Im charged up...Im kinda wooden

It is saturday afternoon, almost a week after first going into hospital and I am home. Entangled in a delicate cocktail of medication at the moment that alternatively renders me lucid then vegetative [and morphine pumps are fun, up to the point when the nausea begins] ... I ... think I am lucid atm, you be the judge.

Im barely moving...I study motion

... so, one treatment path for ruptured and otherwise buggered disks is to have them out ... fair enuff until you realise that means fairly invasive surgery that either goes in through the back [hopefully missing the spinal column ... um, no, other options please] or through the front. C5/6 and C6/7 refer to a pair of joints in the neck, nestling sorta at adams apple level - going in through the front means pushing said adams apple and other assorted squishy bits [you know, unimportant bits that help you speak, breath and swallow] aside to reveal boney bits. If you take the disks out, then the bone has nothing to rest on and the problem is worse ... unless ... bob the builder gets out his tool kit and you affix a bracketything over the lot and introduce some nice preshly harvested chunks of bone from the hip to eventually grow over it like ivy on a primed renovation.

I am assured the bracket is titanium and not just some cheap chomed nickel jobbie from Mitre 10, non magnetic, and no, I do not get FM transmissions on it, yet. It should not make the airport metal detectors go apeshit, we shall see.

I even found a happy snap of progress during the operation [not all screws in place] in my XRay bundle which is sorta interesting [actually fairly surreal digging through folders full of pictures someone has taken of your insides, from the outside, via radiation that gets in like this liquid penetrates this chalk], in a macabre DIY from hell sorta way, wonder if they use a cordless drill or a good old phillips head screwdriver, countersunk the holes and bogged them up prior to finishing with a little Danish furniture oil? I at least have documentary evidence that my head is well and truly screwed on tight - about bloody time I say ... am sure the hardware fascination will pass eventually, sorry if it is all a little too out there for you, it interests me because it happened to me and making sense of it helps me come to terms with it I guess.

I study myself...I fooled myself

R&R time, and it is going to be tricksey resisting the urge to do too much too quickly. Certainly the meds zonk me out from time to time, but I have to be careful with weights, strain and over-effort, to allow the grafts time to fuse and grow strong, yet not "do it tough" as pain is the bodys way of saying "do not do that". I hope my students are behaving themselves, will check in on progress from time to time, but need the time away. Is affirming and wonderful to be surrounded by people who care ... interesting how we take them for granted so easily.

Im charged up...Its pretty intense.

The first "Talking Heads" music I ever heard was this song, a song called "Drugs" as part of a soundscape for an avant-gard puppet theatre of the imagination by Nigel Triffett many a long year ago. Their protopunk stage was fascinating and resulted in much music that is truly memorable. The album "Fear of Music" is in my top 10 desert island disks [as in music I would want with me if marooned on a desert island - an odd concept really as I doubt I would also have thought to bring a decent stereo, and not many electrical appliances plug directly into palm trees, but I guess that is where metaphors break down]. Neways, the album is one of their most interesting, and prolly least commercially successful, but what would the public know.

decompliment (v.) To immediately insult someone after complimenting them, thereby rendering the compliment void.