Find balance with physical therapy

I‘ve started walking with a cane. It was the obvious thing to do. But it was a hard thing to do as well.

I mean, how does a person admit to the world that she has a disability? But you can only trip and go splat so many times, see the look of concern on those near you, wonder if they think you’ve thrown back one too many at the local bar (this for a woman who gets tipsy just looking at the wine bottle), and wonder how long it’ll be before a fall turns into a broken hip. Oh, and then there was that nurse, asking me how many times I’d fallen in the last two months. And me realizing that most people don’t fall, ever, in their day-to-day lives. Duh.

So the first thing I did was get a cane. And I stopped falling, which is a good thing. The second thing I did was listen to my husband.

“Go see Dr. Moise,” he said. She can help you.

Indeed. Dr. Vivian Moise is a physiatrist. She’s a rehab doctor. She works with people with all sorts of neurologic and orthopedic problems. Having multiple sclerosis qualifies. And the first thing she did (after she made sure that my cane was the right height) was send me for physical therapy. Because, did I mention, I was falling? A lot?

I’m not elderly yet, despite the cane, but with any luck I’ll get there. And falls increase as we get older, even without the MS. Muscle weakness, poor eyesight, poor balance and medications that can affect balance are all culprits.

And then there are diseases like MS, arthritis and diabetes. Dog bones left on the way to the bathroom by a loving pet. Poor lighting. You get the gist. Dangers abound.

It’s estimated that falls will cost the U.S. health care system $45 billion by the year 2020. According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, one in three people age 65 and older fall each year. Add brittle bones to the occasion, and you can see the problem.

So how does physical therapy help? The first step was to set goals for myself. Not, “I want my MS to go away” goals, but realistic goals.

More like, I want to move under my own power for as long as possible (forever, actually), and I want to care for my husband as well as he cares for me.

My therapists are giving me exercises that, frankly, I find rather daunting. Like walking heel to toe. Like standing with my feet close together, with my eyes closed. Like standing on a rocker board, shifting left to right and front to back.

These may not seem like difficult tasks, but to a person whose feet don’t know exactly where they are, they are herculean. The point of these exercises is not to make me the next Mary Lou Retton, walking a balance beam with rock-solid grace. The point is to teach me new clues, because my old ones don’t work anymore.

Armed with these clues, I can regain my balance if I begin to feel it slipping away.

Balance is a complicated skill. Good balance requires input from the middle ear, the brain, the body’s muscles, the feet, the eyes. If any one of these is out of whack, a skill we’ve relied on ever since we gave up crawling is at risk.

Studies show that balance training coupled with strength training reduces the number of falls in elderly people. I’m betting the combination works for 56-year-olds as well. It’s reasonable to assume that weight training and balance exercises are good ideas for all of us, whether or not we have a balance problem.

My physical therapists are helping me regain a measure of control over a disease that has kept me off balance in more ways than one. I am so grateful.