Fitness haiku
Plastic surgeon said,
?Oh, you?ll run by the weekend.?
Six oh-so-sweet words.
Tuesday, I went to my plastic surgeon for a week-after-surgery checkup and stitches removal. This was after my Mohs surgery, which I wrote about here and here.
I?ve been doing what I?m supposed to do exercise-wise (or at least how I?ve interpreted it) which means no running (I?ve been walking, albeit moderately quickly) and no lifting heavy weights (I haven?t lifted any).
Still, I was the tiniest bit nervous to go, thinking maybe Dr. Pownell would look at my nose, determine I?d walked too fast and thus hindered my healing, and then bar me from even moving for another week. OK, I didn?t really think that. Even if I had, the yen to have the getting-gamier-by-the-day bandage removed from my nose trumped any fear of reprimand.
Belinda, the nurse who has been my calming influence, said we wanted the skin graft area to be pink or purple. That means that the skin graft was successful; that blood vessels had been created between the circle of skin taken from behind my ear (which had no blood vessels) and the space on my nose where the skin cancer was removed.
She peeled off the bandage and said, ?It looks nice and dark. You probably have a great vascular system because of all your running? (which yes, tickled me quite a bit).
Then she said, ?Watch; Dr. Pownell is going to come in and say it looks ?robustly pink.? ?
Belinda left to bring me a 7-Up, because I was suddenly feeling very very very slightly woozy. Dr. Pownell came in, looked at the fruits of his labor and said, ?It looks robustly pink.?
We talked for awhile about marathons (he ran one the weekend before my procedure) and what was happening on my nose. Belinda had told me, which I repeated to him, that he has an uncanny ability to take a piece of skin for a graft and have it fit the host area (that?s lingo culled from my instruction sheet) perfectly.
?There?s a lot of geometry involved,? he acknowledged.
He talked some more about the different approaches doctors have to doing the same procedure, likening them to the various ways runners get to the finish line during a race.
As he turned to leave, I thanked him and said, ?Oh, wait! So can I get back to running??
?You?ll be running,? he said, ?by the weekend.?
?THIS weekend?!? I asked, wanting to make certain.
?This weekend,? he said. ?You can jog a little now, but walking or riding a stationary bike is really best.?
During that first week after surgery, I obsessively watched my heart rate when I exercised. I also found myself paying closer attention to what I don?t really see as much when I run: Swirling pre-dawn cloud formations. The first light in homes I?d hardly noticed before. Faces of people that are otherwise merely blurs. A railroad track that goes on and on and on.
This morning, I followed a pattern of walking two minutes and running (as in jogging slowly) for one. I was faster than I had been during the last week, and while I wasn?t paying as much attention to the rate of my heartbeat, I did try not to lose sight of what helped me through the previous week; namely, the sky, the rising sun, the smell of sprinklers, and the rhythm of my lucky feet on the sidewalk.
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