|
|
|
sore in the Rectus femoris
Sunday, January 17 2016
In the middle of the night, I'd awaken to discover my eyeglasses on the pillow beside me in the big upstairs king bed where I spend most nights with the cats, dogs, and Gretchen. That only happens when I've stumbled into bed in the most thoroughly unaware state with which I can stumble. In the case of last night, I'd drunk some red wine and then some tequila and then swallowed an ambien. I like the way the world around me seems to come alive with spirits when I combine ambien with alcohol, but this mix also frequently results in blackouts that cause me to wake up in unexpected places (such as up on the solar deck). This was one of the reasons I didn't try that particular combination when sailing around on the Letty in the Galapagos. I didn't want to risk not waking up in the Pacific Ocean.
I didn't think that I'd drunk very much last night, but who could really say? I had no recollection of how it had ended. Happily, there were no fucked-up postings slowly pecked into Facebook, and I hadn't made any absurd purchases. Ambien has a self-limiting quality to its buzz in that it eventually robs the body of the coordination to do itself any further harm. But there's a brief phase where it unleashes a very dangerous animal that lives inside each and every one of us. This is why we're told to take it and immediately crawl into bed.
Despite the little I'd felt I'd drunk, I lived today under a cloud of discontent. It didn't feel exactly like a hangover. My problem might have been something else, perhaps a reaction to some food I'd eaten yesterday. In any case, throughout the course of the day, I suffered from perhaps the angriest, most unpleasant case of diarrhea I've had in a very long time. I lost so much water from my asshole that my normal tea drinking behavior resulted in much less than the normal amount of urination. (Not that it matters for this story, but I've exhausted my cache of Red Rose black tea and been forced to drink green tea instead.)
A hopefully unrelated problem that afflicted me was muscle soreness in my legs, particularly in the part of my Rectus femoris muscles immediately above the knees, particularly on the right leg. This soreness didn't much affect walking around on flat surfaces or climbing stairs, but going down stairs was so painful that I could only do it in the halting manner of a much older man. Evidently this was the result of installing the sink yesterday, though I didn't remember it being a physically taxing job nor do I remember pulling anything in my legs. It's possible that all the lifting I'd done to get the sink into position had strained muscles that aren't normally worked so hard. But if that had been the case, why hadn't my arms and back been affected? It's more likely that all the getting up and going down to do various things under the sink had added up to a lot of exercise for the muscles necessary to stand me up from the floor and ease my descent down to it.
At around the time Gretchen was getting back from walking the dogs, I set out with my firewood salvaging equipment and recovered two large chunks from the recent windfall tree as well as a number of thinner pieces from a much smaller (and much longer-fallen) skeletonized oak nearby. The load came to an impressive 123.00 pounds, and lugging it home didn't seem to aggravate whatever was wrong with my legs.
This afternoon, my mentee came over for a two hour session. As I've already made clear, I was not at 100% and was wondering how I would find the energy to do much in the way of mentorship. I thought I'd start out by showing my mentee the credit card harvester I'd recently discovered on that trouble-plagued Los Angeles website I work for. But he doesn't give me much satisfaction for anything I tell him. No matter what it is, he quietly absorbs it, and then the laboratory is quiet again and I have to come up with something else to say. Luckily, he hadn't done much of an assignment I'd given him, so I had him work on it while I was there while I did other things. To fill the unpleasant silence, I played the Engineers quietly from my computer's sound system.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160117 feedback
previous | next |
