Pinky's Book Link

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

In the Neck of Timing.



The neck.

Since Friday morning until now, I’ve been in excruciating pain.

It’s felt as if I have a knife, gleefully twisting in my jugular region, every ten seconds, just for the spite of it.

Via Google I self-diagnosed shingles after a bubbly, red rash appeared on my collar bone… but then I realised that the rash was where I’d burned myself after over-exuberance with the heating pad I’d had permanently attached to me all weekend.

By Tuesday (this morning), the pain had crept up to the back of my head and behind my ear. It was unrelenting. Every ten seconds I’d get a savage stab of pain that would cause me to twitch in an unattractive fashion akin to a convulsing, box jelly fish victim.

“Are you alright, Mrs Poinker?” my grade six students kept asking when I repeatedly jerked and winked at them like an unco-ordinated drunken pirate.

It’s been a nightmare. Even driving to school with a painful pulsating throb in my neck was a trial. I was yelling at myself in the rear vision mirror I was so cranky.

So today I went to a proper physiotherapist and now the acute, intense and piercing sensations are only occurring every half hour and easing. It’s such a relief. I bloody love physios.

One thing I was really looking forward to when I arrived home today at 6 o'clock, was a hot shower and the sensation of scalding water beating down hard on the compacted muscular constriction that is the isthmus between my shivering torso and my pin-sized head.

Imagine my horror when Scotto (who’d had a day working from home), informed me that he’d lovingly replaced my shower faucet in order to bring me into the twenty-first century. 

He’d installed a fudging fancy one.

It takes me at least three weeks to acclimatise to a new shower faucet. 

It takes me at least three weeks to work out how to stand in exactly the correct position to maximise the benefit of the stream, how to adjust the taps to achieve the ultimate temperature and at least three weeks to get to know how the balance of temperature control and pressure works in order to be able to have a shower that makes me feel like a fudging Mother of Dragons, not a cold, bedraggled rat chasing around the intermittent drips endeavouring to get a bit wet.

If I have a bung neck, the last thing I want is a new shower faucet that looks like a model of an alien spaceship from the movie set of Independence Day.

But, I had to be nice because it’s the thought that counts.

It was sweet of him to think of me but… TIMING!!!

Hot showers and baths are a religious experience when you’re in pain.

How about you? Do you get to know your shower faucet intimately?

No rude comments, thank you very much.