Progress!:)

Exciting news! One of my nurses and I decided that I'd try out the treadmill today for five minutes. I'm up to forty five minutes of exercise now, so I did twenty minutes on both the recumbent bike and the upright bike and then did my five minutes on the treadmill. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, but then I've never liked treadmills. Ask my friend Hanna, it's like pulling teeth to get me on one when I go to the gym. I'll run on tracks or outdoors but for some reason I just don't like treadmills.

Anyways. Five minutes.

I didn't get any bad reactions! I got tired after five minutes and I got super dizzy when I got off the machine, but my heart stayed below 150 BPM, which was our goal. Progress! I wish you could have seen my nurse, she was so excited. I love my rehab team. So. Much. It makes pushing myself easier when my team cheers me on and gets excited for me and celebrates my small victories with me.

Also, I was able to do some Ballet barre stretches by using one of the counters as my "barre". My flexibility is coming back so fast I'm so happy. I know the weight will drop off once everything's under control and I'm able to work out as much as I want, so I'm trying not to beat myself up too much over it. I'm still in the "normal" weight range according to my doctor, I'm just used to being under it. Probably not the healthiest thing to admit but whatever. I'm short and petite, I like being skinny and muscular. I've had a couple people tell me I look better "with curves". That's nice. The curves are going away. I'm sure they'll get over it. In my mind curves for me means muscle tone and definition.

Don't get me wrong, I think curves are gorgeous on women. I think when people are so skinny their bones are protruding and they can't even hold their purse or backpack because they have no muscle it's just sad. And disturbing. In my mind, strength is a higher priority. If you're strong and healthy and confident you just glow and it's stunning. Whatever size that means. Cut off size labels if you need to, they don't matter. Dance mommy rant over.

I also saw my shoulder doctor today. He's hilarious. He thinks I screwed up my rotator cuff. He agrees with me that surgery should be an absolute last resort so I'm going to try a month of physical therapy to strengthen both shoulders and get everything working again. If it's still bad after that it'll have been a couple months since the injury so then we'll start the MRI with contrast and considering surgery route. I love conservative doctors. I told him I refuse to take narcotics because they don't work on me. I get fuzzy and nauseous and still in pain. I don't like being fuzzy and nauseous. I get short (er) tempered and nobody wants that. Heh. So he gave me a prescription for Lidoderm patches. They're like Lidocaine but on an icy-hot ish patch to numb the area. He also gave me Voltaren gel that's an anti inflammatory gel. He's a good man.

So even though I'm tired, my chest is tight and my shoulder's grumpy because Raj loves to beat me up, today was a good day. I might even use some Christmas money to treat myself to some new fun makeup. We'll see how I feel after some time with ice on my shoulder.