"Relax Your Protocols" -- Princeton Patch Blogger Returns to Kayaking, And Peril of the Shoe

Princeton Patch readers have been very patient with me, in this healing journey that began November 9 at Princeton Medical Center. 

You've learned to rejoice with me over the little victories associated with this 'total hip replacement.'  And therefore to share first nature excursions, as Dr. Gutowski's promised kayaker's hip turns out, also, to be really good on trails, --even in woods, marshes and swamps.

First among many triumphs was my surgeon's permission to "relax your protocols." Sounds wild, doesn't it? The poet in me loves that phrase, as does the person who manages NJ WILD for the Packet...  And the naturalist who longs for horizons old and new, denied for at least a year by 'total loss of cartilage.'

Dr. Gutowski's protocol-relaxing permission meant that I can now bend 'the surgical leg' at 90-degrees. I never thought geometry had any connection to life.

The first breakthrough from relaxing that 90-degree proscription meant I could pick up my purse when it slid off the car's front seat.  It soon meant it was o.k. to attend nature lectures; then the stellar Dryden Ensemble's early music performances. And, this week, sit with knees right at the stage for Lily Tomlin's triumphant return to McCarter. I've now been accused of showing off for bending to bring in a friend's newspaper, as well as for repeatedly standing to let people past in the theatre. 

The victoire no one would guess is that I frequently do my prescribed standing exercises (at home!  not in public) to Hugh Laurie's Dixieland.  I literally can't sit still during his incredible "Let Them Talk" (playing as I write for you...).

For all this, the major triumph turns out to be that I can tie my right shoe.  Out on that drought-hard towpath, I can wear my real hiking shoes, --generous in bounce and support.  And warmth, which the flimsy ones with elastic ties just did not possess.

All of this means I may well graduate from P.T. (Physical Therapy), --probably Monday.

This is bittersweet. For everyone, --therapists through aides--, is so generous and protective that I've think of them/us as "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers."  True, I am not King Harry.  But they have been at my side throughout this battle with having been crippled. 

I'm beginning to suspect that not even kayaking will make up for their absence.

To get back to the shoe -- it turned out, professionally speaking, that Carolyn's last week return to kayaking meant less than getting serious about that shoe! 

As John Walker, (love that pun), my physical therapist observed a month ago, meticulously requesting a prescription for yet another four full weeks:  "Carolyn, we can't send you out into the world with one shoe."

So what that I've birded two uninterrupted hours in Belleplain's woods, marshes and bogs, with cherished friends, in quest of warblers.

Nor does it count that I've managed two major receptions at D&R Greenway Land Trust - one for water art and one for splendid waterfowl decoys  -- 5 1/2 and 6 hours on my feet, creating beauty and fellowship. Let's tie that shoe.

Last Wednesday, however, I walked into P.T. in my own tightly tied well-used hiking shoes. 

Whom did I meet in those first shoe-tied steps but Dr. Gutowski's marvelous nurse, Terry.  She seemed sent as witness to something right out of King Arthur.

Although kayaking will always matter far more to me than shoes, something else may be more important: the return of the Muse. 

I share with you two of the new poems from what may turn into the first collection of poems ever on P.T. 

May they bring you the joy in the reading, that they brought me in the writing:

I dedicate them to Dr. W. Thomas Gutowski and Terry. To John Walker, my physical therapist, without whom I would not have been out in the middle of Lake Carnegie with no other humans and one great blue heron. And to my fellow patients and all the dedicated personnel at Princeton Orthopaedic Associates' remarkable healing center:

JUXTAPOSITIONS

in this room full of premature blossoms

I perform final exercises

on the heels of ‘total hip replacement’

March sun suffuses whiteness

that one day should be pears

as I am handed stretching bands,

assorted weights, one bolster

and a ball

here, serious playthings promise

flexibility, stamina, gait

-- and  possibly-- kayaking

relentlessness conspires

with absolute lack of privacy

throughout my fitness attempts

outside, blossoms yearn

for pollinators’ essential arrivals

inside, --completing yet another

“two sets of thirty”--

I perceive flowery profusion

through a tall bright curve

of ivory spinal column

vertebrae and blossoms

my new reality

MARCH HEAT

tonight I am distracted

from interminable exercises

by a plethora of blossoms

filling every window

of physical therapy’s temple

high priests preside

as dignity is sacrificed

in the worship of fitness

some vaguely recall

gazing

through this forest of arched legs

and branching arms

as snow slid sideways

smothering the panes

in that rare whiteness

my physical therapist admitted

"I am a connoisseur of snowflakes"

…so few flakes in 2012

not enough for practice

and practically nobody remembers snow

tomorrow or the next

bloom will become blizzard

swooning with March heat

inscribing too-green grass

with drifts of lost promise

                                             Carolyn Foote Edelmann

                                             Spring, 2012

                                (No new kayaking poems yet, but stay tuned....) 

Thank you for cheering me on. 

Don't waste an opportunity to enjoy nature.

And please preserve her, especially in New Jersey, especially with D&R Greenway Land Trust.