Melissa: A Hathaway House Heartwarming Romance by Dale Mayer (good book club books txt) 📕

“Good,” he said. “You’re showing a lot of improvement physically.”

“Not enough to walk normally though,” she said. “I mean, obviously I can walk-walk, but it’d be nice to not lurch.”

“I know what you mean,” he said. “I’ll show you how much you’ve improved in our next session.” He checked his watch. “And that’s in about two hours.”

“It is,” she said. “I’ll head back and get ready for my doctor’s appointment.”

“Until then,” he said, lifting a hand.

She pushed her wheelchair back and turned, heading out. She knew his gaze was on her as she left, she could just feel it. It was that inner knowing. But it was also special too. She was a little afraid to believe in him. In them. He could have anyone he wanted. Why her? Maybe the need to walk normally was more for him to see her as somebody who had done as well as everybody else in here.

As she headed out the doctor’s door, after her session, she turned to him. “Oh, I wanted to ask you about walking.”

“Well, you are ambulatory, aren’t you?” he asked.

She motioned at the wheelchair and said, “Well, I can walk without it, yes. But it tires me out, and physically I’m not very strong to keep it up.”

“Have you asked Shane about that?”

“Not yet,” she said. “I have a session with him now.”

“Well, maybe work on focusing on that,” he said. “No reason you can’t walk now. You’ve come a long way. You’re not in anywhere near the pain you were in, are you?”

She shook her head, surprised at that. “It’s a funny thing about something that’s negative,” she said. “Because, when you take it away, you tend to forget that it’s not there anymore. Because I can focus on so much else. I had forgotten that the pain was as crazy debilitating bad as it was when I first arrived. But you’re right, it’s much better now.”

“So the next step would be to get you walking as efficiently and as cleanly as you can,” he said with a bright smile. “You may want to try crutches, but maybe you don’t need to because it’s not like you can’t hold your weight. It’s a matter of walking straight and not favoring certain body parts, and Shane is a specialist at that.”

She was surprised at his words, and she pondered them as she headed toward Shane and her session with him. As she wheeled in, she said, “I didn’t know you were a specialist in walking.”

He looked at her and frowned. “Not sure I understand what the comment means.”

She explained what the doctor had said.

He laughed. “Well, I’m a specialist in structural integrity, and that’s definitely one of the things that we’ve been working on. That’s why you’re in much less pain.”

“Ah. Well,” she said, “according to him I should talk to you about focusing on walking better.”

“I was just looking at your test results to see how you’re doing,” he said. “So we’ll go back to having you on the floor and make you do the same exercises that you did day one, then getting down to the floor and back up again. We’ll take a look at how that compares to when you first got here. This will be like your midpoint. Then we’ll start working on getting your walking stronger.”

“I would love to walk into the dining room, pick up my tray, and walk to the table, without it being like this half-crab-hop.”

He nodded. “That will definitely be a priority as we push forward now,” he said. “But first let’s go through what I just suggested,” he said. “Push your wheelchair over there, and go lie down on the floor, and I’ll take a video as you do it.”

She remembered that scenario from the first time. “That was pretty ugly.”

“It was,” he said, “but you’ve come a long way since then. I think it’s important for you to see exactly how far you’ve come.”

Obediently she followed through on what he asked, and by the time he said, “Okay, that’s good,” she relaxed on the mat.

He came over to her area with his camera and plugged it into his laptop. “In a second, I’ll show you the original video. Then I’ll show you the new one.”

“Do you want me to come over there?”

“Sure,” he said.

She made her way up into the wheelchair, sat on the edge, and watched as he brought up the original video. She had tears in her eyes when he stopped playing it.

He looked at her and asked, “Why the tears?”

“Because I’d forgotten,” she said. “The progress has been so slow that I hadn’t seen it. But I had forgotten how bad it was.”

“Well, now that that video is fresh in your memory,” he said, “watch this.” He showed her the video of how she had just laid down on the mat and then gotten back up.

She stared in shock. “Wow,” she said. “I really hadn’t seen any improvement to be that extreme.”

“It is extreme,” he said. “And it’s lovely to see.”

She nodded slowly. “I just hadn’t realized …” She broke off, not knowing what to say.

“And now,” he said, “we’ll take the next step. We’ll work on your walking. Instead of the floor work, I want you to stand up against the wall. Heels back, arms at your side, head back.”

She got up from the wheelchair, walked a little awkwardly to the wall.

“Now tell me where the pain is.”

She immediately put her hand on her lower left side and said, “On the left, a bit higher up, as I’m struggling a little bit too.”

“Okay, relax again. How about the head, the neck, shoulders?” he asked. “You should have all this in alignment.” He stepped her away from the wall to stand in front of the mirror. “I want you to take a deep breath, to imagine that your chest is like a box. Your shoulders and collarbone are the top of the box,