can deepen my understanding of so many things, even if I don't ultimately agree with my friends' points of view. Now I find myself in the position of knowing so many people and yet not really knowing them or having them know me because of the guarded nature with which I approach things. In a world where information is a hot commodity, that's a smart and safe way to go about things, but what about those Aha! moments when you discover some off the wall thing that you have in common with someone else? Those don't come as easily when your guard is up.
So, to bring this all full circle, back to PT, I think that's what happened. We moved beyond the surface conversations that you have with people you don't know well and discovered that, for all our differences, we had some things in common and other things that were different but complementary. We let our guards down and the boundaries got fuzzy. He messed with my mind (whether intentional, I don't know) and I wondered if I had inadvertently been messing with his. But we shifted gears (Okay, I admit, I had a little freakout at therapy, but we're not going there.) and reached a happy medium. In fact, today I dropped by and gifted him a bottle of wine in thanks for everything he did to get me better. Before you get all freaky about that, let me explain that I had a chance conversation with his boss last week about the work that I do, and I put together a package of information for his boss. When I was on my way to drop that package off, I impulsively decided to bring a bottle of wine from a case I bought last week for PT, and I brought my kids with me. So, please, I didn't show up with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. The wine was well-received and closure was had, and that's a happy ending.
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