Rolfing, Session Three

I walk from one foreign language to another, from one fugue state to another, as I move from my Italian class to my Rolfing session, just a few blocks apart. What is that blasted word for “fifteen,” which was right there where it belonged as I recited 100 numbers on my way to the train. In the class: gone.

Rolfing fugue: things float back to me haphazardly as I lie there. The goal of the first session is the breath, she says. The breath? I forgot all about the breath. I did the scary thing with eyes and mouth wide open, but you were also supposed to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Totally forgot.

Foreign language: We round to the form, she says. This has something to do with connective tissue reshaping itself to hold the newly Rolfed structure in place (I think), but conjugating essere suddenly seems a lot easier.

As she explores my lateral alignment, the goal of the third session (the second had to do with feet, apparently – that didn’t penetrate my fugue last time), I learn that my twelfth rib (one of those two weird ribs that float) is right on top of my ilium on the side that hurts. Very confusing to hear as I float in and out – I never realized part of the intestines and the big hipbone were homonyms, and so I’m trying to picture my rib floating down among all those twisted tubes. Italian and anatomy – neither one comes easy.

Quindici.

Rolfing, Session Two

I hate instruction manuals that number their pages with a dot, like 1.01; 2.27; and I hate outlines that do the same. What’s wrong with consecutive numbering, or the good old-fashioned I, A, 1, a, etc.?

And yet I see that for some reason I titled my previous post Rolfing 1.01, as if there were going to be many sections about my first session before I moved on to the second. Well, there was a next event involving a trip to the ER, but it had nothing to do with Rolfing Session One, or with my head floating so gently on Atlas, despite what my husband thought (“And what did you do differently in the past week?” “Well, I dug up a tree root and fell down on the driveway and oh yes, I got Rolfed.”).

It was a bit of a weird thing, though, in that I landed on the opposite side from the shoulder that didn’t start hurting until the next day. And also weird in that, after one naproxen, the shoulder that couldn’t even support a coffee cup was totally fine. As has been my hip.

Which brings us to Rolfing, Session Two. (“I had in mind some gentle walking, not necessarily heavy shoveling and falling,” she said.)

It’s almost like being here, lying on that table. (This is Chip, watching evening descend over the island we camped on in Maine.)

Something gently happens to muscles and bones in my feet, in my neck, and, yes, my shoulder. An hour, or two, or only half, goes by.

Walk around the room, she says. Let your head float on the top of your neck. (Who knew heads were supposed to float on necks? My head, trained for ballet, grew up balancing books.)

Homework: eyes and mouth wide open, sway back and forth, side to side (have to be careful not to look in a mirror or I’ll scare myself.)

Train home; head floats.

Medical tedium

Medicare insisted on knowing whether I’d retired or not before they’d let me have a dexa scan last week and, if I had, what date.

What date indeed? I retired from a marketing career after 20 years, but I was too young for all the retirement benefits, so I guess that doesn’t count. Then I retired, sort of, from a consulting company I started, but I have no idea what date, and besides I’m still doing some occasional consulting, so am I retired? And then I just retired from being a standardized patient (where you pretend to have a variety of medical conditions to give med students a chance to practice taking histories and doing exams) because Temple University, perhaps taking a clue from Medicare, suddenly wanted to know, after I’d worked for them for nearly ten years, every single job I’d had from when to when and when, if I’d retired, I’d retired. Way too tedious.

So I just made up a date for Medicare’s benefit: 9/9/02, but now I guess I have to remember that for every future Medicare encounter, unless Congress takes all our benefits away and it doesn’t matter anymore, but since I chose it because it seemed easy to remember I guess that won’t be a problem until I’m in a state where I really need Medicare to take care of me because I can’t remember anything.

Their questionnaire was all computerized. The ladies at the desk were asking all the old people, very solicitously, whether they needed any help “working” the computer. I was filling mine out on a tablet, since I was also having an MRI for this nagging pain in my hip (during which they gave me headphones playing Shubert’s 9th symphony, one of my favorites, but which will never sound the same to me again) and the two visits were combined (I know that doesn’t make any sense but neither does medical bureaucracy).

Anyway, fortunately for my ego, the receptionist at the MRI place didn’t ask me if I needed help, so I just stylused along on my tablet, sighing loudly and groaning when I got sick of the questions. At the end they had boxes to check about how very easy, easy, difficult, or very difficult the process was. I checked very easy, but they really needed another option: very easy; very tedious.

 

Hamstrung

I’m standing in my kitchen, talking with my air conditioning man.

His 13 year old daughter and his wife have terrible fights, just as his wife and her own mother did. He tells his daughter it’s up to her: she has to break the cycle.

If I were your daughter, I say, I’d feel like it should be the older person who has to try to change.

Yes, he says. But then I’d be taking on my wife. My wife is a teacher; she has to be in control.

