The Change Diaries, Vol. 1

The wine: Chateau Saint Michelle Merlot 2009
The music: Changes, by David Bowie

Trying something different tonight. I haven't written in a while, my work and other activities have been consuming too much of my time. Tonight, I just want to put pen to paper and see where it goes. Write it out, see what comes. May be nothing, may be something. In any case my fingers will be more limber at the end. Perhaps my mind will be more limber as well. Nothing fancy tonight, I'm afraid. Just good ol' home-cooked, pot roast writing.

My last patient of the day today was a woman who has been experiencing a lot of musculoskeletal and neuromuscular pain from as yet unidentified causes. Test results are pending, and naturally I have my theories. Today was the first treatment session post examination and I decided to do deep tissue massage and manual work first, to try to loosen her up a bit and give the poor lady some pain relief. When I did, I realized how much I miss manual work, and how much I miss having a good treatment table. I don't have this in the home setting. Her muscles were like stone, she has been in a lot of pain for a long time and her shoulders were hiked up to her ears. I let my hands lead me, and it was wonderful to enter the musculoskeletal zone again, my voice dropping, asking leading questions of the patient, listening to their breathing change, feeling the tissue relax. This work makes me feel like I have done something genuine, and although it seems sometimes very simple and intuitive to me, I realized today how little people know about their own bodies, how confused they are about their pain, and how much better they feel after what seem to me like the world's most obvious suggestions.

And then I remember, not everyone knows all the attachment points of the trapezius, and how the greater occipital nerve and artery go through it and up the back of the skull and cause headaches, and how the attachment points of the rectus capitis and obliquus capitis can develop trigger points and cause incredible pain and headaches and how a touch of my fingers and postural retraining can make it all go away, when they thought they probably had a terminal disease and were going to die. It's all a mystery to them, and I can explain it, open their closet of pain and make all the monsters go away. This is why I spent three years dissecting cadavers. This is the field I play in. I need more moments like this. Not everyone has my hands, and today, as I was thankfully able to bring some relief to a patient in pain, and saw the amazed look on her face, I remembered that. I remembered that, and held it, and valued it.

Change is coming. Change is underway. As I walked/ran around my lovely, humid, green Southern neighborhood tonight, I inhaled the hot boxwood, and made memories. I will not be here forever. I never thought I would be, but now the knowing is more immediate, more urgent. In flight, there is that moment at the end of the runway where you throttle forward and commit to take-off. Natural forces take over, and you are in the air, ready or not. It is the best feeling in the world.