You know that fabulous class I was gushing over in my last post?
Yeah, Day Three fucked my back up. Or rather, my back, injured long long ago when I was twelve, decided it had had enough and wasn’t going to take it any more, and I wasn’t going to give yet another massage, I was just going to lie on the floor and cry for an hour.
That day? Also the first of my cycle. And the spasm came while I was trying to put on my pants, so I was on the floor wearing only a nursing tank and my bright red undies. So, that was fun.
On the other hand, if you’re going to have a great big physical and emotional break down, there are worse places to do it than a room full of nurturing women half of whom are doulas (some wonderfully radical) and all of whom are massage therapists or massage students.
This has happened to me before, and it will likely happen to me again, although I’m working on preventing it. But this has me thinking a lot about privilege, and access to medical care, and sick days, and disability, and, oh, lots of things.
Like there’s this: since it happened, I’ve seen a massage therapist, a physical therapist, and the chiropractor twice. The latter two are almost entirely covered by my insurance, and the former offers me a student discount (which I can only be because I had good enough credit to have taken out a massive loan to cover my schooling — it’s really true that the more you make, the less you spend).
And there’s this: The Man took two days off, took a super long lunch to get me to an appointment the third day, and has a job that allows him to work from home once a week so he was around again to help me out today. He’s salaried, has abundant sick and vacation days, and is in a class of work that allows for flexible hours and minimum oversight.
And this: when I am not up to writing, when I am not up to taking out my own damn sponge, I can do nothing but sit around and pop NSAIDs and ice my back and go to body work appointments and bitch about #backpocalypse2010 on Twitter. I lose some readers and some momentum, I miss a week of The Boychick’s Bookshelf and am five days late on a monthly menstrual post: I do not lose my job, I do not worry about paying my rent, I do not grit my teeth and soldier through and further damage myself to avoid those things.
And then there’s how hard it is to ask for help, the socially imposed conditioning to apologize for being hurt that I’ve struggled with, the allowances I am given because this is presumed to be temporary, the language used to describe the incapacity that is today only for me and every day for others, the suggestions that it’s my own fault for not taking better care of myself, the voices saying that if I’m so damaged what am I doing trying to be a massage therapist… there’s rather more going on than I can identify, much less analyze. Especially as the ice pack melts and my hips start tingling and my back starts twitching and my bed starts calling — loudly, in the form of snores from my child and texts from my lover.
But I haven’t forgotten you, and soon I’ll be back with another Boychick’s Bookshelf (and there may be a collaboration there to announce soon — stay tuned!), and a review of Flow
(oh so mixed), and whatever else I can eke out time for (ideas I never lack — time to follow through, often). And I promise it’ll be a little less apocalyptic, and a lot more topical.