Costs

I think I'm going to be taking a break from my weekly scheduled official physical-therapy sessions.

Like so many MS treatments we MSers are given, by people who have nothing but the best of intentions, it costs too much.

Not financially... energetically. My PT sessions do not appear to be making me "better," and certainly aren't making my walking better. But I come back from PT barely able to wall-walk or even walker-walk the 12-ish feet between the bed and the bathroom. The bed, by the way, where I spend much more time after PT than anything else that takes a lot of energy, like going out to dinner or a movie.

Two days, sometimes, it can take for me to recover from even a gentle PT session.

So yeah, I think I'm gonna take a break from this for a while.

Will I try to do some exercise-y things at home on my own, anyway? Well, I'll do what I can, but very very carefully. And not an hour at a time. A couple of minutes. Then a break. Then a couple of minutes, again. Maybe.

But mega-doses of PT, right now, feel like they're harming me, not helping me. My abdominal muscles, what the Pilates people call the "core," those have definitely strengthened, and I can feel when I use those. And actually enjoy feeling that my core has been strengthened.

But legs? Oh no, if anything is done to those, it costs me days of functioning at even my now-normal half-baked level.

What will this mean to my (cue the 1960's-grade laugh track) improvement?

Well, as far as I can tell, it's basically done nothing. And even one of my PT people says as much... she said that if I'm not getting helped by this, I might want to take a break.

Well, I do. So I will.

My Primary Care Guy is currently on vacation, I'll be seeing him in a couple of weeks. But I'll be very surprised if he makes a case for "one day of PT coming at the price of at least two days of fractured mobility. Maybe more."

Ah, the MS world. Only we know what the costs of everything truly are. Everyone, everyone, has to pay the energetic price for everything they do... but they don't notice what it really is.

But we do. Oh boy, do we ever.