Well. That was an interesting six weeks.

I finally got cleared by the various Medical Professionals I'm seeing to work out again. That clearance came with caveats galore, though: no running, no jumping, absolutely no plyometrics, nothing high-impact. No heavy lifting. Bending over is strictly limited.

I suppose, given that my neck could've just gone out and left me with limited sensation and movement all over, that some restrictions are reasonable. It was still frustrating. More on that in a moment--for now, let's recap the First Workout In Forever.

For starters, Atilla showed up with a short haircut. Her hair had been down to her waist, but she cut it--herself!--into a really cute pixie. Just looking at her made me want to head down to Ye Olde Hair Salon and get mine chopped. I'm waiting for the feeling to go away.

I tried bicep curls with a measly eight pounds. On my right side, I could do the full three sets of twenty, no problem. On the left, where I'm still lacking sensation and strength, I managed a total of fourteen: eight the first time and six the second. The third set, I couldn't manage to lift the weight at all. It's a weird thing to have happen: your brain is sending messages to your muscle, and you're fully aware of that, but the muscle is just plain out to lunch. There's no contraction, no effort, nothing. It's a total blank.

So we worked mostly on legs and core. Which is fine; I'm not into going balls-to-the-wall any longer just to prove I can.

And that brings me to the main point of the last six weeks. I've been learning to be patient, to be humble, and to ask for help when I need it. None of these things are natural for me in the least, but all of them have become necessary.

My yard was already getting overgrown when I got hurt, but it still took me two weeks to muster the courage (and swallow my pride) to ask my neighbor to mow it for me. I'm no longer trying to move heavy patients by myself or with just one other person to help. When it comes to what my average day off is like, things have really changed. Seven weeks ago, I'd've done a hard workout in the morning--enough to make me want to vomit--then mowed both yards and maybe cleaned house as well.

Today, I did a light workout. Then I showered. And that will be it for the day. The rest of the day I'll spend either cooking for the week, or painting my toenails, or reading.

The days of thousand-calories-burned workouts are probably over forever. That bothers me more than I thought it would; it's surprising how much I'd come to depend on the feeling that I could do damn near anything. I lifted heavier, ran faster (I was just able to run again when this neck thing happened), and was more agile than any of Atilla's other clients, despite being much heavier than all of them. Being that fucking tough was a point of pride for me. If Atilla couldn't lift the weight I was pressing, I knew I was on the right track.

No more. (Dammit!) Now I have to keep in mind that I have a really serious, potentially chronic, only-partly-fixable-with-surgery injury in a place that, should that injury get worse, could be catastrophic. Necks should not be messed with under any circumstances.

I'm coming to terms with it. I'm coming to terms with the fact that I have to ask for help at work, in a business and on a unit where the standard for toughness is set by twenty-six-year-old residents who never sleep. I'm slowly, slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am forty years old, no matter that I feel no older than 27, and shit is wearing out. I'm facing the fact that I might not be able, going forward, to do everything that I want to do when I want to do it.

Because honestly? I'd much rather be out trimming back the rose bushes than typing this. I just know I can't and still expect to be functional in the morning.

The first three weeks of this were hell. I couldn't move the damn arm at all, not in any useful way, and had to take a nap--I am not kidding--after every shower, it was so exhausting. The second three weeks were a lesson in learning how to do things differently. I'm going to have some hellacious accessory muscles on this left side, thanks to nearly a month of having to steer primarily with my lats and neck muscles.

Even now, six weeks out, when I'm recovering as quickly as expected, I still have very limited function in my left arm at the end of the day. My left forearm and part of my hand is still numb after twelve hours of starting IVs and working on the computer. Sometimes my hand just flops around without warning, like I've got a dying fish at the end of my wrist. And sometimes (thankfully, it's rare any more) the whole left side of my back hurts so badly that nothing will fix it except lying atop a variety of frozen food bags for half an hour at a stretch.

We'll see how it goes. The first three weeks, I was mostly depressed and drinking. This second three weeks has been much more productive, and much better for me mentally.