You should see my closet, he says. All my shirts are organized by color. And they’re spaced exactly the same distance apart. So are my shoes.

All the papers on his desk are lined up in exact piles, no corners out of line. An errant pile, placed carelessly on the kitchen counter, disappears.

Each morning the pots and cans destined for dinner are lined up exactly on the stove, each can inside its future pot. Heaven help us if we move them, he says. He laughs, as he has been all along.

My heart twists inside, feeling for his daughter. OCD! OCD! I want to scream. She needs help! Your daughter can’t possibly break her mother’s cycle. But I say nothing; keep listening. He must know; if he doesn’t know he doesn’t want to know; not, at least, from his air conditioning customer.

In the only other conversation we’ve had (other than the ones about air conditioning), he told me about his hamstrings. He woke up one morning and could barely move, his hamstrings were so tight. The doctor took nine vials of blood. Today, the air conditioning man says, he’s just learned everything is normal – except his hamstrings. They still hurt. He can hardly lift his legs.

The doctor’s baffled.

hamstring (transitive verb): to make ineffective or powerless; cripple

One more pretext for the tea-party House Republicans

Yesterday I learned from NPR that you can only make all the hair on a beach ball lie flat if you’re in a world with more than three dimensions.

I was wishing I could crawl inside of the mind of the person who came up with that analogy, just to see what it felt like to be able to visualize all those dimensions, until it occurred to me that I might not like the images I found there (but what could be worse than a hairy beach ball?).

What atheists and Jehovah’s Witnesses have in common

I’m thinking that the next time a Jehovah’s Witness knocks on Sam Parnia’s door, he needs to invite him in.

Now of course I myself have never done this, being a person who’s so theologically irascible I get irritated even when people say they’re going to pray for me (which I guess they’d better, if they’re right and I’m wrong). But the other day was, as I told my hospice volunteer coordinator at the end of our monthly “Faith and the End of Life” series, the first time I voluntarily took handouts from a Jehovah’s Witness.

It’s pretty interesting, what they believe. When you die, you’re dead (Yes! says my true-atheist friend). You just lie there in your coffin, waiting, to the extent that a dead person can be said to wait, that is.

Then along comes Jesus, and everybody, good and bad, gets resurrected. But here’s the rub: only 144,000 of them get to go with him back up to heaven. And what happens to all the rest of the billions of people? They stay here, on Earth, except that Earth is now a paradise and there is no death.

So it seems like we’d all better try really really hard to become one of those 144,000; because we’re going to be awfully crowded on Earth, not to mention all those bad people rubbing up against us.

But what does all of this have to do with Sam Parnia? Well, I suspect the Jehovah’s Witness will tell him his experiment, to see whether clinically dead people can report back what they saw when they were floating on the operating room ceiling, is a waste of time.

Dead is dead, until…

Decapitation

“How many of you are capitated?”

Only a couple of people raised their hands; it turned out they were from California, trend-setter for all things, good and bad.

I had no idea what they were talking about. This was in the mid-nineties sometime, at a seminar series on medicine and literature for alums of my college.

And so the other day, when I turned up at the physical therapy place my sports medicine doctor recommended and they told me I was capitated, I still had no idea what that meant. Something about a head? A not-cut-off head?

What a crazy word it is, and what a crazy world it is. You can’t go to the place your doctor recommended (well you can, if you want to pay more) because your insurance company has decided that your primary care doctor (who referred me to the sports medicine guy in the first place because she’s not an expert in rehab), is only associated with certain PT places.

But why are PT places assigned to her in the first place, when that’s not her specialty? And what gives an insurance company the right to tell her which ones her patients are allowed to go to?

Off with their heads!

Sarah Palin’s anosognosiac dilemma

One theory I have about Sarah Palin (one among many, because she fascinates me more than I’d like to admit) is that people like her because she doesn’t make them feel stupid.

Being too smart is a liability for politicians, especially in this country where sometime back in the Spiro Agnew days someone came up with the idea that you can get people to support you, and not someone who’s smarter than you, by ridiculing intelligence.

Elena Kagan was the smartest person in the Senate hearing room, but she tried really hard not to show it. Obama can’t quite pull this off.

The real question about Sarah Palin, though, is how smart she really is. Pretty pretty smart, as Larry David would say, but I also wonder if she suffers from anosognosia, a terrific word I learned from that most thoughtful, and therefore, ipso facto, elitist, New York Times.

Originally, it referred to people who had some neurologic disability they were unaware of, like a paralysis. The Times article told a funny story about a bank robber who believed he was invisible because he’d painted lemon juice on his face. A Cornell psychology professor, reading this, hypothesized:

If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

He went on to write a very interesting paper, called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.”

I present to you: Sarah Palin.

Or, realizing the basis of her support, is she even better than Elena Kagan at intellectual disguise?