Saturday August 16, 2008
After yesterday’s pain attack I woke to find that it has all sunk down to background level and what passes for normal mobility has been restored. The usual after effect of post-diclofenac toxins were swishing around my system of course but I drank a load of water and flushed them through by late morning.
Another ‘episode’ passed successfully, then. Don’t you love that as a medical term? ‘Episode’, I mean. Sort of a reminder that there is more to come.
I think that another disc has settled a little closer to its neighbour, swiddling and swaffling about to make better contact before another natural fusion. ‘Spondylarthrosis’, the consultant called it last time I submitted to being poked and prodded.
“What’s that?” I asked, meekly.
“Think of it as normal wear and tear,” he said, in a strange attack of helpfulness.
“Ah. That I can understand. Not a lot of hope for recovery, then?”
“‘Fraid not. Your body seems to be doing a splendid job of adjustment, though. Look here, and here, and here,” he said, pointing with his pen at the ginormous crystal-clear MRI picture of my poor old spine. “These x-s [I missed the word but I suspect it was a professional term meaning disc] have done a grand job of fusing themselves. Couldn’t do it better with surgery. You’ll have no more trouble with them so long as you can live with not being able to twist and shout in your old age.”
“My twisting days are done.”
“Good on yer. Come and see me again if there are any really nasty events, otherwise stay clear of hospitals. Dangerous places, hospitals.”
“Aren’t they just.”
Anyway, apart from that, a normal day. Another trip to the dump, with large pieces of the hideous wardrobe we inherited from the previous owners and which have been mouldering in the back of the garage ever since, the pile growing smaller and smaller with successive dump trips.
Unwanted inheritance
“We seem to have been carting bits of this down to the dump for ever,” I said. “Is this really the last of it?”
“Yes. Apart from a couple of plain bits I used for staging in the garage loft space.”
“Glory be.”
Then, it started to rain. A miserable, constant drizzling rain with little in the way of ambition to turn into the real thing. Dolly sat by the kitchen window gazing out into the garden, the picture of sadness.
“Mraow,” she said, looking at me over her shoulder.
“You don’t really want to go out there, Dolly,” I said. “You’ll get all wet.”
“Mraow.”
“I really don’t think so, luv.”
“Mraow.”
“Oh, well, OK. If you’re sure.”
“Mraow.”
I opened the door to let her through and off she went, to sit in the dampest part of the garden.
And sit. And sit.
I poddled out to check on her. There she was. Sitting. I pulled out my camera to capture a picture of her dedication to self-punishment.
“Mraow,” she said.
“Yes. Serves you jolly well right. Now the whole world is going to be witness to your obstinacy.”
A picture of obstinacy
That did it. She glared at me, and stomped off back into the house where she sat, dripping, waiting to be dried and fluffed with an old towel. That’s cats for ya.