The whole trouble has been in learning that I am human, and thus fallible.

Jo reflects: Injury, depression, getting a clue

Yeah, um. So. It's been a month. Sorry 'bout that.

If you read Head Nurse, you'll know that I have a well and truly jacked up neck at the moment. Recap: heavy lifting, big weeks at work, huge muscle spasm in back, non-functional left arm, scary intimations of damage to cervical discs, X-rays, massage, painkillers, new pillow, return of some function in left arm. MD's prohibition on doing *anything*, including walking on the treadmill, until the 21st of this month.

It's been a bad three weeks.

Working out consistently is a joy. Working out consistently also predisposes a body to depression and despair when that working out is taken away. The release of endorphins that happens after you get close to barfing during a cross-training session is gone; your body craves those endorphins like they're heroin (which, in a sense, they are, being very closely chemically related). When you've been training like a motherfucker and suddenly you're told not to do anything at all challenging, things suck hard very quickly. Combine that with searing pain and the fear of being permanently disabled, and you're in a bad headspace before you know it.

It's my own damn fault. I had been lifting heavier so that I could do more on my own at work, and doing more on my own because I had been lifting heavier. The injury I'm dealing with now is nothing more than an overuse syndrome. (For those who are curious, I have adhesions from hell in my shoulder muscles and rhomboids that are compressing a number of spinal nerves.) A combination of a new pillow and very expensive, very effective massage has left me free of pain, though I still can't lift my arm above my shoulder.

For now, the depression that came along with not training is lifting. I no longer feel like standing in front of the mirror and cataloging all the ways my body is going to hell. I start myofascial release treatments today (picnic!), and expect to be back to *light* weight training and cardio by the end of the month. Meanwhile, all I have to deal with is boredom.

I'm not joking when I say my doc banned all physical activity for three weeks. I can't weed the garden, vacuum (although I have; the cost-benefit analysis of cat hair balls versus nerve damage came down heavily on the side of not choking on dust bunnies), lift patients, bend over, flip my bangs out of my eyes, or turn sharply from one side to another. I am prohibited entirely from working out or even walking the dog. I am not allowed to trot, let alone run. Because, let's face it, the consequences of a high spinal injury are nasty, I have mostly adhered to these prescriptions.

For now, I'm okay. I'm working to be better than okay, but it's going to be a while. Recovering from this most basic injury to a very sensitive system is going to require that I get over being Superwoman and swallow my pride (more on that in a later post). I'm going to actually, you know, have to ask for help. I'm going to have to learn a different way of working out than just balls-to-the-wall all the time.

*sigh*

Meanwhile, I'm thankful it wasn't any worse. Yes, I have a muscle knot in my left rhomboid that is approximately the size and shape of a bratwurst, but it's fixable. I'm not dealing with a paralyzed arm for the rest of my life. I got really freaking lucky in that; apparently, the vertebrae in my spine could've been pulled out of alignment by the muscle spasm, it was so bad.

More on all of this later. Charlotte over at GFE has been in my head this week, so I've got some thoughts on psychologically-loaded fitness-related goals. For now, though, it's ice and rest and maybe a bowl of soup.

On fear, self-sabotage, and lifting heavy.

Charlotte is in rare form these days. I don't know what's gotten into her, but damn if she's not hitting an entirely new level with her writing.

Right now, I think at least partially as a consequence of having had her daughter, she's doing a lot of really hard mental work. I've been watching with interest because a lot of what she's saying and discovering about herself is stuff I've had a hard time articulating or clarifying to myself about me. Good Lord, what a sentence that was.

Anyway, her most recent gobstopper of a post was about being broken, and about using that broken-ness as a way of being selfish. For the record, I see the recognition and embrace of one's own brokenness not so much as being selfish as it is a reaction to the fear of putting yourself out there. Y'know, if you tell yourself that there's something wrong with you in your reactions to various situations, you'll never have to get far enough outside your own head to look at other people's reactions to those same situations, and maybe engage with them.

