My new book will be out in less than a month… I hope. It’s difficult to stay on track but I’ve done a monster edit over the last six months. Like this drawing, my story was missing some legs.

Separately, last week I met a woman who looked like me. And by that I mean, she walked unevenly with her whole body slightly tilted to one side. I didn’t initially pay attention to which way she tipped. We fell into a conversation about this and that, and eventually we ended up discussing hips and knees and getting old and such things, and how her right leg hurt.

She wanted to know what I was doing about my own limp, and she wanted to think that her tilt was just the beginning of a problem. Was it really time for her to go to the doctor? Should they have a discussion about what to do about her generalized struggle to stand up straight? Was pain enough to send her to the doctor? (Very like me. Yes, pain should send you to the doctor.) Towards the end of the conversation I asked her — and I forget why — how she went upstairs. She said that she could only go up on her right side, step after step.

My blood almost ran cold. You go upstairs on your good leg. You go downstairs on your bad leg. This is just how the mechanics of shifting weight from leg to leg on the stairs works.

I said, “It’s your left leg that has a problem.”

She said, “But it’s my right leg that hurts.”

“But you can’t go upstairs on your bad leg,” I said.

I could see in her face the dawning realization, the recognition that she didn’t use her left leg going upstairs, because she couldn’t. That pain in her right leg? It meant that her right leg was tired of doing all the work. She was on the verge of a catastrophe if her right leg gave out, because her left leg was already gone.

I shared bits of this conversation with my physical therapist, saying only that I had met a woman who said her right leg hurt but also that she went upstairs on her right leg. I could see my PT person go slightly rigid as she, very casually, said she hoped my chance acquaintance was going to get an X-ray. Immediately.

I don’t know. I hope so. She wasn’t a dummy. Thing is, pain in a joint can sneak up on a person. It’s like the old mom-joke.
Kid: “Mom, when I move my leg like this it hurts.”
Mom: “Then don’t move your leg like that!”

I keep thinking about this little episode because there’s an extra lesson here, of some kind. You can ignore some kinds of pain and whatever caused them will heal. Ignore other problems and they won’t heal, and they will cause more and more trouble, until the way back to health is very long. I simply don’t have a lot of muscle in my left leg, because muscle that is unused atrophies, and I didn’t use that leg properly for years.

As my physical therapy continues I’ve had to up my protein intake because I literally wasn’t eating enough protein to build the new muscles. Not that I mind eating steak, or discovering some ground beef that makes wonderful hamburgers. Habits though are … you know… habitual. They sneak up on me and take me off the new course I am trying to follow. It takes constant vigilance to stick with retraining. That’s true physically, mentally, and spiritually. Something to keep in mind as we all get older.

One of the reasons my new book has taken a long time is that I made some fundamental mistakes, and had to go back and … let us say … add some muscle to the story. It was limping along and needed a lot of extra protein to build up the invitation to Keep Reading.