May and health

Clearpath Chiropractic in Guelph has an annual health event in May called, appropriately enough, May Health. You choose a challenge, you do it for 31 days, and hopefully you have a habit built afterwards that you can keep up - or not - as you will.

This year my goal was to work up to a five kilometre bike ride. As of April 28 it looked as if that would be a goal I could easily reach, even bypass.

April 29 I was in a car accident. This resulted in a knee injury. Physio was started immediately, but stayed at a very basic level due to problems getting an ultrasound and getting results from said ultrasound. It was delayed by three weeks. Three weeks where all I could do was wait, rest, and try to get through what I needed and wanted to do as best as I could with a knee that would comply or not with no good pattern.

My May Health goal was changed to meditating every day instead. This helped me to relax and reduce my stress.

May was not an easy month, though. The healing process has also resulted in some pretty heavy exhaustion. There are days I didn't meditate because as soon as I started I fell asleep. Fitting it in was difficult due to sleeping through alarms in the morning and dropping asleep in chairs at night.

There has been frustration and anger. I've lost a month of what I've wanted to do because someone didn't do a simple shoulder check. I'm finding this a lot harder to deal with than with a previous accident that was caused by bad weather. Bad weather is understandable and can be forgiven. I'm still working on forgiving bad driving, and I may be for a while.

The ultrasound delays have also been a problem. I followed up and made calls and kept pushing until I had them. Three weeks, though, is a long time to wait and do nothing when you're in pain.

I've managed to not miss much work through all of this, but everything else in my life has been hit or miss. 

The trick, I think, isn't to deny the anger or frustration or exhaustion. It's not to push through and pretend like nothing bad has happened and everything has been good, although I've tried my best.

The trick is to keep moving. It's to look at what I can do, and try to manage to keep doing that. If I can't then I need to take a breath, step back, find where I actually am at, and start over again.

Starting over is something I've gotten good at. I've done it a lot over the years. I may not be as far as everyone else is, but I haven't stopped. In the long run, I think that's the bit that really counts.

After all, June is supposed a great month to be out on a bicycle.