barelegged and barefooted

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5 responses to “barelegged and barefooted”

1. 

   April 3, 2007

   Sara

   Forgive me for this, but I know very few female transfemoral amputees who also practice yoga, and I have questions! You do not have to answer if you don’t want to.

   1. Are you also a transfemoral amputee? If not, then your answers won’t really help me and you can stop now if you weren’t otherwise going to. :) If yes,…

   2. Do you have a C-leg or, like me, an analog, strictly mechanical knee?

   3. Do you wear a suction socket or some deal with liners and pins?

   4. Are you able to balance, say, in Tree Pose on your artificial leg without any external support of any kind? If so, how?

   The reason I am asking all these questions is that I cannot balance solely on my artifical leg. There are obvious physical reasons why this might be challenging, among them the womanly squishy fleshiness of my residual thigh and it’s lack of internal supportive structure. It’s like balancing on a sack of Jell-O on top of a pole. Yeah. Not happening.

   I have been trying to finesse this for three and a half years now without success, and I am wondering if you or anyone you know has figured out how to do this better. And if you or anyone you know has, I am eager to learn your secret(s).

   Thank you!

   Reply
2. 

   April 3, 2007

   jana

   Hi Sara:

   I love to talk about doing yoga! If you’re really interested, you might want to take a listen to my story at this link, as it interweaves my yoga practice with some details about losing my leg:
   http://pilgrimgirl.blogspot.com/2007/03/reading.html

   So to answer your question about balancing on one leg….I can do it sometimes. There was a time about 10 years ago when I was intensely practicing yoga and I had a superb teacher. I could balance on one foot then. Now, I usually can’t, but my practice is less frequent and I’m older, a bit heavier, and more scared of falling. The studio where I take yoga is also a dance studio so they have bars along the walls. When I am doing a pose where I need to balance on my right foot (the fake one), I will often grasp a bar with one hand or lightly rest my hand on top of the bar. Sometimes I just lean a hip against the bar for stability. Sometimes my teacher comes over and holds me in a balancing position so I can get the benefit even if I can’t stay there w/o her assistance. Oh, and when I attempt to do this at home, I often use the back of a ladderback chair for a bit of steadiness.

   Some more answers..

   Yes, I’m transfemoral. My residual limb is about 1/3 of my original thigh. I have long legs so that gives me some good bone for stability even though the end of my stump (the last 4″ or so is mostly soft tissue

   I wear a C-leg, though I used to do yoga with a 4-bar polycentric knee and that worked quite well, too.

   I wear a liner but not a pin suspension. I use the kind of liner that has a rubber flange around the bottom edge (not sure of the technical term for it). I’ve done yoga with a traditional suction socket and with a pin system. I like this particular liner because I can ease the suction a bit as needed and put weight on it and it seals tightly again. Traditional suction held too tightly to always be comfortable (esp when stretching the hips) or slipped when I got sweaty. The pin system ‘pistoned’ a lot and caused sores. (This liner system is also a winner for biking and other sporty activities, not to mention walking, sitting for long periods, etc )
   What do you use?

   Do you practice yoga?

   I highly recommend Krista Tippet’s “Speaking of Faith” podcast with Matthew Sanford, btw. He uses a wheelchair and not only practices yoga but also teaches it. His insights about mind/body connectedness (esp in the case of disability) are powerful stuff, indeed.

   Reply
3. 

   April 4, 2007

   Sara

   Thanks, Jana. Yes, that story was one of those posts I have been meaning to go back to, so thank you for pointing it out. I’ve also been chewing over the Bufano thing in my head, having a slightly different take than yours on her art, but that’s another topic for another time and place. But maybe now you see what I mean about the setting aside and chewing. :)

   Ironically, it was when you were 12 that you gave up your leg to cancer, while it was when I was 12 that I first took up yoga. I will write more about this at my place; you have set me thinking and I find I have much to say about it all. For now, suffice it to say that I practiced it desultorily, and entirely privately, for 28 years before my leg came off. I still practice alone; it works better for me that way for a lot of reasons including my fear not so much of falling but of falling in front of other people. (They tend to react badly.) I don’t even like to practice on days when my boyfriend is working from home. Also, I have very specific health issues, such as a worn-out, middle-aged left knee, excessive chubbiness, and a case of metastatic cancer for which my amputation was strictly a palliative therapy, and I don’t want to have to explain all this to a teacher and then have him/her have to be all invested with unusual possible consequences that are not even in my control. I invested in a copy of Peggy Cappy’s Yoga for the Rest of Us (yeah, the New Hampshire lady who shows up with her largely geriatric students every pledge break) in order to learn how to adapt my practice safely, and usually I practice with a chair now, too.

   One reason I’ve been grateful to have given up my leg at 40 is that I got to do everything first. Well, not everything, but almost everything I’d wanted to do on two feet. I ice skated for about eight years of my childhood, so I learned to fall safely early. I danced. I studied fencing as well as yoga. The problem is that now I have a very specific reference point for what this (e.g., vrksasana) is “supposed” to feel like. Intellectually I realize that I have to form a new reference point, as I have for so many other things, like walking, but something in me is rebelling. Perhaps it is because yoga is a physical practice for me, not a spiritual one. For me, it’s always been about the breathing more than anything else, and then the stretching, the physical stretching.

