Spoor of the Bookworm

By Bookworm1962

Withdrawal symptoms are beginning to really bite and my pain is breaking through the thinning opiate fog, it's also getting harder and harder to get up in the morning or get to sleep at night. Consequently there are days like today when I only see the sun for the briefest of afternoons and the door is only opened to get the post. I don't know if it's common for people to personify their disease in their imagination but for years now mine has had shape and form. One of the meningeal membranes that enclose the spinal cord and brain is the arachnoid layer so called because it resembles a web of spider threads wound around the vulnerable jelly in which we think and the bundled cable of nerves through which we communicate with muscle, sinew and the exterior world. In my case that layer is tangled and thickened, progressively deformed by scar tissue, it squeezes and damages what it's supposed to protect setting off further changes such as the calcification of my spine and the growing syrinx or cysts within the cord itself. In my mind it is an enormous black spider clamped to my back, it's legs thrust inside, blocking and pinching, numbing and paralysing and swamping perception with pain. Basically it looks like the "Eight Legs" that attached itself to Sarah Jane Smith forty years or so ago, no doubt the source lurking in my childhood memories on which my imagination went to work.

Too many bad days like today recently but even on days like this there are long, treasured conversations, music heard and made, bright moments grasped. A year ago I couldn't have said that, I'd call that progress.

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