Seriously: for whom do they make these things anyway?

I admit it: I went a little crutch-crazy the first week I was on the sticks. But it just took one mention of bone spurs by my mom to slow me down.

I've stuck mostly to mat workouts and pretty easy going (at least I'll have plenty of weight to lose when all this healing is over... oh, wait, that's not a good thing?) the past few weeks. With respect to exercise, that is. I've still had plenty of places to crutch at work — the bleepin' bathroom is a few minutes away, my bleepin' car always ends up on the opposite site of the lot and bleepin' Starbucks, well, it's not far at all — and my social/normal life hasn't taken a backseat to fractured legs. I crutched the Tremont artwalk a couple days into crutchville and cheered Neil wildly at Joseph Monastra.

It's not high mileage (it's not meant to be), but it certainly isn't using these things as an excuse to be lazy.

Which me to wonder: what kind of sloths use crutches these days? Because mine look like this:


Yep, that's the metal bar tearing through the grip. It was really fun when it finally broke through the rubber — I was crutching through a tiled hallway to PechaKucha Night and the darned thing slid right across the floor, sending me flying. It took me a few days to remember that my mom had left some spare crutches in my basement. So, a few perilous moments followed.

Like wiggling into the crawl space to get the crutches (yick!). You can imagine my surprise, though, when I found the spare pair. The arm and hand grips were worn to tears, but the bottoms looked nothing mine:


Perhaps my definition of rest is a little different than the average crutchist. Anymore rest here and I might suffer cardiac arrest. From sheer boredom and blubber.

So, I grabbed a new grip and have been crutching smoothly since. And my skillz as a crutchist are only moving up: not only have I mastered the water-bottle carry and the hot-coffee crutch, I can push a grocery cart while crutching too. It's all about rhythm. What I'm most proud of, however, is that I've experienced no residual pain from my new way to "walk." No crutch chafing. No torquing, turning or burning on the opposite leg. No crutches getting anywhere near my armpits whatsoever.

Did I mention I can crutch sideways, backward and through small spaces? Yes, I take my victories wherever I can get them. The downside is at least once a week it totally wears me out. Particularly the work environment. I can't elevate my leg and the bathroom jaunt is a stretch. But it's reassuring that I can keep doing it all.

Even if these crutches weren't made for people like me anyway.