Observing Humans

I’ve been going to physical therapy twice a week for the past two weeks because I am a dumb dumb who was not watching where she was looking months ago while walking around on campus. Basically I thought a bottom step was the sidewalk when it was, in fact, not. I turned both ankles and landed on my knee HARD. Ankles were fine, and my while me knee is not injured, it is unhappy.

Sometimes my knee feels weak when I’m working, carrying some extra weight with my gear and crouching and squatting and whatnot. I figure it’s better be safe than sorry since if my apentages are not healthy, my bank account will be not healthy either.

The PT place was busy this morning.

As I laid on a PT table being tortured by a massage to the sensitive muscles around my knee, my PT asked “We’ve talked about freezing meals, right?” I confirm we have, and she tells me she has taco soup that she made four days ago and do I think it’s safe to freeze what’s left? “A patient of mine had food poisoning recently so I’m a little nervous about it.” she tells me. I tell her it’s very likely fine to freeze what’s left, and we have a good giggle after I ask her how old the leftovers were that he ate, and she tells me, “he didn’t know”. Yeah, if you don’t know how old it is, you throw that shit out!

As I stared at the ceiling continuing on with some exercise or another, I heard a woman come to the table next me me for the start of her session. She had a pixie cut and was dressed in a unisex outfit. She apologized to her PT for being late. There was something going on with her mom, and her mom was currently in emergency surgery.

When that woman went off to do her exercises, I felt two more people arrive next to me. A young woman and her mother. The mother was the one there for PT, and she wouldn’t really talk. She didn’t want to come, she told her daughter in, I think either Cantonese or Mandarin. The daughter interpreted. It’s too cold out and she didn’t want to come, she reports. The daughter continued that she’d dropped her son off then called her parents house to see if mom was ready to go to PT. She was still in bed, but dad got her out of bed and ready to go. Now that’s she’s at PT, mom was not interested in talking much about how she was feeling. She stayed in her puffer coat for her whole session and maintained a neutral expression on her face. I wondered if she was depressed.

I thought about the daughter and how completely different her upbringing was from mine, and how she is a perfect example of someone in the sandwich generation.

Then I heard a voice of someone who I suspect is on the spectrum or maybe is just super awkward. She came into the waiting area and announced to her physical therapist – who was at the other end of the gym – that she feels West Side Story is a completely unrealistic story. “Tony runs through a barrio,” she announced for the whole room to hear, “yelling MARIA! MARIA! MARIA!” And then that was the end of the movie critique and she started her session. I wondered how long she held this thought in until she couldn’t contain her observation a second longer.

When I’m doing another exercise facing out into the room, I see one of the attendants come out of the bathroom and by her body language and a wordless exchange with a PT, I see that the staff bathroom is very cold, and that this is a known problem.

The PT working with the quiet mom sets her up for some step work, and the PT asks a man who looks like he’s of Indian descent to do his resistance band side steps in another direction. He obliges and I wonder if the request was annoying to him.

Next I can see the entrance. An Asian man comes in and I notice he appears to be very young. Maybe thirty? One side of his body is weak, which suggests to me that he is recovering from a stroke. He hangs up his coat and cane, and makes his way to the treadmill and starts his warm-up unprompted. I wonder how that happened to someone so young.

A white woman who also appears to be around thirty comes in. She’s wearing camouflage cargo pants. She’s wearing a mask and shoulder-length curly hair and one side of her head is shaved. I wonder to myself if she shaved it since last Tuesday, election day.

There’s a man sitting in the waiting room. He has a blue t-shirt on and a ballcap and wears a handlebar moustache, and I wonder who he voted for.