20220418 : the spectacle each evening

-
When I sit on the wheelchair in the evening, I move my right leg a few times.

The leg will be lying lifeless. I can't feel it or move it initially.

I have to lift it a few times using my left leg and move it a few times.

It sometimes responds and sometimes not. If it doesn't work, I have to leave it alone for sometime and try again later.

At some point it stiffens when lifted. It still doesn't know how to loosen - so have to rely on gravity to bring it back down slowly.

After that, very slowly, I am able to lift it a few times - relying on gravity each time to bring it back down.

It's a amusing thing to experience and watch happening.

However, that is what I can see.

The real action and spectacle is happening in the brain actually.

When I am unable to feel the leg, the neurons are not connected.

The passive movements and the intention means it is causing the neurons to frantically be trying to find a path - running helter-skelter, through trial and error each time.

Sometimes they succeed sometimes they don't.

The moment the connection is made, spasticity kicks in tightening the muscles.

After that is exploiting the pathway to work the muscle till it fatigues and doesn't move anymore.

The connection is released after. The leg becomes flaccid again .

Until I can repeat the spectacle next evening. It's so interesting to experience it and imagine what is happening in the head. Wonderful indeed...

I am waiting for the day I can move it without the initial cranking. That would signify that the brain remembered the connections and doesn't have to do trial-and-error anymore...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20231208 : Privilege...

-
  Before my stroke, I had enough and more work to do - both on the work front and home front. I had reasonably ok health, reasonably good eating habits, reasonably good physical activities. Money is not enough for anybody, but it was reasonably ok as well. The only thing I had very less of (almost none) was time! Free time specifically. I keep sharing video recommendations to many folks regularly - most of them,  long talk show formats (1½ - 2 hours sometimes). Very interesting and informative pieces in my opinion. In today's world filled with over information and disinformation, it is almost impossible to understand most things if we don't spend the time and either read and research ourselves (which is a very far shot) or spend time going through secondary sources who have done it for us and can present it in an unbiased way.  Without it, it is very easy in today's world to get biased, subscribe to misconceptions, get misled, manipulated, etc.  However, often I get the res
Read more

20240811 - Bubbles on the back

-
Ever since I have had my stroke and became bed ridden, I sleep on a mechanised hospital bed so that I can be inclined and reclined to different levels and heights. It is needed both for me (as my muscles don't support me and I can't get up on my own) as well as the nursing staff to be able to do many things needed for my care). The hospital bed, as you may have noticed in hospitals, has a mattress which is made of rexine upholstery (usually blue in colour - I don't know why). It needs to be a non absorbing upholstery to be able to wash/ wipe the mattress clean as it is very common to soil it for bed ridden people who are in diapers. That makes it hard unlike usual mattresses. Most importantly, I have been lying on an "airbed" on top of the mattress since my stroke, the airbed is also a very common feature for bedridden people (especially strokes like my case). Since we have absolutely no ability in our muscles on the back, waist, hips, etc., we can't turn arou
Read more

20240124 : balancing the equations...

-
It is fascinating to read and understand how muscles work. For all my life, (since I had not given it any thought earlier), I simply had assumed a muscle is 1 muscle. Ex, if we say bicep muscle, it was one muscle in my mind (I don't know why I imagined so, but so it was). The truth is very far from it . Each muscle is made up of hundreds of strands (maybe thousands). And the best part (I have practically understood, not backed by any medical stuff) - is that each strand is connected separately to the brain and not as one.  For mechanical enthusiasts, each strand works like a sort of rack and pinion arrangement, operated by a chemical reaction, triggered by the brain. Each strand has two separate connections to the brain - one to work the rack and pinion arrangement each way (to contract the muscle strand and the other to release it or relax the muscle strand). In short, that's how it achieves any movement. By selecting the set of muscle strands to activate (how many most probab
Read more