Context:
Several months of therapy were needed after metalic replacement of shattered bone fragments composing what was left of my upper arm.
Excerpt from my courtroom testimony, February 2025.
Lightly edited for grammar and structure:
The therapy was painful. They didn’t intend for it to be. In fact, the therapist said that No Pain, No Gain was not part of his philosophy. For injuries such as this, therapy involved simple retraining.
But sometimes humor applied there too.
Therapy occurred in a very large room, about the size of this courtroom. Well, bigger, really. Large room. And the whole front part of it was a window that led out into a parking area with a sidewalk next to it.
Toward the back of the room, once we got advanced enough to do it, the therapy involved taking a two-pound weight…
[At this point in my testimony, I stood to demonstrate]
…and slowly lifting it at an angle. I was to look directly forward into the mirror to make sure my shoulder wasn’t assisting my arm, lifting the weight up, and then slowly bringing it down.
Lifting it up was not a problem for me.
Bringing it down really hurt. But I did it.
I sometimes put my head down during these sessions, and closed my eyes, because it just isn’t suitable for a 72-year-old man to cry in front of people.
It hurt.
One time, as I finished bringing the weight down, I glanced across the room, finally, and there was a little boy – eight years old, as I found out later – looking at me intently. As he caught my eye, he gave me a thumbs up.
Imagine that!
I went and talked with his mom. Oh, she had a terrific kid. She must be a wonderful mom.
He told me that when he grew up, he wanted to be a cook. I told him that my grown-up stepson was a United States Marine, and that was his ambition as well, to be a cook. So he was in good company.
My juvenile sense of humor helped there, too. I teased my therapist about standing in front of the mirror and doing this painful exercise.
I wondered if some bystander, strolling by on the sidewalk, might glance in and wonder why there was a person on the other side of the room, watching himself in a mirror, practicing a Nazi salute.
Leave a Reply