Day six
There seems to be a major improvement in the neck. I’ll just ignore the fact that two new regions of pain – my hip and my coccyx – have taken over instead because I’m so glad to be able to move my head without being in agony. Small price to pay. So maybe the detox is beginning to work.
I tried an epsom salt bath last night. Very nice it was too. With the pleasant side-effect that I could be alone again. You see, my dearly beloved family returned from their holiday yesterday. And much as I wanted them to come home, I realised just how nice it was not to have them around for a while. Not to have the never-ending arguments with my son about teeth-brushing, going-to-bed, washing-himself, eating. Not to be woken up in the middle of the night with a nightmare story or a I-can’t-sleep-Mummy tale. Afterwards, he falls asleep in seconds and then I lay awake for the rest of the night.
And then there’s his father. Heaven forbid that I should complain about my husband. But we do have our differences, I can tell you that much. And yesterday he seemed to think I should laugh at a long, boring joke about how badly women drive cars. I wish I could find a statistic to show that dithering women are NOT the killers on our roads. Anyhow, I ride a bike and I hate cars. With a vengeance. Two of them knocked me down. To be precise it was the drivers that knocked me down. They just used their cars to do it. The first time it was a woman, but I fully admit that it was my own fault because I was a crazy pubertal eleven-year old and I just dashed out in front of her. But the second time I was a fully grown woman riding innocently on my bike when a young Turkish lad decided to have a race with his mate and overtake him on the inside. Only thing was, I was on the inside. Crash. Bang. I landed on my tailbone and he screamed to a halt just half a metre from my head. Lucky lucky lucky.
That’s why the coccyx hurts. The squiggly residents love old injuries and I have plenty of them. And the left hip? Could be the first car accident – that’s where it hit me. I can still hear the sound of metal on bone. I can’t remember the car hitting me, but I can remember the sound. And now when I hear brakes squealing I always stop. And listen. For that sound. If its not there, then I smile and go on. Lucky lucky lucky.
So let’s go back to the subject of pioneering disease, shall we? This is where we can start getting esoteric. Time to examine the reason for all the pain and suffering. You didn’t think I was doing this just to tell everyone how sick I was, did you? The point is to get to the point. Whatever it is.
When I first arrived in Berlin in 1985, everyone was oohing and aahing about a book called “Schicksal als Chance” (the English title is “The Challenge of Fate”) by Thorwald Dethlefsen, which – if I remember rightly – encouraged you to understand the universe as being mirrored in the tiny details of the world around us, right down to the cells in our bodies. Macrocosm and microcosm are two sides of the same coin, so to speak. It was a brave attempt to explain how symbols help us to understand how the universe works, by creating a language to express its principles, most notably in astrology. Certainly a fascinating book and incidentally the first one I read from cover to cover in the German language, having only just mastered (or mistressed) it.
But an even more interesting book from the same author, together with Rüdiger Dahlke, is “Krankheit als Weg”, the follow-up to “Schicksal als Chance”. The title of the book in English is: “The Healing Power of Illness”, but a correct translation of the German title would be: “Disease as a Path”. The book delves into the realms of psychosomatic medicine and puts forward the theory that every sickness we have is a message from our bodies about the state of our psyche. That is to say, in not dealing with a problem or an inner conflict on a psychological level, it gets pushed onto a somatic level and gains expression there. The book proposed that you try to read what your body is telling you that the problem is. Easier said than done.
Talking about this means walking a real tightrope. I don’t want to suggest that it is “all in the head”, or that if we Lyme patients would do psychotherapy then we would all get better (though a little bit of psychotherapy might help us to cope with the Lyme disease!) No, the disease is real enough, the bacteria are there and the pain is insufferable.
But I do believe in the interconnectedness of things, including within myself. My psyche and my body are inseparable. So there has to be a point of healing at the psychological level as well as at the somatic level. And this is where I think this book might (and that is a very reserved “might”) be helpful. I have already poo-pooed positive thinking, so you know that’s not where I’m going with this. Where am I going then? Not really sure, to tell you the truth.
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