Washing My Hair

This is something I completely took for granted up until recently. Washing my hair use to seem like a chore, particularly when I was swimming - the hair washing would often happen daily to try and remove some of the chlorine smell, even just for a few hours.

Following my first surgery last week though, hair washing became an almost impossible task. For the first 4 days after coming out of hospital, I put this mission off. My wrist was too sore and not moving properly to even think about trying to scrub shampoo through my hair. Not to mention the fact that my arm had to be covered in glad wrap, plastic bags and strapping tape to keep it dry. By Saturday I was allowed to get the wounds wet, if I hair dried them straight after. The hair washing had to be done!

Wrist was still pretty sore and I probably still had only about half the normal movement, but I was determined to have clean hair again. The whole situation took a good hour. I wasn't in the shower for that whole hour, but it took a flippin long time. I underestimated how much each hand contributes to the scrubbing. I didn't have the comfortable wrist movement in my right hand to do this just yet and it was too sore to try. So in the end the right hand just tried to hold the hair up while my left hand did most of the work.

Then came conditioning. I normally comb through with my right hand....not anymore. There was no way I was going to be able to take the resistance on my knotty hair with my right hand...the little that there was. So again, left hand picked up the slack and took on the very uncoordinated combing.

It's small things like this that we don't realise how much we take for granted until out ability to do them is removed. I have many more of these moments to come over the coming few months, such as turning the key to start my car for example. Plenty of challenges ahead of my which will make me appreciate my physical abilities a whole lot more.