I was badly broken by my marriage, and further dented by the circumstances of the divorce that followed. Coming home sick from work to find your husband and best friend in flagrante is so banal and cliched that you start wondering if Jerry Springer is going to leap out of a closet. Still, it's horrible, and losing the entirety of your social circle, your home, and your best pal as a result is so traumatic I can't even begin to go there. Basically, I endured ten years of pretty-constant suck, gave up everything including my dog to get away, was humiliated and stalked and badmouthed, and didn't even get a lollipop at the end.

And boy, was "broken" a part of my identity for a while. I might've, had I not had a fear of nasty bugs, had it tattooed on my forehead. As it was, I wore Broken as a shield. It was the first thing everybody saw and the last thing that they remembered. Broken defined my life from the minute I moved out until just a couple of years ago.

It was time, and the love of a very good man (as cliched and banal as that sounds) that helped. That, and the realization that while horrible things had happened to me, I was not necessarily going to be allowed to marinate in them forever. For one thing, it gets boring. For another, it was stopping me from doing the stuff I wanted to do, like have actual fun once in a while. For a third, I was getting fat and weak and sessile and stood a very good chance of simply attaching to a rock and waving my fronds to catch passing cheeseburgers.

So I quit being broken. Broken was no longer a major part of my personality; nor was Bitter.

It took a while. It was hard. And it was scary and painful to a certain degree. As I told Charlotte, it's not that getting outside of yourself gets easier or less frightening; it's just that by doing it often enough, you develop a habit that overcomes fear.

The biggest single act that made me not-broken was calling Amalgamated Fitness Trainers, Inc. and hooking up with Attila. She was working for them at the time and showed up that first day, taught me to do a pushup properly, and went away. And I could do a pushup.

I could do a pushup. That was something I'd never ("You'd be so much more attractive if you just worked out a few times a week," he said; "You'd look so good if you lost a few pounds," he said, with me at five-two and 120) been able to do before.

Later, Attila made me run. On the treadmill. Two minutes at a time, followed by walking, then another two minutes at a time. I had never ("Are you sure you want to eat that?" he asked) run before, not even for two minutes. Not even in elementary school.

Pretty soon I was running for twenty minutes on my own. After all, if I could do two minutes, I could do five. And if I could run for five, I could run for ten. And if I could run for ten, I could run for ten more, and finish watching this awful movie. I did that on my own. It was something a broken person would not do. I was still fat, and I was still closer to sessile than I liked, but I could do something different with my body.

The real revelation came when I lifted a twenty-pound barbell twenty times. You try it; it's not easy. It's especially not easy when it's the third twenty times you've lifted it, and your muscles aren't screaming so much as simply going on strike, and they don't even hurt, they're so tired.

Yet something came out of my spinal column or my chi or my subconscious and I lifted that damned barbell for three sets of twenty, proving that I could do anything. And Attila was there, counting down the last five reps, poised to rescue me should my bicep roll up like a rollerblind. And at the end of that workout, I heard her say for the first time, "Good job today." That's like a ticker-tape parade and fireworks combined.

The good man later decided that he didn't want a woman with bigger biceps than his, and I decided that I didn't want somebody who couldn't trust me. The little apartment where I'd licked my wounds went away, replaced by a house that needed as much love and care and chance-taking as I could muster. The dog, praise be, came back to me after four years. And Attila stayed through it all.

More importantly, the fact that I could get outside myself stayed. If, I reasoned, I could humiliate myself in front of five guys in the weight room and survive, I could surely potentially humiliate myself in front of one person somewhere else, right? Right. I got outside of my head by doing the one thing every day that allowed me to feel like I wasn't Broken. And, eventually, the habit of being Not Broken took over.

Never underestimate the power of transferring your possibilities in one arena to another arena. Habit can overcome fear to the point that fear and self-sabotage become secondary or tertiary considerations.

In which Jo gives up, throws in the towel, and sees the doctor.

For those of you who weren't keeping up on Cranky Fitness, my blood pressure went sky-freaking-high about the time I hit the 20-pound mark with Weight Watchers.

