A Padded Toilet Seat and a Disabled Parking Pass
There are a few things I thought would occur during my 45th year of life and a padded toilet seat and disable parking pass were not any of those. However, both of them occurred and are extremely necessary.
Before my injury, I considered myself pretty physically fit. A normal run was at least 8 miles and I was doing that 5 days per week. On the days I wasn’t pounding the pavement, I was pool running. When at work, I was running the stairs for 5 minutes at a time every hour. Crushing my movement goal on my apple watch was a daily occurrance.
As physically fit as I considered myself, it was no match for crutches. While using crutches, you are literally exhausted all the time because you are using upper body muscles that get neglected. In addition, the palms of your hands have permanent bruises on them making it difficult to actually use the crutches.
This is where the disable parking pass saves your ass. No more parking at the end of the parking lot and stopping every few feet to re adjust your hands and rest for a few moments. That long walk from the far reaches of the Costco parking lot is a thing of the past. Also, the parking spots are much larger which is a bonus when you are trying to swing a bad leg and crutches out of your car.
I was very aware of the hardware in my hip from the moment I awoke after surgery. My hip had an incision, bandage, stiffness and pain plus you can actually feel the hardware in your bone. Weird, I know! I became even more aware of my hardware the first time I sat down on the toilet seat. The inside rim of the toilet seat just happens to sit right where the screw heads are in my hip.
After I complained to my husband about this for several days, he suggested we go buy a padded toilet seat. So after we went out to breakfast, off we went to Fred Meyers. Initially we looked in the plumbing section where the other toilet seats are located with no luck. Then my husband suggested we check the geriatric section and of coarse there they sat, the padded toilet seats.
The relief was immediate! Sitting on the toilet seat was no longer a painful event. My husband is however not a fan of the padded toilet seat. He says it makes him think of his grandmothers house. In addition he also thinks the toilet seat is warm and feels as if someone was just sitting on it taking care of business. As it turns out, he prefers a cold toilet seat. Fiona, my daughter, is a huge fan and can often be seen sitting on the throne with the padded toilet seat.
Anyway, its the small victories. For me, one of those victories came in the form of a padded toilet seat.
