My husband, Paul, watched me climb down the three steps into our multipurpose room last month. I was going sideways, crab-like, and holding onto the bannister.

“Can you not physically go down straight, or is it all in your head?” he asked.

Good question.

Ascending and descending stairs had been a problem for me since the summer of 2020. I thought I’d pulled a muscle in my right knee when I stepped into an indentation in the lawn. The discomfort grew, and I finally saw my primary care provider in the spring of 2021. The diagnosis was significant arthritis in both knees.

I moved on to the orthopedics practice where, after a number of futile treatments, I had full knee replacements in March and August of 2022.

Before the surgeries, stairs were painful for me because of the arthritis. Then I had weeks of recovery after each replacement, when I couldn’t bend my knees, because I hadn’t regained full range of motion.

But as I neared the end of physical therapy on the first procedure, I told my therapist that the only remaining problem for me was the stairs. I could get up and down, but not very gracefully. He frowned at me in a mock-stern way. “You should be able to do it physically. I think you’ve trained yourself to think you can’t.”

A kind of learned helplessness, in other words.

I diligently did my home exercises and worked on the stair climbing, but I had a problem. My right knee was now feeling great, but my left, which had yet to be operated on, was deteriorating rapidly. So while my right knee was probably perfectly capable of dealing with stairs in a normal manner, my left was saying “Nothing doing.”

My stair skills did improve once I was back on my feet after the second procedure. But then, a few weeks ago, I realized I had reverted to my old ways. I couldn’t understand why. My left knee was doing great. I was walking well. I try to walk half an hour daily and often walk the same route on the Kennebec River Rail Trail, so I knew I was back to my old speed. I had no pain in my knees, even at night. What was happening?

It had to be in my head.

Then several things happened to convince me I needed to put mind over matter. First, Paul’s comment. Then I had my one-year checkup on my right knee. My surgeon was delighted with my progress. The X-rays, which I could see for myself, displayed perfection. I won’t even have to go back for a one-year left knee checkup, unless there are problems.

I didn’t mention the stair issue to the surgeon but a little voice said, “If you can’t fix it, you’ll have to come back.”

Well, I did have to go back to the orthopedics office a short time later, to a hand specialist, because I seem to have torn some fibrous tissue in my wrist. I probably did this when I was hobbling around on a cane during the first knee recovery. Anyway, this nurse practitioner commented on the impressive alignment of my knees, which led to a discussion of the importance of doing physical therapy exercises.

This brought back the voice of my therapist, telling me to climb the stairs the way I was supposed to, and not give in to my inner baby. Those are my words — he was much too nice to call me infantile.

Hopefully, my wrist is going to heal on its own, but if it doesn’t surgery is a possibility. Oh, joy. I put it out of my mind temporarily. I had stairs to conquer.

As with most psychological issues, the first hurdle was recognizing I had a problem. Then, of course, I had to deal with it. I reminded myself to go up and down the stairs straight, with each foot striking the next step. I couldn’t put both feet on the same tread. That was cheating.

With this new mindfulness, I realized it wasn’t my knees that were the problem, it was my calf muscles. Now that I thought about it, my therapist had mentioned something about that, too. I had continued to exercise all winter, walking outdoors when possible and using a stationary cycle indoors at other times. But I knew I wasn’t getting the kind of workouts I do in the warmer months.

So I started doing some physical therapy exercises that stretched the calf muscles.

Not surprisingly, once I began forcing myself to use the stairs in a normal manner, I started getting better at it. And the better I got, the easier it has become. I’m not perfect yet, but I’m getting there.

I think of myself as an optimist. I have my down moments, of course, but generally the glass is half full for me. I often tease Paul about his pessimistic view of life, telling him he resembles Winnie-the-Pooh’s friend Eeyore, whose house is marked as a “Gloomy Place, Rather Boggy and Sad,” on the map of the Hundred Acre Wood.

But this time he saw hope when I was getting, well, bogged down. To paraphrase Christopher Robin, I was stronger than I seemed and smarter than I thought. Once I realized that, it was, as Pooh himself might say, a splendid day indeed.

Liz Soares welcomes email at lizzie621@icloud.com