306.366 - 2016 project and physical therapists

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

physical therapists

I think this is the fourth time a physical therapist has helped reconstruct me.  once I flew through the air and landed on my head and my shoulder, and broke my shoulder blade.  my orthopedist then grinned and shook his head.  "you understand - don't you? - nobody breaks a shoulder blade.  and when they do, all we can do is try to immobilize your arm to give the shoulder blade a chance to heal.  and that means some of your muscles will atrophy, and we'll have to help you rebuild them at the appropriate time."  so after three months or so of an immobilized arm, I spent three months or so with a physical therapist trying to reconstruct muscles that had forgotten what to do with a shoulder and an arm.  if I had been better at following instructions, my right shoulder might not slump so well and my right arm might do things more deftly.  and if my eyes had been green, we might have a red sky.  another time, a pickup driver veered into the lane I was riding in and a tricky break in the asphalt finished throwing me off balance, and my leg broke, I think.  in any case, I spent weeks on crutches, then another three months with a physical therapist learning to walk again.  recently I dropped my Harley on my left leg and shattered both bones in the lower leg.  uh-oh.  another orthopedist reconstructed my tibia and fibula, and another physical therapist once again helped me relearn how to walk and climb stairs.  and now a condition has befallen me:  bilateral sinus tarsi syndrome.  once again a physical therapist is teaching me how to walk again and how to strengthen ruined muscles.  what impresses me about physical therapists is that they know how the body works - all those bones, joints, muscles, tendons, nerves, and stuff.  bones and joints you and I don't even know we have,  and they - the physical therapists - can figure out exercises that rebuild the particular set of muscles and tendons that no longer work right.  and damn, if you'll just follow instructions - or even mostly follow instructions - you do get better and your body does more nearly what you expect it to do!  it's a specialty in medical work, and it takes damn clever people to figure that stuff out.  but then it takes really clever people to hornswoggle or cajole ornery critters like you and me, well at least like some of you and me, into doing what we need to do to get better.  humans are perverse!  thank goodness there are people who can outclever us and trick us into getting well or at least better!  thank you, physical therapists.