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Last week in Montreal, I was somewhat careful about stairs, but I did climb more stairs than I've been doing at home in months: almost none of the Metro stations are handicapped-accessible, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky and rysmiel live in a walk-up apartment. I overdid things when visiting in July, because I thought for a few days that all was well. Being careful this time, I got home without significant knee pain.
On the strength of that, I went down to Chinatown after work today to do a little shopping (despite checking, I left my tea thermos at Papersky's, and it had already proven useful enough to be worth spending $10 on another). I walked down to the #6 station near my office (two flights, it's one of the relatively shallow lines, old cut-and-cover construction), and rode up in an elevator at Canal Street. After shopping, I walked down to the A station at Canal, and used my usual elevator up here. I got the thermos at Pearl River, which has elevators connecting the shopping floors; useful, given that I first tried the second floor, and actually needed the basement. When I decided to take the train to Chinatown, I figured that if necessary (i.e., if my knees hurt by then(, I could walk or take a bus to West Fourth Street, which is accessible, so I was only committing to the stairs down to the IRT at 33rd Street.
(Tonight's episode of "while the cat's away, the hobbit will eat mushrooms" was moo shu pork.)
papersky and rysmiel live in a walk-up apartment. I overdid things when visiting in July, because I thought for a few days that all was well. Being careful this time, I got home without significant knee pain. On the strength of that, I went down to Chinatown after work today to do a little shopping (despite checking, I left my tea thermos at Papersky's, and it had already proven useful enough to be worth spending $10 on another). I walked down to the #6 station near my office (two flights, it's one of the relatively shallow lines, old cut-and-cover construction), and rode up in an elevator at Canal Street. After shopping, I walked down to the A station at Canal, and used my usual elevator up here. I got the thermos at Pearl River, which has elevators connecting the shopping floors; useful, given that I first tried the second floor, and actually needed the basement. When I decided to take the train to Chinatown, I figured that if necessary (i.e., if my knees hurt by then(, I could walk or take a bus to West Fourth Street, which is accessible, so I was only committing to the stairs down to the IRT at 33rd Street.
(Tonight's episode of "while the cat's away, the hobbit will eat mushrooms" was moo shu pork.)
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Now that you ask, I should think about that, and maybe ask Emilie: she's not a doctor, but she has been paying attention to my knees and to how I walk.
Fifteen years ago, I hurt my knee hiking, and for a bit after that, I was much more comfortable walking up stairs than down. I went to a convention right after, and everyone was being asked to reserve the elevators for people who needed them for disability reasons. I used what I needed, but I noticed that more people were riding up and walking down than the other way around, so I didn't find myself looking for ways to not use the elevator, either to avoid queues or because anyone was suggesting I didn't belong there.
The specifics here are an artifact of where I was, where I wanted to go, and the slow process of retrofitting the New York subway system for access, which is mostly one station at a time (and in some cases one direction on one station at a time: the uptown N/Q/R platform near my gym has an elevator, but the downtown side does not.