A lost day

 

image from Freepik.com

I didn’t expect a minor dermatological procedure to cost me a whole day,  abut it did. When I get home a little before noon, I felt fine, spent an hour or so clearing up emails and the like while eating lunch and took my regular nap. It was when I woke up that my world was changed—the topical anesthetic was wearing off, and my scalp and head hurt. Fortunately, a glass of wine helped with that. We had no dinner plan, but Christian offered to bring subs from our favorite sandwich shop, and Jordan and I wrestled with getting into a certain website that kept rejected our log-in. I had great and ambitious plans for the evening for what I would do—but I have done none of it. I lost my starch. It wasn’t that my head hurt anymore, but I was aware, in a strange way of the affected area. And I had no energy. I resigned myself to frittering away the evening surfing the net, looking at adoptable dogs, reading Facebook, and the like. Never even got to the novel I’m reading.

My mother came to my mind. When I was young, she suffered from migraines that would send her to bed for a day. When someone asked me about her, I would cheerily reply, “She’ll be all right in the morning.” And she always was. So that’s my story: I’ll be all right in the morning.

Two things interest me about my lost day. One is, as a child of osteopathic medicine (not only was my father an osteopathic physician, so were many uncles and cousins and today my brother, one nephew and one niece carry on the family tradition), I was reminded again of osteopathic theory. No one part of the body is isolated, so the procedure, beneficial and necessary as it was (and let me stress it was minor), was an insult not just to my head but to my entire system. My dragginess was my body taking its energy to get back to normal after the insult. Yes, I expect my head will still be sore and tender for several days, but I also expect I’ll have my starch or oomph or whatever back tomorrow.

The other lesson today is one that it’s taken me years to learn: I gave myself permission to check out for the day, to fritter the day away. In my world, there’s nothing so urgent that must be done today, and there’s no need to push myself when I don’t feel good. Granted, there’s a thin line there, and it would be easy to abuse that rationale, retreat into “I don’t feel good” and never do anything, but I don’t think I will. My compulsion to write, to be involved with the world will draw me back to business, and there are several things on my calendar tomorrow—phone calls I have promised to make, a fish dinner I want to cook for the Burtons (I’ve ordered groceries to be delivered tomorrow, and if we are  going to have fish, I like to fix it the day it comes from the market).

So now I’m cozy in the cottage and will soon go back to bed for—what? The fourth time today? It’s okay. I’ll be fine tomorrow. I hope you will too.