There are days when pain wakes me up.*
But most mornings start with a cat or an alarm.
There are a few moments between sleep and waking–when the sleep paralysis is still wearing off, when my whole body doesn’t know it hurts. But then the pain rises. My trigger points** feel like they’ve been burned in a kitchen accident. My back tells me whether I will limp, whether I will be able to bend over; my neck tells me whether I can turn my head. I stretch, hoping that the muscles under my scapula and my calves won’t start to seize, but since I haven’t had my morning muscle relaxers, they do.
I check to see if something will give–my right ankle usually pops, as does an arthritic toe. Sometime my neck cracks; every once in a while, my sacrum does.
My lungs and eyes and nose tell me about the pollen levels before I see the weather report.
It takes a moment before I can turn on the light or check my phone, because my hands are either still asleep or frozen into a claw, which is what someone with Viking Hand (Dupuytren disease) has all the time.***
This whole time, a song has been playing in my head, because one always is.**** It’s usually the same song that has been playing all night, there when a cat jumps on the bed, when my arm falls too asleep for me to stay asleep.
Karma Trivia
*When my asthma wasn’t under control (before I had insurance), I would often wake up in a dream about orchestras tuning up–it was actually the wheezing in my lungs.
**We have given up on trigger point injections. Not just because they don’t really work–also because the last two doctors who tried them couldn’t get the needles in–my muscles were too tight. And the more they pushed, the more my muscles would spasm. One doctor, looking at my back, asked me if I’d seen Alien. I assured him that an alien was not going to jump out at him, even if it looked like it might.
***It’s a heritable disease that runs in Scandinavian families. My grandfather had it.
****Having a song in your head all the time (as opposed to the occasional earworms) is now understood as a form of OCD. This morning’s song, the Carpenters’ version of “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” inspired the title of this post.
