Petrified Muscles

This week I have had a three day headache.  It’s unbearable really; but having just had five weeks off sick, I’ve soldiered on and gone to work, cooked… cleaned up.  I decided to give myself one more day to see if the headache was muscle related; or brain related.   Seriously, I couldn’t handle another trip to hospital to get my head shaved.

So I hunted down a new acupuncturist closer to home and went off after work, dragging my somewhat petrified muscles behind me.  And they are like stone.  No kidding.  I lie in bed and tell them ‘let go. Just let go and relax,’ but of course they can’t.  They are like that for keeps now; in a permanent spasm.  The last few nights I have knocked myself sideways with migraine tablets which have a muscle relaxant in them.  Oh I slept, but it was restless and I woke repeatedly with dark dreams.  The muscles didn’t let go; they just tighten a little more until it feels like a bunch of blood men inside my body climb up my spine with ropes and pitch a lasso over my brain and start to drag it down.  My brain is like Gulliver on a beach.

So this new age, Indian guy starts talking to me about alternate medicine and I’m not totally opposed to the idea.  I just think it has to be mixed with a dash of common sense.  I mean if slapping the kid over the head with a dead fish for a year didn’t clear up his nearly gangrenous toe, then maybe it was time to consider antibiotics.   And personally, anyone who doesn’t have their kid immunised should be flogged.  At the very least, don’t send your freaking kid to school with mine!  You want to avoid antibiotics then sure, but you take the stress and germs.  You can’t have such a holier than thou religion and then send the kid to infect me and mine…   But I regress.

I sit down with the new age Indian and he asks some questions and then looks at my tongue, eyes and takes my pulse before leaning back and telling me he suspects my migraines and muscle spasm are because I have a lot of anger in my life right now and that sometimes, it was better not to supress how you feel.  And he suspects I do supress it because I’m pale.  If I was an angry person, I’d have more red.

That made me laugh and I mentioned that I didn’t actually have any problem in articulating anger, but that yes… my home life has taken a dive and I’m struggling to deal with raising someone else’s germ ridden, thankless, manipulative kid and that moving has become laden with work and difficulty and the loss of my Starbucks mugs and God knows what else.  My home used to be my sanctuary.  Now I can feel my shoulders cringing up as I drive up the street because I know that kid is going to be skulking around the corner….