On August 11th I had a "small" stroke and temporarily lost control of most of the muscles on my left side. Luckily, recovery was amazingly fast. Within a matter of hours almost all my fine motor skills had returned, and within 36 hours I was back home, hard at work getting back to pre-stroke condition. Things went well - until August 27th, when I had a second stroke, this one much more serious. Again it was the left side that felt the bulk of the attack. It took almost 72 hours for me to gain enough motor control and balance to head home, and even then I required the use of a walker in order to simply move around the house.
For a few days it was not clear how many of my pre-stroke abilities might be reoverable. But I was lucky a second time, as no permanent damage apears to have taken place. The difficulties I experienced with speech and fine motor skills in the first couple days are well behind me, and I've made a great deal of physical and mental progress in a surprisingy short period of time - I was discharged from Saint Peters Just under seven weeks ago. I'm up to over a mile walking a day, can operate the riding lawn mower properly (including emptying the bags when they are full), and feel safe eough to drive on back roads with Kitty as copilot. My flute playing is better than ever.
Still, It will be quite some time before I am back to pre-stroke levels of strength, coordination, and stamina. It's the stamina part that may prove to be the most difficult to win back; right now even small efforts can leave me a little winded and wobbly in the knees. Tackling that problem will require a lot of self-discipline and hard work. I'm into my second month of a fairly aggressive physical therapy program supervised by the same specialist who worked with me on my right shoulder a couple years. We were very successful with that therapy, and I expect we'll be equally successful with the task at hand.
Something I learned the very first time I had physical therapy - in an extremely successful program aimed at sparing me a knee operation - was how much it helps to have a clear objective in mind. That first time around, my goal was to be able to hop from rock to rock along a trail without falling down or breaking an ankle or a leg. That may sound simple enough, but it took over six months and a lot of hard work, a suite of exercises, and buckets of sweat to acheive that goal.
This time around, I have another simple goal - I want to be able to go tent camping with one or more of my children before I turn 78. That's just a little less than a year from now, and to make that deadline I will need to get my body into a lot better shape. A lot of the work involved will center on walking, and that's where the idea of "Walking to Muleshoe" comes in.
Muleshoe Campground is a BLM site on the banks of the John Day RIver in Oregon. I've been camping there since the summer of 1996. I like to use it as a sort of home base whenever I visit the Sutton Mountain WIlderness, the Painted Hills, and other attractions in that general area. I'd like to get back there for a few days sometime next summer. It's almost exactl 289 miles from my front door to the tent pad at Space #6 in the park. (I prefer that site above all others, and only three times out of dozens of trips have I ever had to camp in another space.)
I'm fortunate to live in a neighborhood where walking is safe and fun, not to mention very invigorating. There are areas where its possible to walk on soft surfaces - dirt and grass -as well as pavement; and every mile-long walk involves an elevation change of at least 200 feet.There is also a good trail through some beautiful woods that leads into Mclane Creek Natural Area. Beyond that lies a huge network of steep and rugged trails through great stands of conifers. I'll use these resources and others to walk my way back to Muleshoe.
My watch tells me that I put in 3.22 miles today - Only 285.78 miles to go!