My Journey With Health And Fitness – Finding Equipment

Wow, has it been raining in Playa the past several days. I mean I live in Metro Vancouver where we get tons of rain but nothing like this. It started the beginning of the week with an impressive thunder storm. We’ve actually had a thunder storm pretty much every day this week. But the past few days we have also had massive rain storms. Normally here you will get squalls come through but these have lasted for hours. At times it is sheets of rain that have been falling from the sky. I know when the sun comes out eventually it will be unbelievably humid and the mosquitos will be breeding like crazy.

I realized last week that my ankle brace was starting to fall apart. It is still wearable but I don’t know if it will last the rest of this trip. And so I did the smart thing and used social media to find a new one (ok, not really a smart idea). We have an Ex-pats FaceBook page and I got lots of suggestions for medical equipment stores that should have a brace for me. Unfortunately all the ones we went to only had the sleeve braces that you slip on. Those simply will not provide the support that my chronic tendonosis requires. I can probably get away with doing my walks without a brace as it is flat here but sometimes I have to run to get away from the coatis. On top of that I do really need the brace for my fitness classes.

One of the medical supply stores that we went to suggested we try Liverpool. Now Liverpool is a high end department store. Those in Canada, it is like a Hudson Bay store. I thought that was kind of an odd suggestion because why would they carry this kind of brace. So I got online the other day and looked and sure enough, they seem to have good, supportive ankle braces. They had a wide variety and I was stunned at the price which is about 20% of what I pay for my brace at home. Ok, they may not be the same quality but as long as they give my ankle the support it needs I’m game to try.

So today we are heading off to Liverpool to see what we can find. I do have a plan b just in case there isn’t anything that meets my needs, we are going to duct tape my current brace to hold it together until I can bring down a new one from home. Hey, this is Mexico, using duct tape would absolutely fit in with the culture.