I’m still getting on with my recovery, and I’m slowly regaining the ability to do tasks that I couldn’t do immediately after my fall. I’ve found that I go through four stages with tasks:
- I can’t do it myself
- I can’t quite do it myself
- I can just about do it myself
- I can do it myself confidently
I’m now eight and a half weeks post-fall, and most tasks are at stage 3 and 4 now. The things I can’t do myself involve stretching my arms up – namely, hanging washing outside. Indoors, I can use stepladders to help me reach things, but it’s more difficult outdoors.
There aren’t many things left in stage 2 – things I can’t quite do myself – but dressing myself was something I couldn’t do entirely myself until recently. My main issue was getting my head through t-shirts, and for this I needed assistance.
Stage 3 is when I can do something, but in a rather ungraceful way or with the help of additional tools. To take the example of dressing myself, I found that laying a t-shirt out on a bed, and then pushing my head through it like a cat going through a cat flap, seemed to work. Not graceful, but it gets the job done. Another example would be drying my back; I would lay the towel over the sink so that I could grab it with both arms.
It’s this third stage that has given me some insight into what it would be like to have a permanent mobility issue. I’m hopeful that I’ll make a full recovery, and regain all of my mobility (although it’s not guaranteed). But I appreciate for some, their limited mobility is the best that they can manage, and that’s where mobility aids and various life hacks come into play.