After some running to and fro and generalized consternation, I took a look at my diet. All the folks in my family who are hypertensive are what's called salt-reactive: in other words, they're part of the minority of people for whom sodium intake makes a difference in blood pressure.

Turns out that what I was eating on WW, while both varied and healthy, and while well within the limit for sodium set by the Feds, was way too high in sodium for me. So I ditched the Boca Burgers with tears in my eyes, went to low-salt cheese, and dumped all manner of processed foods on my neighbors, who are fifteen years younger than me and who run every day.

And damned if it didn't work! My blood pressure came down--sit down for this; you ready?--THIRTY POINTS in three weeks of low-salt eating. And it wasn't even that difficult to do. I bought a book on DASH (diet modifications for hypertension), but ended up not even using it all that much. All I really did was ditch the processed stuff and eat more bananas and avocados.

The point of this is, even people who are close to a healthy size can have hypertension. And, if you do, it's worth it to try dietary modifications and lifestyle changes first, as they can make huge differences.

"So, Jo," you're saying to yourself right now, "how come you went to the doctor? And what's this about throwing in the towel?"

Even with all this good news about blood pressure, there was A Dark Cloud On The Horizon. That dark cloud is called "working night shift". I was fine for three weeks, then noticed my pressures getting quite weird: they'd vary thirty points or more in the course of a shift, and never *quite* get back to normal. So I ditched caffeine, mostly, upped my potassium intake, and (*sob*) cut down on alcohol.

My pressures stabilized until about two weeks ago. At that point--and remember, I'm still circadian-opposite--my systolic decided that 160 was a fantastic place to live and my diastolic (that's the bottom number in blood pressure; the one that tells you how much pressure there is on your heart while it's relaxed) was a dangerous, scary 100 or so.

So off I went to the doc today. My doctor is a kindly, rumpled, reassuring Muppet from the Philippines who said, as he wrote me a prescription for generic Ziac 5/6.25 "You're a real American now, just like me! All real Americans have high blood pressure!"

I have taken one pill so far and feel....strangely mellow. My heart no longer feels like it's going to POUND out of my CHEST at any SECOND, and the headache I've had for two weeks is subsiding.

The moral of this story is, since every story has to have a moral, this: Even if you lose X number of pounds, or lift Y pounds of weights without trouble, or just finished a Z-mile run, *stay on top of your basic health information.* This means checking blood pressures once in a while, women getting Pap smears regularly, guys doing the old testicle-check for lumps and bumps, and all the other boring stuff your doctor is always bugging you about. Just because you now weigh less or move more than you used to, don't assume you're automatically healthier.

I had the triple-whammy of diet (mostly taken care of), night-shift work (boo), and genetics hit me within six months. I'm off of night shift in three weeks and will get rechecked in six weeks to see how Ye Olde Systolic is doing (though I'll be monitoring it at home regularly, too).

Taking medication is a pain in the ass, yes, but it's kind of nice to know I'm less likely to suddenly have a hemorrhagic stroke in the middle of a workout with Attila. That would totally ruin her day.

Diet, Schmiet. Bah.

Fast oxidizer, slow oxidizer. Vegan, vegetarian, Atkins, primal. Weight Watchers, low-carb, high-carb, Sensa. Oh. Fuck. You.

Why can't we just eat a variety of things in moderation with a treat once in a while?

Note: The following rant does not apply to those people who are vegetarian or vegan for ethical or environmental reasons. It also does not apply to people who avoid certain foods for religious reasons. Nor does it apply to folks who restrict diet in response to diabetes and/or heart disease and/or allergies. It does, however, apply to everybody else.

I work with a woman who is an ortorexic. She refuses to eat anything that isn't "healthy", and her definition of "healthy" has narrowed so substantially over time that she's down to eating a plum for breakfast, a small salad for lunch, and six ounces of white-meat turkey once a week. Not surprisingly, she weighs almost nothing, has little to no muscle mass, and obsesses about food all the time.

And yet nobody (except maybe me) sees this as an eating disorder. It is.

