Friday Night Thoughts, Day 5

Tonight of Day 5 I feel like I'm beginning to come back to myself again. I woke this morning without nausea, but this time did not take the Zofran, the Emend now used up. I had some strength early in the morning, but was back on the couch before ten. My Reiki practitioner arrived with a beautiful wooden massage table, music, and blankets and I was ready for the relaxation by then. Reiki is, as I understand it, a form of energy healing. I know very little about it, but understand that the idea is to aid in healing by channeling energy through the practitioner, through their hands, to the client. The energy is believed to know where best to go to heal, and an intuitive practitioner improvises upon certain taught hand positions. I was clothed, covered in cotton blankets, and cradled in his hands in static positions for several minutes at a time, until his hands moved to another position. Often it was my neck, head, or shoulders cradled firmly but gently. There was no kneading or massage, a relief to me. I don't like massage; I'm very sensitive and it's too painful or invasive in comparison to this. This is more like being cupped in strong hands, but there is more intimacy, in that the practitioner is much more actively focused and attentive while holding me than a massage therapist generally is. I sometimes feel his hands become very hot, then cooler only moments later.

I'm not a New Age seeker, but I am open to a variety of forms of healing that might work for me. Over the years I have learned that acupuncture can be very powerful in the form of health support during physical stresses, but that for me it doesn't usually show dramatic change over the course of a single treatment (except that when it does, it really does!). For this reason I didn't expect to feel a change after a single one-hour Reiki session. But I was surprised to find that within a few minutes of his leaving I wasn't feeling like a gray lump as I had been when he arrived, but was feeling increasing strength and vitality, and a marked return of my appetite. I realize that some of this is from getting off the meds, but it's also in spite of going off the steroids, which usually leads to a crash in energy levels. Whatever the reason, I am feeling tired, but much more myself today.

But my hair hurts at the follicles when it bends, and I can't comb or run my fingers through it without it releasing in my hands.

Reading feels good again. Last week I used my returning energy from round one toward building this blog, but then was too tired to read without falling asleep. The earlier part of this week I've been too tired to read a novel without sleepiness, but tonight I feel like I got to read enough to get excited about my book again. I'm not usually a reader of traditional fantasy, preferring contemporary fantasy instead, but in Assassin's Apprentice there's an appreciation of what in UU terms is sometimes referred to as "the interconnected web of life", which greatly appeals to me in a novel.

Side note: I'll try to get a better quiz next Friday. There's a lot of dreck out there to sift through.

Also, I'm updating my BALD-O-Matic picture. As I go to bed tonight it's not really as bad as pictured, but I expect it to be more like that when I wake up.