Sculpin

Dear peoples of the internets: if you should happen to have a very young toddler, and if that young toddler should, heaven forbid, require open-heart surgery or some other highly invasive surgery, please ask your child’s doctor about post-surgical physical therapy. Watch out for the kid’s developing movement patterns. I don’t know if this kind of PT exists for kids, but it should.

I’ve got a nice big surgical scar wrapping around my left side and up my back from when I was two years old and my heart was stitched up. (Thank you, modern Western medicine!) The heart’s absolutely fine now — it’s been checked and checked again, believe you me — the stitching job was great, and I seem to have remarkably little in the way of physical restriction from the scar tissue now. But I learned to walk and stand when it hurt, and I suspect that’s a good part of why I’ve got this damned protective hunch seared into my neuromuscular system.

Posture and movement patterns send social signals; I wonder if that submissive element in my posture was part of why I used to be such a creep magnet. Whatever signals I sent, I doubt they were anything I would have chosen.

It’s a small thing now, but it’s been the devil to get rid of. I’ve managed to rid myself of a lot of it in the last couple of years, but there are some persistent little remnants. (”Hey, how ’bout we just stay contracted all the time?” say the hip flexors.) So I’ve been working on my tadasana this week. Tadasana is hard. Standing up is complicated.

Things just keep ticking along, steadily and undramatically getting better. In August 2005, I was flirting hard with crashing out if my heartrate went over 120 bpm — and I thought I was doing outstandingly well. Now I’m not flirting hard until it goes over 140 bpm.

ETA: oh, heh. So after three-plus years of bodywork I’m finally doing a fairly good job of standing up when I remember to think about it. I’m looking less as if I’m about to take off on a ski jump. (Note to self: straighten up, not forward.) And having started to get the hang of standing, I decide to give walking a try from my mindfully adjusted position. Oh. Heh. When I straighten all the way up but continue to place my feet in my usual manner, the result is, uh, insanely seductive. (I demonstrated for Josh. “Hellooooo, nurse!” said Josh, when he collected himself and stopped gurgling.) Yeah, I think I need to learn to turn that down. But if I ever want to walk like a hyperfeminine sex-charged tiger-goddess, there I go. I just have to practice standing up for half an hour first.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed