Physical Phitness for Phyllis

     Everywhere you look, everything you read, every time you really think about your health (which is as seldom as possible for me), the importance of being physically fit is in- your- face.

     I have never subscribed to gym classes, or health clubs, or personal trainers; that's for smart and careful people. My whole life I just assumed that I would keep walking, until I could walk no more. And that would be when I would be dead.

     The spring we came home from Florida, 1998, from what  we knew was be our last winter in our personal Eden, Bob figured out a way to bring the washer and dryer into a closet on the same floor as our living, dining sleeping, office rooms. It was ingenious what he did; I thanked him, but thought to myself, "that is really unnecessary; I will always be able to take the steps."

     I was brought up short by the medicine gods, in 2005, or maybe the real God, when I found myself on the operating table to repair a hernia on the left groin and, back a week later, for a hernia on the right side. That was the beginning of a long getting-really-sick back to a getting-real-better time. I had an epiphany about trainers and therapists when I had a young man teach me to walk again.

     I can walk, but not far, and if no one is with me, I use a walker.

     I am literally terrified of breaking my hip.

     I am back to my own self-prescribed therapy. With someone to walk beside me, I walk all around the house, which is not really big at all, but very horizontal. I have made it up to one walk-through twice a day. I'm aiming for two twice- a- day. 

     Is ninety too old to stay in shape? It better not be, because my goal is to run around the house in two more years.