Graduation March

Hi readers.  Monday after Physical Therapy they stood me in front of a Happy Graduation banner, gave me a diploma and card signed by all the nurse-ladies, put a mortarboard hat on me and took a picure.  Then they played Graduation March and I went around the room shaking hands while all the old codgers on machines cheered and waved on their various machines.

So the VA paid-for session of my return to physical perfection is done.

I’ve paid for another month use of the Olathe Community Center machines because I’m not 17 years old again yet.

Some of the guys who’ve been using the medical center facility a long time who’d been through similar cardiac situations to mine said they kept improving a while after the first physical therapy, is the reason I’m still hopeful it’s going to improve more despite congestive heart failure.  But they also said, every one I discussed it with, that there’s a plateau that comes somewhere afterward, and things don’t get better from then on.  It becomes a matter of maintaining, holding what you’ve got.

So I’m hoping the plateau for me will involve an ejection factor a bit higher than the 10-15% the VA and private cardiologists measured before therapy.  I need to be able to go out in the world and climb over fences, trespass onto forbidden places.  I need to be able to walk down to the grocery store somewhere and back with a bag of groceries inside each arm.

Or at least I need to be able to walk around the streets somewhere pusing a shopping cart with my belongings in it without tiring myself out too terribly.  Some things in life a person just hates to give up the prospects for.

But phase one is done.  Sorry if you didn’t get your invitation but graduation was never a sure thing.  Even during the final weeks, even the next-to-the-last session the fast six minute measured distance walk took the wind out of my sails.

I’m going to miss all those old guys.  Especially the ones doing post-graduate work hanging around because they didn’t have a courthouse square to hang around in playing dominoes and spitting tobacco.  They’re paying a dear price to go there and can’t even spit.

Old Jules