Learning not to fall

The class participants begin straggling in 15 minutes before start time, arriving singly or in pairs, husband and wife, friends. Some slowly rearrange the tables set up by Sessions Village manager and activity director Brianna Aiello into an opened-ended square, with participant Ralph Laws filling in the open end with another rectangular table while others position the chairs accordingly on the outside edge.

It's in sharp contrast to the arrival of the class instructor to Cheney's Sessions Village Common Room. Blondel Assonken strides briskly into the room at 10:05 a.m. and with quick exchanges of smiles and "good morning" takes position in the center of the square and begins handing out paperwork for the class to go with the homework he distributed last week.

"Who did their homework?" the native of Cameroon asks, looking around at the show of hands. Assonken checks some paperwork, answers some questions, and after a couple minutes, the group rises, joins hands in a brief prayer and class begins.

Assonken has been teaching the class on manual therapy at the Cheney Care Community on his day off for about 6 – 7 years, Aiello said. It has been a focus of his ever since he was a physical therapist at Cheney's Rockwood Clinic, where he began noticing a number of Care Community residents coming to him were doing so as a result of falls.

"He wanted to start something to prevent what they were seeing him for," Aiello said.

It was also something he was charged to do as a member of Cheney's Fellowship Baptist Church. Fellow church member and class participant Judy Coumbs said the church's pastor challenged congregants one day to find a mission of their own as a project.

It could be anything, Coumbs said, and Assonken, remembering the number of people from Cheney Care Community visiting him at Rockwood suffering from falls, began the class.

"Blondel is a great proponent of exercising something to fix something," Coumbs said.

Coumbs has been coming for about two and a half years, thinking at first that the class was only for Care Center Community residents. When she finally decided to show up, she found that only three or four were from the center, with the rest from Cheney and even Spokane, where Assonken now practices.

"You would have thought I knew that (being from the same church), but I didn't," Coumbs said.

The class has recently been focusing on learning visual exercises to help produce better balance. Assonken said it's natural for people to, in a sense, be out of balance by favoring one side of their body over the other.

"As long as you're alive, you're going to have imbalance," Assonken said. "It's natural. Some do things to the right more. Others do things to the left more. We are left handed, or right handed."

Assonken engages the class of 18 in a discussion about how the eyes, optic system, cranium, brain and other parts of the body all are interrelated when it comes to maintaining balance. He has the participants stand up where they are around the tables and begin working their bodies, raising arms and legs at different angles, bending over and touching toes, stretching and turning at the waist until they arrive at a movement that is comfortable for them.

The 16 women and two men are then asked to read text on a vision chart similar to those at an optometrist's office except instead of letters of various sizes, they read whole sentences. Assonken then has them look at a "dot chart," which is a series of squares in which a dot has been placed, either in the center or to the left or right.

The class then spends the next 30 minutes or so conducting a series of exercises where they read through the dot chart and call out the location of each dot – "center, right, left." They do the same thing several more times, each time doing something different to indicate the position of the dots such as slapping the corresponding knee, raising the corresponding foot.

After each 20-second dot read, they stand and go into their comfortable position, and then sit and read the lowest sentence they can on the vision chart. For some, their vision improves while for others, it doesn't, and Assonken asks them to remember which exercise worked and to repeat that at home several times a day over the next three months before class ends.

Aruna Bhuta has been coming to the class for just over year, making the trip from Spokane where she found out about Assonken from a friend. While focusing currently on balance, Bhuta said the class also works on other parts of the body through physical exercises including aerobics.

"It's the whole system," she said. "At different times, he emphasizes different things."

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.