Day 2

I got up this morning at 6:30 (same time I get up for school, actually) after getting almost no sleep because my roommate's parents kept the TV on all night. (How much TV can a person watch? I am totally mystified.) I spent about an hour and a half this morning getting dressed, davening shacharit, and eating breakfast. Promptly at 8:00, the OT came to get me for pool therapy.

Pool therapy was lots of fun, and I got to meet the other kids in the program. There are two girls, ages sixteen and eleven, and two boys. I could tell everybody was hurting, but we didn't talk about it: the rule here is, "We don't talk about pain." And guess what? We were still joking and laughing and smiling like anything. There was one game we played where we had to hit a ball to each other while keeping it out of the water. That was where we laughed and teased each other (in a nice way) the most. And guess what else? I even jumped to hit the ball once or twice.

After pool therapy I had an hour of PT. I am sore all over from yesterday, most noticeably in my abs and quads, but I am now making sure to stretch after each PT session, and it seems to help. They are harder on me today than they were yesterday, the PT told me, "You are not allowed to collapse--EVER." So I said OK. And I stopped collapsing. There was one moment when I was screaming and crying, and the PT just stood there telling me, "You are never allowed to collapse; keep your form; I can't have you crying in the hallways." So I stopped collapsing, kept my form, and finished the exercise. And then I stopped crying.

I did collapse again at the end of the day...they made me retry the exercise...five times. Then they gave up on me for today and told me I was done. Tomorrow I have a doublr block (two straight hours) of PT in the morning, which will be awful while it lasts but then I'm done with that for the day. And I get music therapy tomorrow!

I am very proud of two things today:

1. We (all the others in the program and I) were all in the pool together this morning, and we were running back and forth. I picke dout the fastest runner and decided I was going to catch up with her. I didn't quite manage it--I was about two feet away when the therapist stopped us--but come to find out, this girl has been here for almost a month, is aboutto go home, and was an athlete (playing through her pain) to begin with. And I almost caught up to her.

2. I spent twenty minutes on the elliptical today: walking backward with the resistance at 3, and forward with the resistance at 7; changing every minute. After ten minutes, I got bored, calculated my average number of strides per minute, and decided to beat it. To be sure it was accurate, I met it on a backwards minute, then set out to beat it on a backwards minute: and I did. And then, in the last minute, I beat that average walking forwards with the much higher resistance.

I feel great: I take walks in the evenings just because I want to, and I am walking better than I have since August. On five hours of sleep last night, I have about 10% more energy than I've had on "good" days for about six months.

God works miracles.