It is officially halfway through my school term, and that means winter break is here. Just in time, too – I could use a little refresh in my schedule.
On Tuesday during one of my classes I was standing up talking with my students and when I stepped to the side I felt a little click in my ankle. It didn’t think it hurt that much at the time, but later after the students left I realized that it did in fact hurt – intensely. It wasn’t a sprain – there was no swelling and no vigorous activity to cause it – but it sure felt like a sprain. I was walking with a pronounced limp the rest of the workday, and I barely could walk to the station and home. At home I iced the ankle but there was no real effect, and both Kuniko and myself were worried that I’d be on crutches for our holiday trip.
Wednesday morning it seemed that sleeping and taking weight off it improved the ankle, but after walking to the station in the morning it was back to hurting pretty badly. I limped from the station towards my office, but after a hundred steps I figured it was better to call a taxi and rest my leg for the trip. I gimped up to my office and sat down, and figured that at least I’d have lots of time in the airplane to rest my injury. In a truly horrific moment of bad timing, I entered the office at the same time as one of the ladies who works on my floor, and she has a permanent leg problem – see walks with a limp every day. We came to the door at the same time, and so I had to limp next to her as I walked to my office. I hope she didn’t think I was mocking her – maybe I’m just being overly sensitive but I really felt bad. Luckily she has more experience walking with a limp and she passed me pretty quickly. She didn’t look back as she left me in the dust.
At lunchtime I consulted a website to see if there were any stretches or movements I could do to speed recovery. One site recommended some light ankle movements and I started with those.
Suddenly, while rotating my ankle, there was another click. And then I felt wonderful.
So everything is OK now. I can move completely without pain, and what I thought was a sprain was probably just a ligament that was a little out of alignment. My daily bike rides probably cause some repetitive motions that could lead to this stuff happening, so I’ll need to take more care doing warm-up and cool down stretches.
Getting old isn’t easy – I’m going to have to take a little more care with this old body. My mind is still like a nerdy teenager and it hasn’t quite accepted that my body isn’t the same.
So now we’re on track for our trip, leaving Friday morning at 11 am from Kansai Airport, we’ll first fly to Thailand, change planes and then fly on to Sydney to arrive on Christmas Eve in Australia. We’ll spend a few days with Steve, Brenda, Alyssa and Julia, and then we’ll shuttle off to Laos for a couple of days and wrap up our trip in Bangkok eating street food and getting massaged.
I’m looking forward to more travel – it seems like years ago that we were trekking through Eastern Europe. See you in 2017!
