If you were to ask me what atrophy means on a good day, a happy day, I'd probably tell you it's kind of like aprize, one step up from amedal and a little bit bigger than aplaque. I usually invest a lot of energy into smartassery on good days.
If you were to ask me on a normal day, a run of the mill day, I'd direct you to Merriam-Webster, where the definition of atrophy is as follows:
1: decrease in size or wasting away of a body part or tissue; also : arrested development or loss of a part or organ incidental to the normal development or life of an animal or plant
2: a wasting away or progressive decline
If you had asked me to define atrophy on my first day of physical therapy, I would've told you to leave me the hell alone. If you'd persisted, I may have said atrophy is the process by which my left leg became a complete stranger to me from one day to another.
Then I would've told you to piss off.
Sharon says I'm exaggerating. She says she can't see the difference.
Look! I say. LOOK, DAMMIT! There's no muscle there. NONE!
She shakes her head. She thinks I'm over-reacting. But I know. These are my legs. These legs made me untouchable in freeze tag. Unstoppable in football. They carried me and my teammates to victory countless times. They were the key to the swagger that everyone said I walked with. I know these legs.
Or at least I know the right one. The left one looks like some skinny guy's leg. The right one looks like it can deliver a crushing shot to the nuts of anyone who says I've lost a step. The left can barely get through ten leg lifts without shaking and faltering.
They look the same to me, Sharon says.
Bullshit! I say, without wit or charm. You're not really looking!
Yes, I am, she replies.
Bullshit! I say again. Because it just feels like the right thing to say.
Why? Because my leg has failed me! Because after everything we've been through, it is quivering and shuddering while I do weak man exercises in a room full of old ladies riding exercise bikes and squeezing tennis balls, while some bald filipino therapist asks me, Is this too hard?
NO, DAMMIT!!! THIS IS NOT TOO HARD!!! YOU DON'T TELL ME WHAT'S TOO HARD!!! I TELL YOU WHAT'S HARD!!!
I'm glad I scream that part in my head, because I'm not sure the old ladies can handle the truth the way my inner Jack Nicholson wants to spit it. Even so, I'm embarrassed and humiliated by my loss of control...by how scary I find this.
I take a couple deep breaths and try to remember how, a couple days after my injury, my dad went on and on about how the quadriceps virtually disappears immediately after a knee injury. He said it was "amazing". You see, most atrophy is a gradual process, a wasting away due to disuse over a prolonged period of time. But in the knee, atrophy is immediate. Dramatic. When the complicated machinery in the joint is damaged, the muscles around it sacrifice their size and strength so the knee can no longer be used. So it has a chance to heal. So it can take a break, for crying out loud.
My muscles are failing on purpose. Because they know that, if they didn't, I would tear that knee apart. Best to just suck it up, do the leg lifts, and try not to tell the old ladies I voted for Obama. Healing happens at its own pace, if at all. It will not be rushed. And, though I'm fighting the concept, I'm starting to remember that I've been down this road before.
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