   Regardless, I probably spend over an hour every day, cumulatively, attempting to achieve balance unsupported on my prosthetic leg. Every waking moment I’m standing in my leg and not doing something else I’m trying, tentatively, just putting my organic foot up to my ankle as for a ballet battement. No dice. I fall over at once.

   You know how I described it earlier? Well, unfortunately I hit “publish” when I meant to hit preview; what I should have said was that, with two-thirds of my chubby thigh intact inside my rather rigid suction socket, it’s like balancing on a sack of Jell-O inside a cup on top of a pole. Though most of my femur is intact, it is not attached to anything, and so it offers no structural support whatsoever.

   And I have wondered all this time whether it was just me, my shape, my equipment, or just another of Those Things That Are Always Going To Be Different Now. And though I strongly suspect it’s that last possibility, something in me doesn’t want to just let it go and accept it. Not this time.

   Go figure.

   Reply
4. 

   April 4, 2007

   jana

   Sara:
   One of my former prosthetists was himself an AK amputee. He could walk super-well, even run well. Yet he couldn’t balance on one foot. He happened to be at a meeting with one of my many physical therapists (every few years I try PT again hoping it will finally smooth my gait. never happens, really). Anyways, she asked him to show me how to balance on one foot. When he couldn’t do it, even as strong as he was, she gave up trying to teach me that skill and we worked on more productive tasks.

   When I have been able to balance it is only through breathing and thinking only about continuing to breathe. I somehow forget that I can’t balance and it just happens. The past few years I’ve really lost breath control in yoga. My exhalations are too short, too rushed. I think it’s partially stress-related and partially a lack of focus.

   FWIW, every single yoga teacher I’ve ever had has been super-cool about my leg and my limitations–and I’ve had many of them through the years. I’ve also done some yoga to CDs/videotapes, but I find that much less productive. I like the variety of attending a studio and I really appreciate all of the little adjustments that my teachers make. It also really helps to do yoga in a studio with mirrored walls because I often can’t tell when I’m holding my body crooked (one shoulder way higher than the other or my hips skewed) unless I can see what I’m doing.

   Perhaps some of the class members in my yoga sessions have been uncomfortable with my leg? Sometimes I am a bit self-conscious when I do things differently, but I just go inward and stop thinking about the ppl around me. Kind of like that feeling I get when I walk through a crowd sans prosthesis (or stand in front of a lecture hall w/pylon bared like this morning) and I know everyone’s staring but I choose not to acknowledge it.

   It’s funny, but I’ve always sort of thought of myself as a fairly recent amputee, and it was just as I was reading your comment about losing your leg at an older age that I realized how much of my life I’ve lived one-legged. Sure, I did many things with two legs when I was younger (ballet, soccer, skating, running, etc), but really most of my experience is as a mono-ped. As such I wear the identity of amputee pretty easily. If I want to do something I either figure out how to do it ‘my way’ or I divert my attention to some other pursuit.

   Reply
5. 

   April 5, 2007

   Sara

   AHA! I knew you could help me, and you did. Thank you! :)

   See, what I’ve realized through this conversation, especially from this last bit you posted, is that I’ve been focusing on the outcome, not the process. And you would think I would know better, because, well, I do know better. Just not all the time.

   For example, when I’ve tried to balance on one leg just idly, throughout the day, I’m not even sure I’ve been breathing at all. I think I’ve been holding my breath, like I do while taking a picture on a really slow shutter speed when I’ve left my tripod somewhere. In that case it’s a constructive reflex ’cause it ends (hopefully) in a blur-free image, but in this case it’s not because it actually prevents me from anchoring in any sense at all. I’ve been so invested in a specific result, that I’ve forgotten the point of why I try for that in the first place. I mean, I haven’t forgotten, but I haven’t applied this knowledge and understanding thoroughly enough.

   Funny. Thank you, really. I will blather on about this at length elsewhere.

   Oh, and about worrying about how other people feel about me being a monopod — no, I don’t, either; if they have a problem, it’s their problem. What I worry about, constantly, is being interfered with. I have eight long posts in me right now — blog posts I need to sit down and write, not actual posts like stakes through the heart or something — and one of them is about how one’s autonomy is taken away when one is ill for many years, even if one’s faculties really aren’t. When you are a child with cancer, you have no power. When you are an adult with cancer, you have power, but you find yourself in a position of constantly having to fight to keep it. Constantly. Even with people who mean to be helpful and only end up getting in your way.

   It’s complicated, and I don’t really want to load up your blog with all that, but I must just say that it makes me really value physical privacy, and it can make me profoundly hesitant to enter into situations where I might be physically exposed. It’s not about the amputation or being seen as an amputee. It’s about being seen as vulnerable in a space I don’t own and then having other people act to control and constrain my experience in ways I don’t desire even if their motives are compassionate.

   Complicated. Seriously. :) And yes, potentially crippling in its own way.

   (sigh) Another thing to work on. :)

   Reply

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