Tuesday, October 06, 2015
My new knee and me go home
So we’re home now, me and My New Left Knee.
She’s a very demanding travelling companion.
She insists I take pain killers every four hours.
She demands I do her exercises four times a day.
She insists I take her for a walk every morning and afternoon.
She demands i wear white anti embolism stockings. Which is embarrassing as she has no fashion sense at all.
She insists I move about at least every hour or she gets painfully stiff.
She’s a bit like a jealous lover that demands attention every minute of the day and night.
And she really does take up most of my day; and in that sense my world has shrunk somewhat.
But in another sense it has grown enormous.
My movement in the outer world is painfully constricted; but, as if to compensate, my movement in my inner world feels infinite.
I keep thinking of the extraordinary co-operation I witnessed in the operating theatre, with this amazing, highly motivated and highly skilled team working together for my welfare.
Chris Goode, whose new show WEAKLINGS opens on Wednesday in the Warwick Arts Centre, says it reminds him of the co-operation he witnesses in our kind of theatre: highly skilled, highly motivated individuals working together to realise a shared vision that has emerged from him.
And I keep thinking too, and with deep gratitude and awed astonishment, of the healing powers of the human body.
Of the trauma my leg received last Wednesday, as they attacked it with electric saws, chisels, and hammers, and glued a new prosthetic knee onto the bone… which you’d imagine might finish off anything other than the most miraculous substance.
Substance we utterly take for granted: the human body that sustains us.
The human body that is the stuff we are made of.
Infinitely tough, infinitely creative, infinitely life loving stuff…
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]