Throughout my life, travel has repeatedly rescued me and lifted me to higher levels of enjoyment and fulfillment. Recently it did it again – big time. I’ll tell you how it happened.
Last year I developed a pain in my left leg, and when it got so bad that it was keeping me awake at night, I finally consulted my doctor. He told me I had an inflamed, strained tendon. I was grateful to find it was not a terminal condition, which is always what I imagine when I visit the doctor, and that in fact it was treatable with physical therapy. I had never done physical therapy before, so it was my introduction, and I went into it with happiness and hope of recovery.
I had been pretty freaked out because my condition was making it hard to walk. The pain was causing me to favor that leg, and that made me limp. The simple act of walking has always been one of my greatest pleasures. It is an inherent necessity for traveling, which is at the heart of my livelihood. If I were to lose my mobility, it seemed my life would be over. So I looked on the prospect of a cure through physical therapy as a way to save my life.
I was determined to cure myself. I had an incentive: an African safari and cultural adventure that was on my calendar for May, still three months away. I looked upon that trip with a combination of eagerness and dread, because in my condition at the time I knew I was not up to it. It would be an active trip, and I was having trouble walking from my bedroom to the kitchen.
So, I met with a physical therapist, she gave me an understanding of my condition and a plan for how to cure it. It involved a regimen of exercises designed to strengthen certain muscles that had become weak and were therefore causing strain on other muscles. It seems that during the Covid lockdown I had become too sedentary. When things started up again, I launched back into full activity and my condition was not up to it. We had gotten a puppy during the lockdown, and in the process of housetraining the dog I had to do a lot of running up and down stairs, sometimes in the middle of the night, and that led to a strain.
I launched into the program with great enthusiasm. The exercises were recommended four times a week, but I was so determined to get better I did them every day. At first I wasn’t getting better, I was actually getting worse. Then I realized that the exercises needed to be balanced with rest so the body could build itself up from the exercises. The days of rest in between were an important part of the program.
The physical therapy practice sent me a link to a Ted Talk by Lorimer Moseley, a professor of clinical neuroscience and chair in physiotherapy at the University of South Australia. He’s a leading edge investigator into the science of pain. I looked into him and gained some valuable insights into “Why Things Hurt.”
Any pain, he said, is a result of a number of factors, only one of which is the actual condition of the body tissue. The brain evaluates various signals, and if it decides there is danger, it will signal it with pain to make you pull away from the danger. But pain can also settle in and become habitual, independent of the actual condition of the body.
The pain system, he said, is an elegant system designed to protect you. But when you have persistent pain, it is usually overprotecting you. It actually can hinder the healing process by keeping you from the activity you need to build yourself and heal.
Every day that a muscle doesn’t receive any resistance it gets weaker. So by resting all the time after an injury, you can start to go downhill and actually get worse. You have to find that balance between movement and rest. The pain makes you want to draw back from it. But if you always give in to that impulse, you will decline.
The healing system of the body, he said, is “an irresistible force.” But the body needs motion to be healthy. You need to push through some of the pain in order to build yourself, but not far enough to cause damage. “You need to set challenges for yourself,” he said, so that you exercise enough to trigger an adaptation, but not enough to trigger a flare-up.”
It’s finding that sweet spot, between exercise and rest, and it’s a daily process that requires attention on an ongoing basis until you are healed.
The African safari scheduled for May was my goal. I had to be strong enough to engage in all that activity. I kept working toward that goal day by day, week by week, and gradually, through fits and starts, progress followed by regression. Gradually my condition improved. It was such a slow process that it was only by thinking back to a month or two before that I could see that I was actually making progress.
By the time of my departure date, I was walking pretty well again. I was still a little worried, but I got to where I felt that I was up to the trip. I might not have been in as good condition as before the injury, but I felt that I could make it through a day at a time and rise to the occasion.
Oddly enough, when I actually started traveling, the familiar pleasure of travel – of receiving so many fresh impressions – learning new things moment by moment, it just swept away my worries about my pain and I forgot about it. There was so much to get my attention that the pain went into the background and became lost to my awareness. I had learned from Moseley that pain has a little to do with the physical condition, and a lot to do with the mental and emotional state.
So while I had been looking upon that trip with some trepidation, afraid that I might not be up to it, it turned out to be just what I needed to complete my cure. Through the physical therapy I had built myself up to a place where I could handle the activity again, but I needed the travel experience to really lift me out of that state of mind. Travel threw me back into life again, so that I left behind the concerns of my injury. Travel pulled me out of the state of mind in which the pain had settled in like a bad habit.
Travel is the great habit breaker, and it’s essential medicine for periodically casting off the old and embracing life in the present. In this case it had been the goal of my healing process, and then it became the final consummation. It’s good to be back in the swing of life again. At one time I was afraid I would be leaving it all behind. So once again, I owe so much to travel.
Your humble reporter,
Colin Treadwell