Trust me, it will….
I talked about the body being a truly amazing thing. It’s very difficult to emphasize how much of our everyday functions we all take for granted. We just decide to move, to walk, to do anything, and we just do it. There’s no thought of what that particular function requires to enable it to happen.
Because I’ve been bedbound since my fall in March 2020, I’ve not actually moved or had genuine weight bearing with my legs, so that connection between my brain and legs often thought of as muscle memory has just faded. Now I’m sure most people find that hard to comprehend, surely when you want to walk, you just “do”.
Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, I’ll try to explain this process as simply as possible without getting into the incredibly complex explanation.
An analogy… if you returned to your childhood home after 20 years living in numerous other places, you’d just know particular landmarks, but not the exact roads and streets and turns etc you’d have made and walked on to get from one to the other!
This is because those pathways were all created in the brain, and when not used on a regular basis, they just get lost.
For every twist and turn, the brain has to “make” the connection. These connections require a “synapse,” which is an electrical explosion where the brain signal jumps over the break in the pathway from non-use.
Because of life experiences, every adult will have created more than 6 trillion synapses. Think about that…. not million, not billion, but trillions, so not remembering the exact pathway is justifiably easy to forget.
In my particular case, the muscle atrophy has caused my once powerful thighs muscles to waste away and become non-existent now, but every day, I’m trying to build muscle and recreate that long forgotten synapse.
It would be easy to just not go through this pain, I was diagnosed with MS nineteen years ago, although muscle weakness is my only symptom now, thanks to the ABP and Janet, and although psychologically I seem to ignore the fact that I’m 67 Yrs old, but trust me….
It will happen…