Categories
Cosmography

Song From A Sick Bed

First Pic_09Well Happy New Year all you walking people, with your legs. I’m sorry, perhaps my frustration shows. I did my knee on New Year’s, thanks to wild and frenzied dancing at Roisin Dubh. Someone’s frenzied dancing knocked a drink over, I ambled past and slipped on that.

It’s funny how you know, even before you hit the ground, that it’s injury time. “This,” you say to yourself as you start to descend, “will not end well.” Something to do with the angle. And the wrenching. And the popping.

It was painful for a while, but now it only looks painful. And oddly, something like Van Goch’s Irises. I’ve made good progress, though it did mean being confined to bed for a couple of days. OK, there are worse places to be confined. All other places. And I was very fortunate to have a friend staying, who could mop my brow and bring soup and generally indulge me. But then spoiling someone is actually very nurturing. If your GP gave you a medically unnecessary backrub now and again, maybe a scatter of gentle kisses, far fewer people would need alternative therapies.

Healing is not something a doctor does to your passive body like a kind of mechanic, but it’s not a thing the body can entirely do for itself either. Medicine is a social interaction, between your body and the community it belongs to. Those around you influence your health in countless ways, from pooling their resources to care for you, to simply making you feel cared about.

Few things are more conducive to health and happiness than the assurance that you matter to other people. Why does fake medicine work so often? Because it makes you feel like someone actually wants you to get better. That’s why it’s called the placebo effect, meaning “I’ll please”, not the “take this pill and go away now you walking talking irritation” effect.

Categories
Cosmography

Bats And Venus

The other good thing about walks

Hmm. The free range chicken we just had for dinner seemed very fatty. That’s a thought. What if a chicken is free to move around, but chooses not to? But I have no right to criticize a hen’s lassitude. It is a woeful lack of exercise that has me laid up. I wouldn’t have back pain after a kick-around if I’d been in any way even slightly not unfit. I do feel a lot better today though. When I got out of bed this morning it, well, it was the afternoon. (I was at a wedding in Canada the night before.) But I felt a lot better. The lack of pain was so pronounced it amounted to pleasure.

To what do I owe this rapid improvement? Bowen pain relief technique? A heat patch? Anti-inflammatory pills? A good walk? There’s only one way to be sure. First, I’ll need two spines… Actually though I now think it’s not a very spinal hurt. There’s some pain in the right of my lower back, but as it’s also in my hip and thigh I thought it was radiating out because of pressure on nerves from a swollen disc. I had an injury a little like that a few years ago. But I’m thinking now it might be a pulled thing, a muscle in my hip.

Anyway I’ll just keep doing what seems to be working. Especially the walking. How can I not walk, when in just a little while I can be standing surrounded by nothing much except bog and sky? The sun down and no moon or star, just the planet Venus. Venus, and bats.

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