Well, it’s been almost two weeks now and since my first utterly pain-free day and things have regressed. I’m now in more pain then before that day, and I’m fearful. Fearful that somehow I’ve managed to wrench the bloody thing. This feeling I do not like. The ‘it was all going so well and oh fuck’ feeling.
Not like. Not like. Not like.
In this morning’s Guardian, Ian Jack asks himself why he jibes (using the past tense formulation of jibbed, which is surely something that one did on a sailing boat) at being termed an atheist, when he doesn’t believe in god.
I don’t know why I jibbed at the word atheist. It may have been Jonathan Miller’s argument that non-belief in God is a narrow and entirely negative self-description that ignores all the other things you might either believe in or not, from homeopathy through necromancy to the Gaia theory. As a definition it belongs to the same dull category as “non-driver” or “ex-smoker”; not driving or no longer smoking, just like not believing in God, is an inadequate guide to the self. There are so many richer and more positive ways, or so you hope, to summarise your behaviour and beliefs and what you might add up to when the counting is done. Continue reading
Naturally, my current left shoulder issues precludes anything active in the way of training, but I have prepared myself for the time, and I expect it to be next week, when my left shoulder is strong enough to withstand my right arm doing stuff. Right now too much right-hand activity goes straight to the left shoulder. Which we don’t like at all. No, no … not a bit of it.
So, I have mad a random purchase. Basically the middle bit of a cricket bat and a cricket ball and golf ball on the end of some thick elasticated string.
You hang the balls from above – I will use a doorframe – and biff them, while paying great attention to technique. Naturally, one can either hit the ball while it’s stationary or while it’s still moving a little.
The whole thing stems from Donald Bradman’s training method of a golf ball on a string. It’s a simple enough principle … if you can hit a golf ball with a bat that’s one third of the width of a normal bat, then you’ll find it easier to hit a bigger ball with a bigger bat …
Well, we’ll see, soon enough. The real attraction for me is that the bat is light, so I can train with just my top hand, and get my technique spot on … without getting so tired, so I can train for longer. I will also get assistance with weekly throwdowns … I shall be a convincing leftie … I shall be sinister … I shall …
There’s a point in the recovery from anything, injury, illness, a broken heart, when the patient begins to get restless. You feel immeasurably better, in fact, you don’t feel at all. That constant nagging pain which reminds you you’re alive, but also that you’re ill, has vanished. You feel strong, fearless, confident … well, ok, maybe that’s pushing it, but you no longer feel denuded, weak, delirious, fearful. This is a dangerous time. Continue reading
So. The first day of physio. I’m a lot more comfortable than yesterday when I had a longish lunch and a pootle around Brighton, including a visit to the Pavilion, with an old family friend. It seems that the constant jiggle of walking irritates the internal glue and crotchet holding my arm on. One of those ‘feel better for the walk but worse for it too’ days. Highly, highly annoying time to get into a swingy roundabout sort of thing. Still. At least I know. A good night’s sleep helps, however, and in the morning I’m zingingly ready for my first real physiotherapy appointment. Continue reading
For some reason or other (and I can only assume it’s surgical skill), this has never been particularly painful. Apart from when I sneeze, which if I’m unlucky, seems to jolt the wound inside too much for comfort. The main problem, as I suggested yesterday (in a post which, I note, was less popular than a piece of spam about carrot cake I stuck up … am I boring everyone?), is psychological. Continue reading
This appended to Dexter to sinister III:
Hrm, Not the best post unfortunately. Sorry to be so blunt! You should try some Norwegian carrot cake ( gulrotkake i langpanne ) to cheer you up instead.
That, surely, is proof of, er, something …
This time one short week ago I was walking through my front door, a little blurry, numb from the neck to the tips of my left-hand hand’s fingers. I had just had a delicately brutal operation on the left shoulder, an operation designed to mend the damage done during a training fight over a year ago. Symptoms were not immediate and diagnosis took several months, not least because of my moving house in late march. This led to the apparently crazy gap between injury and repair. I managed my injury well, but it became progressively worse as, unable to train as hard as I would normally, and continuing to play cricket two, sometimes three, times weekly, it gradually ripped further.
