Getting Kicked Out

I briefly mentioned this on my stroke blog last week, but here are more details I wrote up today. Enjoy!

I'm 4 years, 8 months out from my initial 2 strokes (6 strokes over 1 month -Stroke of Grace by Jennifer Saake ). I started in a wheel chair (well, STARTED totally bed bound for the first couple weeks) and even at a year was barely walking independently with a cane and my left shoulder was still painfully subluxed, taped up, and my arm unusable. The pool has been THE BEST form of physical therapy. When I started at about 10 months, I wore a flotation belt and clung to the wall. Now I can do full jumping jacks (both legs, right arm FULLY involved, left arm at about 90% participation in the exercise, I would say) out in open water with no life belt! (If I try to do a jumping jack on land, my feet get about 3 inches apart, so the water makes a HUGE difference! I still use a cane or walker outside my home, so land is more challenging than water.) 

I don't have the stamina to typically swim a full lap in the pool, but with time I've re-trained enough arm function to keep me afloat and capable of my own variant of swimming. On Friday I was doing long step walking, some jumping and stretches in the therapy lane of the pool and swam about 1/3 of the length of that lane. Another patient apparently asked me to move from that lane as it was for therapy only (I'm quite hearing impaired since the strokes, so I only nodded as I thought she was making a comment about how there were 3 of us in there doing therapy at the same time) so an actual therapist (I have never met him, so he doesn't know my story) actually asked me to move out of the therapy lane! Guy's, I GOT KICKED OUT OF THE THERAPY LANE IN THE POOL BECAUSE i LOOK TOO ABLE BODIED NOW AND WAS MISTAKEN FOR "NORMAL"!!! 

As soon as I explained my situation, the therapist and other patients were all very supportive and totally let me stay, but I was just amazed at how far I've come!