Damage report

Tuesday night's massage was not exactly about total relaxation as Kari had intended. It's sure a different experience when you're injured instead of just being pampered. Reminds me of the work that Penny's friends at the clinic did on me when I dislocated my sacroiliac joint - oh, don't remind me... the drive to Vermont for that lovely week on Lake Champlain with Penny and Amy. Beautiful, wonderful, memorable - but damn near killed me to drive up there, as my back had been dislocated for a month at that point and I didn't know it. (Er, "didn't know it" means I didn't know specifically what was wrong. I definitely knew it.) I had tons of referred pain as the massage therapist worked on me...and then when they put my joint back in place, suddenly all was well.

Not so this time. Pili spent the whole hour working mainly on my left arm and the left side of my back. As I think of it, very much like the guys at the body shop did in inventorying the damage on my car, checking connections, noting what might be fixable. A few times the pain that shot through me just made me blur, feeling that I was losing my hold on the room and I wasn't headed to a happy place.

We just spent that hour figuring out what was wrong. Turns out most of the damage that I thought was all through my back is almost entirely confined to the left side and in the neck. Which is where she did the best, most encouraging work on me. Other than some residual soreness, my neck really feels pretty okay, and the reason I noticed this was that when I got home afterward, it occurred to me that my head had stopped hurting.

My head has been hurting awfully for the last six weeks, day in and day out, from the neck injury. I have lived with chronic pain, particularly in two epochs of my life that both lasted a couple of years. So I think that I am tough and I push through it and I endure. I think I just plain forgot in this last month how you just can't be yourself when you're in unrelenting pain. I feel like a different person. A still injured and probably still sorta bitchy person, but I went home that night, did my epsom salt bath like I was ordered, went to bed and felt...relief. No headache. No sense that everything is just wrong.

Next morning I felt like I'd been in an accident all over again - dang, that girl has some strong fingers, and there are places that just couldn't be fixed but are sure bruised from trying. I can't face that again for a couple of weeks but have a followup appointment to see if more progress can be made.