A-ha and ??? moments...

So, after my last post I was thinking and thinking about what I could do differently to teach drill. It didn't go well on Tuesday, and I was discouraged.

I was looking around my office Wednesday afternoon for something to read while sitting and waiting for Ian and Courtnie at their piano lessons and I found two issues of The Instrumentalist that I hadn't read. Cool.

One of the articles in one of the issues was an interview with a college director from Texas somewhere. He talked about how he teaches drill, and it was amazing! Rather than trying to get students to remember 4 sets of drill at a time, he has them learn one, then they go back and forth between those sets five times to reinforce it. He said he'll spend 10 minutes on one set of drill. The big trick was to give 30 seconds to find the new drill spot, then 10 seconds to reset the form after each run-through.

Before rehearsal today, I told the students that we were going to try something different in reviewing/learning the drill. They were pretty receptive, but hesitant at first, but then were so excited once we got the hang of it. We were able to learn and clean 15 sets of drill today in 2 hours. This may not sound huge, but for us it was enormous! Not only were the spots learned, but I'm sure they'll be retained much better this way, and the best part is that the kids all felt like we accomplished something. I was so happy.

Now for my ??? moment...

I've been having problems walking and with my legs in general. As I said in a previous post, my symptoms all pointed to spinal stenosis. I had an MRI, and all it said was that I had arthritis in my back. Well, crap. That doesn't help me at all. My friend Katie's dad is a physical therapist and offered to talk to me about my symptoms. With all of my history and issues I've had, it made sense. We talked about some things while he was here, and then he called me with some other possibilities yesterday.

I called my doctor's office to run these other possibilities by them, and they all said that the radiologist said I only have arthritis. This doesn't really explain my neurological symptoms (numbness after walking a while.) Their only explanation is that perhaps the muscles in my lower back are causing pinched nerves. The PT I talked to said that's not very likely. My doctor gave me an order for physical therapy, which I'm hoping will help. Now, when I'm going to have time to actually GO to physical therapy is a different story.

I'm going to my vascular surgeon in Phoenix next week to see if there's any more blockages. That might also account for the pain in my legs while walking, as the symptoms are very similar. I'll have a CT scan and find out. I was walking Tuesday morning and by the time I got back to my office I was almost crying because my left calf hurt so bad.

I just want answers, and not more questions.