Laura and I thoroughly enjoy our summer membership in the
Mountainside Community Pool (MCP). This
excellently maintained facility features a fifty meter main pool with crystal
clear water. There is a wade-in baby
pool and a diving tank with slides and diving boards. Augmented by changing rooms with clean
showers, a snack bar and a well-trained staff, the MCP rivals most of the area’s
private clubs—at a fraction of the price.
Laura goes to the pool to swim laps after work every day. The lane lines segregate two lap lanes on the
far side of the pool at 5:00 PM. This
year I met her there two to three times a week.
She does 20 laps (1 kilometer) in a typical visit; I try to do half of
that. My kicking ability is no longer
adequate to hold my legs up, so I use leg floats. This works fairly well, but forces me out of
the comfortable, streamlined position I cultivated in years of regular
recreational swimming. As Uncle Bill
(William Kalt) used to say, “We manage.”
I usually walk with the aid of a walker, but use a travel
scooter for longer jaunts or when I’m a bit weak (heat and exercise are the
main culprits). We keep the scooter in
Laura’s car because the longer jaunts tend to be on weekends when we use her
car almost exclusively. The pool is one
of those gray areas. The walker is fine
when we arrive, but the scooter offers more flexibility when we are at the pool
and when we leave, depending on water temperature, air temperature, how long we
stay and how I am shod (right shoe lift, left foot toe-up brace). One evening this past August I met Laura at
the pool. I failed to notice that my
scooter battery had been charging in the garage, so I had to use the walker at
the pool—no problem. The evening was
lovely. While the sky was not cloudless,
there wasn’t the hint of rain in the air.
To the west, from where our weather usually arrives, nothing but blue
sky.
Now when I use the scooter, I zip around to the far side of
the pool by the swimming lanes. When I
use the walker, I enter the in the shallow end of pool on the near side, and
walk/swim across to the lanes—anything to save steps. The little children who hang around on the
shallow-end steps where I ease myself
into the water are usually very good about giving me the space I need—even
without parental admonition, which is usually quick in coming (nice
people—another reason to like the MCP).
They are curious, but I don’t think they’re too badly traumatized by the
sight of the fat old man with a walker holding onto the handrail and backing
into the water.
Fast forward ten minutes.
Two laps into my swim, as I glide gracefully (in my mind anyhow) into
the wall at the shallow end of the pool, a young lady in a lifeguard bathing
suit directs me to get out of the pool.
The lightening warning has been triggered; thunder issues from the south
through a still almost cloudless sky. I
tell her that I will traverse the shallow end of the pool to make my egress by
the steps near the walker. She offers to
get the walker for me, but I demur. It
will overall be faster this way, and I certainly don’t want to take the time to
explain why, even with the walker, I cannot really effectively walk without a
five minute recuperation, drying my feet, and donning my orthopedic shoes with
lift and brace, which are, of course, with the walker. She is clearly nervous that I am now the last
one in the water, but I fairly quickly wake my way to the steps and haul myself
out of the water.
Is everything OK now?
Not really. The assistant pool
manager really wants us off the pool deck, NOW.
Our assistant pool manager is a very friendly, chatty physical education
teacher. He understands the danger of
being out in the open whether the lightening in the area is coming from the
west with rain, as it properly should, or it is atypically coming from the
south with no accompanying precipitation at all. He politely asks if they may carry me off the
pool deck so I may complete my resting and dressing rituals in the relatively
safer covered exit passageway that runs through the building housing the locker
rooms/pool office.
I quickly agree.
After a brief remedial tutorial on the two-person arm carry, two strong
young men safely lift and transport this slippery, wet, somewhat defective body
the seventy five feet to a bench in the passageway. While in transit I muse that this is really
an appropriate time to be mortified at having to be toted like a sack of
potatoes across the pool deck. But I
really wasn’t; this was just another event triggered by a disease that I didn’t
ask for, and have no control over. To be
embarrassed by needing help politely offered and respectfully given would just
be giving in to the MS. That will never
happen on my watch.
Each incident is an
adventure, both for me and for Laura following this parade with my walker and
belongings in tow. An adventure and a
blog entry.