Restricting the amount or type of food you take in to the point that you are getting less than your body requires of nutrients is an eating disorder. It's not a diet, it's not "going raw". It's a psychological condition that will eventually harm or kill you unless you figure out what it is about your life and your brain that is making you want to exercise control in that area, and to that extent. It is no more healthy than bulemia or anorexia, and it's no more connected to diet than those conditions. It's a symptom of a larger problem that is expressed through dietary control.

And, may I say, just because you switch from one extremely restrictive diet to another (Pritikin, Atkins, raw, primal) for no other reason than to exercise more control over your body, that does not make you less eating-disordered. It just means you have a little more variety to your symptoms.

Restrictive eating is popular right now. Chicken fat is bad, coconut oil is good (no matter that your body sees them in essentially the same way). Eating high-protein is smart only if you're a Type X body or have Type Y blood. Everybody and his dog has a "food allergy" of one sort or another that usually has zero to do with an actual allergy or intolerance. I know some people who eat three freaking salads a day--and I love me some salad--because they automatically equate "salad" with "healthy". (Note: uncooked spinach can block the absorption of calcium. Uncooked broccoli can do weird things to your iron levels. Some veggies need to be cooked to be ideally processed by the human body. That's called science.)

And here I am, stuck in the middle. I know that for me, a high-protein diet works wonders. If I don't have my two-egg-white, cheese, GoLean breakfast, I'm hungry within an hour and have nasty sugar crashes. If I don't get plenty of vegetables, beans, and nuts, I'm grouchy and constipated and have no energy. Pancakes put me out and make my mood seesaw and my belly bloat.

I also know that a varied diet is the only way to go. If you eat the same damn plum every day for breakfast and the same damn peach every day for lunch, your bones will not thank you. Likewise, if you restrict yourself to high-fat, high-protein foods with few or no carbs, you'll get all ketotic and light-headed and ka-ray-zee within a few days.

Look: I'll be straight with you: the type and amount of exercise I do accounts for, at most, thirty percent of what I've achieved in terms of weight lost and strength gained over the last three years. Diet is responsible for 70%, minimum, of the changes I see. And the diet I follow religiously is this: eat less than is necessary to make you full. Eat when you're hungry. Eat protein in the morning (and this is personal, not a prescription) so you don't get hungry fast; otherwise, eat mostly plants. Stay away from shit with ingredients you can't pronounce or food that's pretending to be something it's not.

In short, to paraphrase Mark Twain, I eat what I like and let it fight it out inside.

Your diet is none of my damn business. It just makes me angry and sad to see smart people--mostly women, but a few men, too--spending so much energy on what they put into their bodies. Thirty years ago, it was all about how we looked--that took energy away from more important things, like personal development and political action. Now it's all about what we eat, with the same results.

If you spent even half the energy you spend on your freaking food doing something for somebody else, what would be the result? What could you accomplish by paying attention to something outside of yourself for the space of one meal?

Heavy Lifting, Day Two: Fifty-pound deadlifts? No problem.

Fifty-pound deadlifts combined with a shoulder row?

Owie.

Three sets of fifteen was as much as I could manage. Start with a regular deadlift, but stop just short of coming up fully straight. Then do a pullback motion.

Scream internally for the first eight reps. For the last seven, scream externally. Accomplish the last set while making a noise like a rabid teakettle.

Attila looked at me today after I'd finished a combo curl/row move and said, "Have you been eating a lot of protein lately? You're getting a lot stronger really fast." I told her protein has nothing to do with it (as we all, save for Olympic athletes, carry enough stores to last us a good long while, even with activity); it's simply figuring out what works.

What works for me seems to be standing in one place and lifting really heavy shit.

Also eating five times a day while still doing Weight Watchers. I haven't lost any more weight (dammit; how long can I plateau within a four-pound range?) but oh, I am changing, fearfully changing. My waist is smaller, my arms are already a half-inch bigger, my legs are losing the cankle look.

With any luck I'll look like Wolverine by the end of the summer, just like I've always wanted to.

With less back hair.

Many things are happening.

I have--wait for it!--repaired my weight bench.

