My beloved is knitting some bones together that got broken when his pinky and ring toes collided with the wood frame of an easy chair in January. Not an easy thing to do, to hit just right to snap those wee bones. The fractures happened just over a year after the last crack of a pinky-side tarsal bone on the same foot. Ouch! Painful walking. I worry about the health of his bones.
A dear friend has a fractured patella. Ouch for the knee cap! Two gals at my 'church of last resort' are healing from broken ankle and foot bones, and yet another friend is just eight months out from a severe fracture of both lower leg bones on her right side when the ground came up too fast in a game of flag football. Gravity sucks. We all fall down. Bone health is a concern as we age.
Knitting bones is a pastime I’d rather skip. Alas, I broke my pinky toe on a bed frame two weeks ago, but it’s healing on its own. No need to cast it as 'best supporting toe.'
At age forty-five I was diagnosed with severe osteoporosis. (Osteo-PORN-osis, I call it.) The doc who delivered the news after seeing my X-ray didn’t know how I had even been able to walk into his office. I wanted to deck him. Kill the messenger, you know?
Bones are our core; our framework and invisible means of support. When we lean into them, they hold us up. Muscles move our bones for locomotion. As a ballet dancer, my muscles became so tight from years of getting that leg up by my ear - no matter what it cost (and it cost a lot!) that the chronic tightness acted like tourniquets, cutting off much of the blood flow to my lower back, hip and pelvic bones. Undernourished bones grow flimsy and full of holes.
An initial flare of extreme pain occurred at age twenty-three - just a year after I quit dancing, and after moving a piano, desk and dresser one after the other at my mother’s home. (No brains, no headaches!) I slipped a disk and was put in traction for ten days and prescribed muscle relaxers and Valium.
After giving birth at age twenty-eight, back pain returned perhaps because of the sudden shift from having a huge cantilevered belly out front to not. I perfected the “crab-walk,” as I was often doubled-over in pain from muscle spasms and bi-lateral pinched sciatic nerves. I was unable to pick-up and hold my child for days at a time. We took life lying down. My back went out nine times within that first year... a real pain in the butt!
A quirky chiropractor, who was recommended by my neighborhood yoga teacher, took time to teach me some exercises to do every day to ease the pain. These I did religiously from my late twenties through age forty-four. Things were looking up. THEN, coinciding with my diagnosis of hole-y bones, I found a particular brand of yoga that became my new stand-in for “Dumbo’s Magic Feather.”
I gave these new Svaroopa(R) yoga poses a daily trial. Within eighteen months of the diagnosis of osteoporosis, I had another X-ray. I had re-grown and strengthened my bones! Blood flow had returned as I released that chronically held tension from my lower spinal muscles. There was no sign of hole-y bones, only healthy ones! Touch wood and thank the stars, I don’t have that challenging back pain any more. To this day, I don’t leave home without doing my Magic Four life-changing poses.
Last Friday, I got a call from my new internist. Dr. Terashima had just received my latest routine bone density test results. He was really interested in how my low back and hipbone density was so much better than is expected for a “woman of my age.” I can only guess that it’s the yoga and the intention to keep releasing the clench that comes every time I listen to the news or lift heavy objects or spend too much time bent-over in the garden pulling weeds.
Along the way to incorporate core-release poses into my life, and teaching Svaroopa(R) style classes since 1995, I discovered that I sing from my tailbone - meaning that I tighten up my coccyx muscles and all the way up the whole spine. I also tighten up with many routine tasks. It's fascinating to watch myself clench while sitting and conversing. I consciously un-clench and several minutes later, I'm using those same "hover-muscles" to lift myself out of my seat, so I let go again, tighten up, let go again... over and over. What's so life-threatening that I need to tense-up during conversations with friends or while listening to a concert or radio show? Or is the tightening just emphatic whole-body expression? Knowing how to re-release the tension seems important and life-saving. I'm grateful to my teachers who took enough time to guide me to life-long habits for health.
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My new favorite hobby is knitting… with yarn. I learned last Thursday at Minda’s knitting group, where about ten of us show up to solve the world's problems, eat sweets, laugh, and learn from one another, how to knit in the round using two short needles that are linked together with a nylon cord that looks like fat fishing line. I’m making a hat to go with the scarf I completed last week using the same yarn. Knitting is such a meditative act and it is portable to waiting rooms, TV room, bedroom, and even the car - when someone else is driving!
For now, knitting in the round is my favorite kind of knitting. This matched set is for our project knitting items of warmth for folks living under freeways in Oakland.
I’m wishing well all those whose bones are knitting back together, including my own. Bones are smart. They know how to heal.
Completed scarf and hat in progress.
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