So I woke up this morning and tried to get out of bed only to find out I had pinched a nerve or something during the night, just above my buttocks and could barely move. There was that intense pain in the small of my back that makes it hard to breathe trying to sit up and I had to stumble around the apartment like an old man, moving stiffly, actually having to hold on to the wall trying to bend down enough to sit. It took about an hour of going back to bed with several paracetamol, a very hot shower and copious amounts of tiger balm to get rid of some that stiffness.

While I was going through all that, I couldn’t help but think that now I knew a bit of what Sandra had been going through for so long, that feeling of having to be careful all the time not to hurt yourself more. Even before she really got ill and had to go on dialysis she always lived in an unstable equilibrium, where a little nudge in the wrong direction could sent her into yet another health crisis. Which is why she had her little routines and tricks to keep a “normal” life going.

She was always a bit stiff and in pain in the mornings; I could always see when she was in pain as she would be hunched over, drawn into herself. It was her stomach and digestive system that mostly gave her these troubles, for various reasons. So that’s what she needed to stabilise first when she got up, often much earlier than me, even when I was getting up at 6AM to get to work early. She’d move slowly from the bedroom to the kitchen, turn the radio up slightly, put her stool by the door and smoke a cigaret, brew a cup of tea, start on the various pills she needed to get her guts calm (codine phosphate, loperamide, etc), then smoke a phatty to really get it under control. She smoked enough dope to impress even the most stoned teenager, but I’ve rarely seen it affect her; it went all into pain control.

So yeah, when I found myself doing the stumbling in the kitchen this morning, that called up memories of Sand.