The experience of being not only denied the use of my left arm, but also to suffer a constant fear of tweaking the repair, bumping into someone or something and collapsing in a heap of pain, was chastening. Vulnerability is not a feeling that I am used to. And vulnerable I am. I know (all too well), what it is like to attempt manoevres around an antagonistic individual knowing full well that a simple even poorly directed and relatively weak blow to the shoulder will not only cripple me in the immediate, but damage me in the longer term.
I am suddenly fearful of many things, of my immediate and long-term working future, of my long-term emotional health … and my general health. How much this injury was affected by the PD is a mystery to me, as is its potential deliterious affect on the rapidity and efficacy of the healing process. This worries me immensely.
The worry makes me flat. Flat emotionally, intellectually, physically. I am, well, if not exactly scared, at least very wary of being out in public. I’m quite. Quite. No. Quiet. That’s what I am. Quiet. Subdued. Contemplative.
Negotiating the world.
A friend just pointed out how what I’m going through is a negotiation, or re-negotiation, with the world … and how right she was.
I published a collection of essays this year entitled Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book, something of a mouthful of a title, but utterly appropriate. As one of the contributors, the ever-astonishing Randall McCloud, pointed out recently:
Hi, Pete,
I just learned the etymology of “negotiate”. It consists of a negative particle (“neg-”) plus “otium”, the word for “leisure”.
When you were negotiating the book, you were not at leisure. At last, I dig the title.
Hot damn! I wish I’d done it on purpose. He was right, however (he generally is – apart from his glaswegian accent: far too comprehensible), negotiating is anything but leisure. I feel like I am lounging around, doing nothing, relaxing … like I am at leisure. But every day, every hour brings up new problems, new things to work my way around, to decide whether to fight my way through them or circumvent them. Socks. Sausages. Sodding scrubbing. Yes, it’s mainly things beginning with the letter ‘S’. I seem to have Sesame Street sickness. Without the cookies.
I’ve been negotiating for a while, now … since I was diagnosed with PD. PD does the same, it forces you to reconsider continually, stops you from settling into a routine, as what is comfortable and possible shifts continually. PD turns your body and its environment into a Godwin’s Sands: never the same way twice (though you can play cricket at low tide). The negotiation is multifold – a UN-style affair with the big guns of body, mind, disease and drugs poked and prodded, vetoed and filibustered by the odd finger, the throat, someone’s reactions, a news item, an accident. And the council is always sitting.
Now there is a new spectre at the feast. My lack of left arm in any capacity but ballast. It redraws boundaries and rewrites treaties. It has potential, but potential for decline, rather than progress. While it is, I’m sure, getting gradually better – if only because that’s what the body wants to do, get better, just like a plant wants to grow – most of what I can do is to harm it, by knocking it, jolting it (the fear of the sneeze is ever present), or the automatic reach-out when something falls (which happens a lot. The falling, that is).
Naturally, as it gets better, it becomes less and less sore. Less and less noticeable. So the potential for catastrophic failure becomes greater. This we do not like.
This first week has been scary, but eye-opening. I fully expect great frustration to set in over the next week. Which will make it a great time to write, and I’m building up a head of steam.
Not the best of days. I’m beginning too wonder whether there isn’t a sort of anti-depressant quality to the anaesthesia I ‘enjoyed’ on Sunday … I sort of tripped and danced my way through the first three days, well, within reason and the bounds of not being able to do muchness because I’m pretty much broken. Naturally, my right shoulder and arm are sore because I’m using them more than usual, and with no support.
But Thursday I sort of spiralled into a bit of a black dog … maybe a grey puppy, or something … and perhaps spiralled is wrong, too. By the evening I was despairing of ever regaining the use of my left arm. The physio felt wrong, the sling uncomfortable, the shoulder sore, the wounds pulling, the tendon tweaking as I sneezed … the fear began to grip.
I’ve been expecting it, but like the operation itself, when it comes it’s almost more surprising, as the expectation pretty much takes the place of the real thing as a totem.
Perhaps that explained my mood – I have /had been so fearful of the rehab that when I didn’t wake in screaming agony, my mood automatically shot through the roof: proof, if proof were needed, that the way of the cynic, as in ‘if I expect the worst anything else is a bonus’, does sometimes reap rewards. When it’s not self-fulfilling …
I slowly levered myself into bed, pillow on my left to support my elbow, and stared at the ceiling waiting for oblivion.
Then I dreamt about golf. I mean, wtf?