Hallelujah! I have relief from some of my pain! But more than that, I have had my first definitive, clear vision of the sources of my pain -- the curtain of oppressive yang sensation has been pulled aside so I can see what is bothering me, SO I KNOW WHAT TO DO!
The agent (or angel) of this revelation is my old friend Frania Zins, PT and Feldenkrais practitioner extraordinaire. I took a hellacious fall last summer while hurriedly building a rabbit hutch for my five-year old's birthday bunnies. I was lucky I didn't die, honestly, and the lesson is clear: no matter how big a hurry you're in, go get a ladder instead of standing on top of something dangerously inappropriate (a sliding board, in my case)! I knew I was badly hurt right away, and craved Frania's experienced, knowledgeable hands right away, too. But she's in New York, I'm in Central PA, I had a practice to run, kids to raise, an election to lose, yadda yadda yadda. Besides, I did what I could and my immediate pain went away after about 6 weeks. It wasn't for another month or so that I started awaking in pain. And I certainly had Lyme disease, gout and other real reasons to worry about some other, systemic origin for my comprehensive pain pattern.
Still, after starting to write about my situation (and after listening to my wife, Amy, in more and more exasperation tell me for five months to go get myself some help!), I made arrangements to meet Frania for a Feldenkrais/acupuncture swap. One of the things that is amazing about Frania is that her hands can make your body understand directly what is happening to it, and as soon as I felt them on my lumbar, thoracic and cervical spine, I knew, "Oh, damn. That's hurt bad." See, after the initial six weeks of lower back pain from landing on my left butt cheek, I never perceived my back as hurting -- I perceived the pain as starting at my hips and shoulders and radiating outward from there -- this was part of the incomplete, flawed perception that my sea of pain obscured. But it was clear from Frania's hands that, Lyme disease or no, I definitely had hurt my spine pretty badly in three different regions.
I would be lying if I said I leapt up off her table, right as rain, but I did get up slowly, with my hands and shoulders hurting a lot, knowing a lot more about my situation than I did when I laid down. Furthermore, Frania gave me one simple anatomical/kinesthetic concept to fool with, and one week later, while lying in bed on a Saturday morning, something big let loose in my deep right hip (piriformis, maybe?), a place where I had never had any particularly intense pain, and by the next day my legs and lower back worked again and were essentially pain-free. I mean, pain-free for an out-of-shape 50 year-old with chronic knee problems.
Now don't get me wrong -- I am not going to play soccer or perform ballet again, and the absence of that lower body pain brought my upper body pain into much sharper relief -- but I can get up out of a chair now and walk, I can roll over in bed, and I can clearly feel the pain in my neck and upper back that is tied to the pain in my shoulders and hands. I still awake at 3:00 a.m. most days in pain, but since it is only half of me that hurts, I can re-position myself more easily, or hell, get up and take some more aspirin if I need to. The thought of getting out of bed and walking to and from the bathroom is no longer the scary ordeal it was a few weeks ago. That's the most important thing -- my pain level is back within my thresholds, so I am no longer held in thrall by it.
Yes, Amy and everybody else, I am going back to see Frania again next weekend, and I am really looking forward to making some headway against my upper body pain. And if I had health insurance I probably would have gotten an orthopedic or neurological consult that would have revealed my ruptured discs or fractured vertebra 9 months ago. But I would have missed this opportunity to experience and understand a new, debilitating and terrifying pain, the sort of pain that so many of my patients endure.
By the way, I will probably follow through with getting a neurological examination, with MRI and all, but I would bet $100 that it will show ruptured discs in my lumbar and cervical spine, fracture or ligamentous damage in my thoracic spine and a fully torn supraspinatus muscle in my right shoulder. More damage accumulated in this animated carcass to go along with all the other injuries, illnesses and iatrogenic mishandling. I will probably have to be careful about lifting for the rest of my life, and my head- and handstand days are probably over. But that leaves a lot I can still do, and even if my neck, shoulder and hand pain don't get any better than they currently are, I am not paralyzed by pain as I was. Hallelujah!
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