Back to Life.

This has been a week of remembering pleasures that I had tried to forget until I could come back to them. These include:

* sleeping on my side (ahhhhhhhh);
* leaving my house without the sling, and therefore not having to negotiate the sling in the putting on and taking off of coats;
* carrying something, even something light, in my left hand;
* driving my very own stick-shift car;
* looking at my sling lying in a heap on the floor and just leaving it there.

OK, so that last one was not so much something I had experienced before, but it is sure sweet.

The difficulty of being rid of the sling is that there is a bit more soreness and tenderness around the place where the surgery was done. (It feels a bit sore and then if I touch it there is no question of the exact spot.) I believe this is part of the process: not wearing the sling puts the wound under a bit more pressure, as I relearn to use the muscles around it to support it. But so far my body has not rejected any of its bionic parts.

But most of all, I have been to swim practice twice. Those of you who swim regularly probably do not remember what it is like to come back to practice for the first time after a long time of being kept away, but being in the water? Moving your body in some strange way that, because you have done it for so long, actually makes you move pretty efficiently through the water? Realizing that you remember every little automatic thing that you do to keep from getting water up your nose? Discovering that it is absolutely possible to do a (somewhat half-speed) flip turn with one arm's worth of propulsion? These are amazing things.

Saturday I was allowed to add a couple of hundred meters to my practice, so it was a total of 1500 meters. Less one-arm drill, because that felt a little bad in my shoulder where the surgical work was done, and the goal here is to do no harm. I am guessing, given that oblique ab work in the gym did something similar, that the body rotation puts some strain on that spot, strain I had no idea about. So I will back away from those drills completely, and then see if they can come in gradually sometime later. For now, then, kickery, and seeing how long it will take before I can do an entire practice. (But this is not a race.)

I know myself well enough to know that after a month or so, I will start to get frustrated that I cannot push further. I might tend to focus again on what I cannot do instead of what I can do. I might get stressed out by my job and lose all my senses. So I am writing this now to try to remember that even being here is terrific.