Sitting Is Overrated

Ruby Vee, BSN

Sitting is overrated. I say that because at present I can't sit. It isn't that I'm far too busy to ever point my posterior at a chair -- although I am busy, that's not the problem. And it isn't that my world famous teaching hospital spends millions on conference rooms for executives and dining rooms for physicians but next to nothing on chairs for charting, paperwork inundated nurses who have no fewer than four places in three different computer programs to record the hourly glucose checks. It's not even that getting those hourly glucose checks on two extubated patients who have far too many demands and far too little gratitude for the lives we've saved, along with hourly urine outputs, chest tube outputs and intake assessments has me busier than, as dh would say "a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest." I can't sit because my back is acting up again.

A back injury sidelined me a few years ago -- I spent six months on medical leave by the time all was said and done. I tried rest, exercise and steroid injections. the last was problematic -- before the injection, my right leg was numb and I had little control over my right knee. After the injection, I had no control -- or awareness of -- my right leg. I climbed off the procedure table and promptly collapsed. ("oh-oh," said the cheerful blue eyed blonde teenager who was the orthopedic surgeon doing the injecting. "They said that could happen but I've never seen it before.") I was wheelchair bound until the surgery which fixed everything. Well, everything except for the fact that I still can't feel most of my right leg.

After doing my stretches and my core strengthening exercises faithfully for months and months, I started to let them slide. You know how life gets in the way of your better intentions. They'd slid for a long time when I started doing the stretches again, bright and early at 5am while I sit out on the back deck with the dog, who generally has to sniff everything before doing his business. So at first I thought I'd overstretched. Then I was convinced I had a dvt -- that burning pain in my calf that traveled up to the back of my thigh. But when it included my buttock as well, I had to admit it was my back again.

Sitting is overrated. Nurses very rarely find time to sit at work anyway, right? But there's the part about the toilet that never quite impacted until I couldn't: girls sit to pee. Or, if they have sciatica, they hover over the seat and gently lower themselves part way toward the hand they've placed on the seat, fall the last few inches, and leave the hand there because the butt cannot tolerate the toilet seat.

There's meal time. Perhaps my co-workers actually believe that it's a new weight-loss strategy to put my food on the counter in the break room, and then pace around in circles, grabbing a bite as I pass my plate. There's driving -- nothing like the feeling of having golf balls in your car seat. I actually felt for golf balls, it was so convincingly painful. No golfballs. Just sciatica.

I think I've discovered the reason that all those white haired grandmas and grandpas you pass on the road are going so slow. It's hard to press down on the accelerator when it feels as if you're sitting on a seat full of golf balls. And it's hard to pay sufficient attention to the road when every now and again, a major "twinge" strikes you. What am I saying, "twinge." It's like a hot spike piercing your buttock and traveling all the way down through the back of your leg to your foot, which is trying to curl itself into a ball inside your shoes.

Getting into bed is easy -- my husband and I have an extra thick mattress on top of a box spring on top of a bed frame that was meant for an extra thin mattress and no box spring. It's high enough to keep the golden retriever from bounding onto the bed -- a plus in dh's book. I can just lean backward and fall into bed. Turning over is infinitely painful, though. I hitch over by tiny increments, and lay on my good side. Until I can't lay on my good side anymore, and then it's hitch over again by tiny increments until I'm almost laying on my bad side. Impossible to get comfortable there, though, and so I hitch back again. Is it any wonder my hair seems to be thinning on that side?

Getting out of bed is interesting, too, but the high bed comes in even more handy there. Slowly, by excruciating increments, I get on my bad side on the edge of the bed, leg stretched along the very edge. And then roll over, trusting that nothing (dog, cat, partially chewed bone) is on the floor underneath me, dropping my good leg onto the carpet. Now I'm partially standing facing the floor with my bad leg still stretched out on the bed. Sliding it off onto the floor is perhaps the easiest part of the whole maneuver. And then I'm bent over with both feet on the floor, and slowly walk my hands up my thighs, pushing myself up until I'm (mostly) upright.

I guess it's obvious -- to everyone except me -- that my days as a bedside nurse are -- or at least ought to be -- numbered. But what else am I going to do? I've been a bedside nurse since 1977, and have never considered anything else. so i take my steroids, go to PT and continue to drag myself to work. But the time has come -- and even *I* know it -- to start looking for the next big thing. I'm scared to death.

Sitting Is Overrated

About Ruby Vee, BSN

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