Downward facing dog

I usually start my day with the 'salute to the sun'. Well, once in a while, because I really feel more awake after going through it a couple of times.

Downward facing dog was my undoing yesterday. The position requires all fours and I am now reduced to two reliables, both on the same side!

I have been making daily adjustments to acommodate the changes in what my left side will and won't do. There is no paralysis, although sensation is erratic and my ability to hold on to things and pick things up spontaneously is AWOL at the moment.

There is no telling what happens to the impulses between my brain and left side at the moment. Frequently the opposite of what I intend. I nearly yanked my arm out of the socket coming up the stairs when my left hand took a grip on the bannister that could have uprooted an oak tree. The same hand that dropped a coffee cup without even noticing it had picked it up.

Sleeping is odd. If I lie on my right side, my left arm and leg fall off the shelf that is my body, perhaps forward, perhaps back so I can actually roll to my left, onto my back and trap my left arm under me, quite painlessly, all unnoticed till my hand gets really cold because the circulation is blocked. so far i do not get pins and needles as the blood flows back. When full sensation returns it will probably hurt like hell.

If I lie on my left side i feel as though I am floating, suspended on something cushiony that does not feel stable and secure. On my back I have to wait out the spasms that firing, misfiring synapses put through my left side, including groans and yelps and snuffles that creep up and out the left side of my throat and mouth unbidden, uninvited pictures of possible futures where i twitch and moan and burble shapeless sounds that no one can find meaning in...it is a fear i look at just a little, in case I reach the point I have to look it in the face.

I am waiting, of course, for biopsy results. I have let them poke and probe and take their samples. I already know the answers in broad strokes, it is the details that hold the future. What poisons will I need to take, for how long. Radiation and chemo together or separate, one after the other or spaced out.

How long before the tide of symptoms, miscommunications from my brainstem, can be halted, reversed and how far back can I go ? And can I really live throughout my days with the taste of my mortality forever in my mouth? Will i be able to climb the 29 steps up to my apartment or will I need to find another home?

I do not look at all the questions. I don't want to give them shape before I must. I watch the certainty of sunrise in its beauty even if my attempts at salute are more like pratfalls now. The sun still rises.