Monday, October 7, 2019

    October 7, 2019

My back was good during the night; getting up and going to the bathroom was not a problem. However, a few steps on the road with Elsa said otherwise. Walking is always the worst. I did the whole Bikram class while lying on the floor again. I learn a lot about my body doing these modified exercises. It provides a different perspective. When I feel my body has learned something new and has to integrate the new information, I remain in the dead body pose. I woke up when I felt someone touch my hand. Heather was telling me that the next pose was a spine twist.  Since I gave a few snorts as I woke up, I gathered that I had entertained the class with my snoring. When I got up, I felt fine until I completed 10 steps.  And, there it was again - the pain. 

      Today, there was a young woman in class whom I had never seen before. She was on the mat next to mine. What a fantastic torso! She could curve both backward and forwards completely; her abdomen was in complete contact with her upper thighs on her forward bend, and her head touched her rear end on her backbend.  It was the first time I had seen what the spine looks like when each vertebra is in a slightly different position than the one above it or below, forming a continuous curve. What a revelation. I spoke to her after class. She told me that she’s a Bikram teacher on Oahu.  She said she had never seen anyone adapt the postures while lying on their back. She was impressed with my adaptations. 

When I got home, I was exhausted and slept until I was ready to go to the chiropractor at 3. My back and leg were terrible.  I had to crabwalk to get from one spot to another. When I arrived, Kim, my usual chiropractor, wasn’t there.  She had an accident and would be out of commission for a month. Instead, her business partner, Dr. Nancy, was.  My first thought was, damn! I had to start from scratch to train her to deal with me and my body. But no! She got it all very quickly.  Of course, the situation was somewhat different.  I was dealing with an acute rather than a chronic problem.  I told her I thought the problem was coming from my psoas and piriformis. She confirmed that and worked on those two muscles. Wow! She told me to remain vertical for the rest of the day.  I asked her if I could lie down. She said yes, but don’t sit. Sitting shortens the psoas and creates all sorts of problems. Many problems that develop with age result from sitting for over half of our lives without stretching out that muscle. 

I went home and lay down on the library sofa and binge-watched Cuffs. I like this show.  Unfortunately, there is only one season.  The show is well-written.  I watched another British show, A Touch of Cloth, with an actress I had seen before. It was so poorly written I couldn’t bear it.  It wasn’t violent, but its purpose was to be edgy at the price of creating an interesting story.  I came off as contrived and downright dull and annoying.

I got up to have dinner and walk Elsa - briefly.  I am concerned about triggering the pain again. When I got home, I went to bed.  My bedtime reading right now is a book on how to fix dysfunctional breathing patterns by Leon Chaitow, Dinah Bradley, and Christopher Gilbert — called Recognizing and Treating Breathing Disorders.  This is so interesting. Yeah, I’m a body nerd. Heather dubbed me that. That’s what she is. So glad to finally have a label. 

Mike always took one and a half or two breaths to my one, even when he was asleep and I was awake. I was worried about him.  In this book, I am learning that hyperventilation can cause all sorts of things to go wrong in the body. Because hyperventilation is associated with the fight/flight/freeze response, it is not just the result of stress, but it promotes it.  Hyperventilation causes the body to become acidic and can cause high blood pressure.  It was high blood pressure, which was identified as the most likely cause of his kidney disease.  Also, the medication he took for his anxiety was the only explanation for his pancreatitis. I couldn’t get him to consider changing any of his movement habits. He was the opposite of a body nerd.  He once asked how he wound up with someone with my body awareness.  I had the opposite question: how did I wind up with someone with so little?