I won't give you the standard 'I want to make 2023 better in terms of this blog'. You know the spiel. What I'm going to do instead is write.
I am 55 years old. Mature, middle-aged even, but not really old. But I felt old this week due to finally making the decision to buy a cane. I have very bad knees (I have since high school, actually) and need a knee replacement but have about 50 more pounds to lose before they'll do it (I've lost 50 already since November 2021). But more importantly, my balance is really off. I've fallen three times in the past year, two on ice, so maybe they don't count, and once off a Lextran bus servicing the University of Kentucky. But a lot of the time I'll be standing on a completely solid, even surface, and if I turn my head at all or move a bit, or just stand completely still, I will start to fall over. Put me on an elevator and it's worse. So...I ordered a quad cane from Amazon using my flexible spending account. It's not aluminium, it's steel, all of two pounds, which several reviewers complained was too heavy (it took me a couple of days to get used to it, but I get that an older or less strong--and while I'm pathetic in terms of strength, I'm better than some). It can handle someone who's 500 lbs, which I'm not, of course, but I did need one above the standard ones that bear up to 200 or 250 lbs, as I'm about 30 lbs over. So I wanted to make sure it was sturdy enough.
Behold!
I've used it for a couple of days now. The first thing I did the night it came was to watch YouTube videos on adjusting, walking, and dealing with stairs while using a cane. The next day, I went to work with it and definitely made sure I took it to our physical therapy department to make sure all was well. I'd changed the height that morning, and gotten it right (it was a little too short). The cane should come up to your wrist. On a quad cane, there are four legs on the end, not one, and usually (as in mine) the inner ones are aligned narrower than the outer ones, so that shows the orientation that should be used, and if it has a curved section, it should face curving to the front, not towards you. You use it by the opposite leg from your weak one. My left knee is worse, for example, so I use it on my right, but bring it forward when I step forward with the left for greater stability. Lastly, you go upstairs with the good foot and downstairs with the bad one, and the PT secretary actually helped me remember this by saying, 'I always think of heaven and hell', so the good ones go up, the bad ones go down, and that mnemonic has done more for me than anything else.
What I have discovered is that it slows me down somewhat (I can walk smoothly with it, or at least did after I did a little experimenting), but that's good because I need to slow down due to my loss of balance, as I usually fall when I'm rushed.
One thing I discovered years ago when I broke my ankle after being hit by a car while crossing a busy street in a crosswalk (and with the light!) is that adaptive device like walkers, canes, and wheelchairs are a boon because they help maintain or increase mobility. I initially felt bad about being on a walker and in a wheelchair then, but it helped so much.
This seems to be much the same thing.
Anyway, I'm going to try to embrace this and remind myself that people of all ages use canes, crutches, walkers, etc
This is a step up from my hiking poles, I guess.
But it will help me a lot in the long run. I still feel a bit decrepit though, and I hate that feeling, but this will help me by preventing dangerous falls, I'm sure.
It also means that the bus drivers tend to remember to kneel the bus (the bus incident involved me coming down from a greater height on the step off the bus because the driver had not lowered that side of the bus, which they call kneeling), as they recognise I'm having some difficulty.
This, along with getting ADA [i.e., handicapped] parking this summer, including a general placard and a university hangtag, has really helped, along with riding the Lextran buses at UK, which kneel and are easier to navigate than the UK-run buses [almost all of which have stairs at the entry; the Lextran buses only have stairs if you go all the way to the back of the bus].
Also, the Lextran bus route takes me right across the street from the medical centre I work in, rather than being dropped off at the UK hospital employee entrance by the emergency department and walking all around the ambulance bays and the hospital itself, which is difficult for me. So it's a win. I park in the Blue 'K' lot near the stadium, and it takes me about 5-7 minutes to get from there to work once the bus comes.
The Orange buses that UK runs at the healthcare lot run more often, but they took about 10 minutes to do their route to my stop and then I took 7-10 more minutes to walk around the hospital slowly and get to my workplace.
I just wish I'd figured this out three years before when I struggled with those staired buses for all that time.
