Okay, on Monday I fell and sprained my hand, and on Friday I went to the doc, who pushed and prodded and generally made my sore paw ache even more. We see naturopaths, so they try to come up with more natural remedies and that's fine. Still, we've reached an odd moment in physical therapy.
I have a cream, and I have some pills, all designed to help reduce the swelling, reduce the pain and generally make things work right again. But the therapy is "contrasting hydro-therapy", which is a fancy way of saying water torture. Well, torture may be overstating it, but it's decidedly odd and un-fun. I heat a pan full of water to as hot as I can stand it, and no cheating - it has to be hot, then put my hand in, preferably gently swirling, for three minutes. Then I take my hand out and put it under icy water for 30 seconds. Then I do it twice more.
I understand why I'm doing it, opening the blood vessels and whatnot up to release the toxins and then constricting them to push them out. I get it, I do. But there are some odd issues that go with it. First of all, it feels like my fingernails are coming loose. And the tingling feels like that pins-and-needles feeling you get when your hand falls asleep, and it happens both when my hand goes into the hot and into the cold water. Then too, remember what happens when water runs over your fingers sometimes? Yeah, part-way through the process, I have seriously got to pee!
So, there I am, standing over a hot stove with my hand in the pot! It's wildly surreal. Aren't we told not to do that as kids? And for good reason! I'm glad there aren't any small people watching me.
Fortunately for me, the stove is right by the fridge, and we do have magnetic poetry, so I'll be playing with that over the next week. Fortunately for you, I won't be copying down what I write there. And while the grocery list is close at hand, I can't really write with my left hand so all the strange things that I think of won't make it onto the list, and the shock of the cold water tends to drive frivolous thoughts out of my head. But it's entirely possible that my vocabulary might expand.
And this had better work! As I said, my doc is a naturopath, and if the swelling doesn't go down this way, you KNOW what's next!
Leeches.
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