Walking

Like millions of other folks looking to get fit for the new year, I signed myself up for a new membership at a gym. It had been a few years since I regularly worked out, so it was time to tune up my aging, flaccid bod. 

In the last couple of years I was distinctly damning my stroke for either gaining weight, being out of shape, getting gray hairs and getting more wrinkles. I’ve never been so vain in my whole life. While it is true that a fair percentage of things progressed quickly right after the stroke, stroke or not, they were going to happen anyway because I am now at a point in my life that is called “middle-aged”.

Gulp.

Middle age? Yes, middle age. 

Yuck!

The last time I was at my ob-gyn, I was talking to her about my “interesting” menstrual cycles and asked, “Is that because of the stroke?” She chuckled and said, “No, that has nothing to do with the stroke. It’s pretty normal for your age.”

Excuse me? MY AGE? It has to be from the stroke, right?

Aside from the changes in my brain, it turns out I’m not so unique at all. As I think about my age - 44 - I consider my maternal grandmother: she died a couple weeks shy of her 89th birthday. So, when she was 44 years old in 1957, she was...middle-aged. Assuming I’m banking on my DNA it makes sense that I would consider myself middle-aged.

But how does my body feel? Over the last couple of years I feel like I’ve aged a decade. The fatigue hasn’t helped by making me feel like an old lady and since the stroke, I wasn’t feeling in control of my own body. I felt myself hesitant to swiftly move around, fear of another fall or fear of another dissection. Truly that is a valid fear, but I know that I can’t continue to move so stiff for the rest of my life. Late last year I started walking in a regular basis to move my body again, but of course when it started to get cold, I wasn’t walking anymore. 

So, I’m happy to be back in a gym again but wow, I forgot how sore muscles really feel like. After the first few nights of agony with jimmy-legs that almost propelled myself off the bed, the jimmy-legs have subsided and moving my body on a (somewhat) regular basis is really the ticket I needed to keep moving forward.
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To read more about my exercise after stroke, see the following article, "Walker Recovers One Step at a Time" published on the OhioHealth website as part of the Faces of Heart and Stroke Stories page. Beside my part, there are several inspirational stories.