This Week

This Week

Monday Morning Osteopath appointment. He can't help, refers me to someone else.

Tuesday Morning Therapist appointment.

Tuesday Afternoon Osteopath appointment. It's a miracle I got in last minute! No, it's not, the front desk made a mistake and only booked me for a brief consult, not a full appointment. But someone cancelled for tomorrow...

Wednesday Morning Full osteopath appointment.

Wednesday Noon I am supposed to go to a Feldenkrais class - osteopath #1 recommended it - but I can't summon the energy to drag myself out of the house again, so instead I nap.

Wednesday Afternoon PT appointment. 

Wednesday evening Now. I still hurt.

Blerg.

So. That has been my week.

It is that kind of day, inside that kind of week, inside that kind of month, which is turning into that kind of season: months, plural.

Back in December I flew to the East Coast. Stood up at the end of it, only to have my left knee buckle under me; it has hurt ever since. So I started PT. That sent me into an insane v pain episode (because to help the knee, they needed me to increase my core stability, which meant engaging my glutes, which sent my pelvic floor into an insane spasm...now we know why I wasn't so stable to begin with, I suppose.) I finally got it to calm down and resumed PT, but this time the deep right hip rotators and pelvic floor muscles and SI joint all started freaking out, bouncing the pain around my left hip area like a ping pong ball, until at the beginning of March it lodged in my SI joint, where it has remained.

Since then, I have been in constant pain, made worse by any kind of flexion (i.e. bending) in my right hip. So anything other than standing or lying on the floor makes it worse.

I open my eyes and sit up to get out of bed in the morning. Worse. I bend to wash my face. Worse. And so on and so forth. I have had to cancel or get subs for all but two of my yoga classes since then. I eat standing up.

On top of this, I keep having Mysterious Vomiting Episodes. They don't follow any pattern, other than that all of a sudden I will have to retch like crazy - doesn't matter if I have food in my stomach or not - and they generally end after 15 minutes or so, except for one that lasted five long and miserable hours.

Of course, it is near impossible to vomit standing straight up without bending, which means each Mysterious Vomiting Episode makes the SI joint pain worse.

And my three months of diligent knee PT exercises, the ones I stuck with no matter how much I had to modify or reduce them in order to accommodate the SI craziness? They have not helped my knee one damn bit.

* * *

I feel like I'm living in a bombed out city of a body.

Nothing's really working. I keep trying to live my life, do my routine, make plans, set goals, only to have to re-schedule (again and again), and cancel (over and over), and make the goals smaller and smaller and smaller until that task or project barely exists.

I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I start the week with a schedule and then it gets slowly eroded until its unrecognizable. Haircut? Erg - gotta reschedule, doctor has an opening. Helping a friend while her husband's in chemo? Crap, I managed to get there fine a couple of weeks ago but this week it's worse and I can't sit in the car long enough to get there. Maybe I can re-schedule? How far out? When will this be okay again? 

Nothing in my extensive kit of self-help tools is working. My old routines and schedules and Stuff That I Do has mostly fallen away; teaching, working on this website, the morning yoga practice, the bike riding, Tuesday afternoon grocery shopping, sitting, and writing or reading or watching tv.

I used to be building something: my yoga classes, the website. Now if I so much as drop a hair clip, instead of picking it up I look down and think, how much do I need that hair clip? My feet are cold - but are they cold enough to warrant bending down to the bottom drawer to get socks? My days are stilted, each movement careful, the pros and cons of any and all action weighed. Building anything beyond my breakfast is a thing of the past.

Amidst this maelstrom, it seems as though everything has gone along for the ride.

My former favorite lipstick looks oddly off now, and after decades of loving tank tops and not liking tee-shirts I only want tee-shirts, and as of nineteen days ago I play the guitar. 

My mystified husband says sometimes I change so quickly it's hard to keep up with me. I hear your pain buddy, but lordy, try BEING me.

He asks me if playing the guitar makes me happy. I wouldn't say that, but it is soothing. It is medicinal. It keeps the screaming banshees of insanity at bay.

And if amidst this hell something will keep the screaming banshees at bay, I'll take it.

(Rosie lounging in the backyard. Many thanks to our friend Carlos for abandoning her in our garage when he moved to New York. I love her.)