The Two Kinds of Decay

Strength

After my first hospitalization I was sent home with a prescription for three physical therapy sessions per week at the local rehabilitation center. I was all better.

My physical therapist asked me what I wanted to be able to do, and I tried to think of the hardest thing I’d been able to do before I’d got sick. I said run three miles.

The therapist knew how to strengthen each muscle that had been weakened by the rogue antibodies in my blood, and she took a few minutes to record the strength of each muscle and to write a detailed plan, and then she explained the plan to me.

All I remember of her plan is that she pronounced the word strength as shtrenth. Over and over.

I got on the treadmill, but I had foot drop — my feet slapped down because I was too weak to dorsiflex, to turn my ankle and toes upward — and so I stomped with flat feet. Marched. And tripped a lot. I was going one mile per hour. The first day, I walked for five minutes. Eighty-three thousandths of a mile.

I stayed on the young therapist’s rehabilitation plan for one week, getting weaker instead of stronger, and then, eleven days after being discharged, I wound up back in the hospital.

I did eventually run three miles, but it took nine years.