It's a scavenged weight bench, a cheap-ass thing made with MDF. The MDF, having sat outside through winters and summers, disintegrated the moment I put any weight on it, so I had to sort of work around splintered woodlike substances and moldy foam. It was gross.

A couple of months ago, I took two sliding closet doors off a closet so I could put shelving in it. One of those closet doors--well, part of it, anyhow--became the new sitting-bits of my weight bench. You can't really go wrong with inch-thick hardwood plywood. It looks odd, since I haven't gotten around to putting padding on the thing, but it's usable.

The pads on the leg attachment were shedding bits of foam rubber, too, so I stuck some brightly-colored tube socks over them. I plan to put hot pink vinyl and foam rubber over the bench sometime soon. It'll be a psychedelic weight bench.

In other news, Attila and I have changed the way I lift.

Attila's real big on the light-weight, high-rep thing. I don't like that much: it's hard on the joints and it doesn't give me the size or definition I really want from weight training. Yeah, I'm strong, but I'm not strong *enough*, is another consideration.

So this week we shook things up and started heavy, heavy training. Eight reps to failure heavy. Holy shit, do my upper arms ever hurt heavy. I think I'll have to go buy some more plates heavy.

Shockingly, after only two sessions of yowza heavy lifting, I can already see changes in my shoulders and biceps. That's mostly due to the fact that they're pumped more than usual, but I think it's also that my body responds really well to lifting heavy things slowly. My brain responds well, too--the concentration that heavy lifting takes, along with attention to form, leaves me physically drained and mentally very clear after only 45 minutes.

There are some people who are just plain meant to lift heavy shit over and over, and I'm one of them. I'll never be a natural runner like my neighbors Pastor Paul and His Lovely Wife Val; they run something like nine miles a day and call it a warm-up. They're both tall and slender and gazelle-like, whereas I am short and stocky and thick-necked. However! When The Man of God was having trouble getting a washing machine into his truck, I was able to grab the strap he'd cinched around it, heave it up onto my knees, and balls it up into the bed of the pickup with effort but no injury.

You go ahead and run down that antelope. I'll haul it back to the campfire for you.

With that in mind, here's a particularly twisted little exercise Attila sprang on me this week:

**Nota Bene: please be aware that form is crucial in this exercise. You cannot slop around and not hurt yourself, so start light and go slow. Do it in front of a mirror or with somebody who can let you know when you're getting out of alignment.**

Grab yerself a barbell. It doesn't really matter what size, but I would recommend going lighter rather than heavier at first. I started with fifteen pounds and moved up to twenty, but don't go there if you're doubtful. Start with eight pounds, or five, or three. Form is key here.

Hold your arm straight out at shoulder height to the side. Keep your elbow soft.

Moving slowly and carefully, do a bicep curl until your knuckles are almost at your shoulder. Don't waggle, don't try to do this fast, and for God's sake, don't lock your elbow when you return to the starting position. That way lies disaster.

Do fewer reps and fewer sets than you think you can. Your muscles will fatigue quickly with this one.

Shockingly, this exercise takes quite a bit of balance. I was wearing normal Nikes during the workout, but would love to try this with MBTs on, for the challenge. Be aware that if you're hearing clicks from your elbow as you do this, you should definitely stop. Elbows are very hard to replace successfully.

Be prepared to be insanely, toxically sore two days after you do this, no matter how many reps or sets you do.

Also: Hack squats: they're totally doable without a machine. Again, it takes concentration and adjustment in front of a mirror or another person in order to maintain form, but it's worth it. (Hack squats, for the uninitiated, are a variation of the normal squat in which your body is aligned as though you're doing a wall-sit. Your back stays straight, you don't go down as far, and you scream differently on the third rep.)

Hack squats, however, are best done with a trainer who can lift the amount of weight you're squatting without injuring herself. Attila is one of those fast, coordinated, gazelle-like creatures, and is having difficulty moving the amount of weight I can handle. The last thing you want to hear when you gasp, "I can get through this set, but be ready to grab the bar" is a doubtful, "Er...okay?"

I think I might have to build a weight stand that's a little higher than the one on my bench, is what I'm saying.