The First Day of the Rest of My Life started yesterday. I got done with the morning rant- why aren’t those bankers and financiers in jail?- and looked up at the clock. I realized I had 31 minutes to be in a place I had never been before.

Crap. Double crap.

Every movement takes extra time, and my internal Washington Commuter Clock just doesn’t work properly to incorporate the brace and the tentative steps. Attempting to “hurry” takes on a certain air of the surreal, but after tottering down the hall to the elevator I got to the lobby, greeting Rhonda the Chief Concierge and Leo the Engineer, as I hobbled with earnest intent across the marble and out the front door.

Then I was in the Bluesmobile and headed west. After some interminable traffic lights on Route 50 and one wrong turn, I found the office complex whose address I had scrawled on a piece of scrap paper.

This would have been easier, of course, by punching the address into the Crackberry navigator app, but of course the Company had zeroed my device in a security update, and nothing worked. Crap.

I did blunder across the building almost by chance, and found a parking slot almost large enough for the massive Ford was filling out insurance paperwork in the office upstairs with a minute and thirty seconds to spare.

I am getting too old for this getting old business, I thought.

The office was an alcove off a large sunny room with various devices of torture and a middle-aged man who was walking slowly around an obstacle course of small orange cones.

I was handed a sheaf of papers to fill out and riffled through them. Once the physical therapy people were confident that they could bill me, I was turned over to a curvaceous young woman named Christina.

She had long blonde hair, a statuesque bodice and a diamond on her left hand. She summoned me to a work station next to a massage table in the middle of the room and changed my life.

No kidding. Up until the moment I took the brace off, I was an invalid and afraid of falling like a codger. Christina changed all that. She took me in hand (or foot as the case may be) and put me through my paces. It was quite extraordinary- I left the house an invalid, and within ten minutes at rehab I was being challenged to be healthy again.  It was almost too much to absorb, like the earth had lurched. I totally had to recalibrate the person I had become and imagine a new one.

Forty-five minutes later I was bathed in a sheen of sweat. Christina printed out two pages of diagrams for the exercises I am supposed to go twice daily. There are twelve exercises to strengthen the knee and leg structures and set up a two-a-week office schedule with the admonition to do the exercises morning and night.

I was amazed at what I could do without the brace, but I had to remember that it was the fear that needed to go first. “Don’t push it too hard,” she said. “But push it.”

I got a real adrenaline rush out of the session, one that carried me through a business lunch and back to the computer at home. There, the adrenaline leaked out and I started to get back spasms, intermittent dizzy spells, a series of mini-panic attacks and gnawing pain that radiated from knee to the small of my back.

I gave up around five, I thought some Motrin might be good, then said, “Screw it,” and found the plastic prescription bottle of Percocet, happy that I quit taking them after the operation and still had a stash left. I took one, mixed a drink and got in bed. In a half hour everything was fine. I am glad I didn’t finish them weeks ago.

This is going to be interesting, and one thing for sure is that it is going to be different.

Sorry this is disjointed- they are going to power wash the garage and I have to move the Mercedes and think about how I am going to look like I am working today. Still amazed. What a difference a day makes.

Jeeze, Louise. Now the work starts.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com