I think it was February, I know it was 1970. I was crossing East Broadway in Tucson, at a corner but one not marked for pedestrians. I didn’t see the lady from Tombstone in the gray Nash Rambler, and she didn’t see me. The car clipped my right hip, sandwiching my right hand between metal and flesh. I spun, and fell into the two lanes of opposing traffic.
I obviously survived, but in those moments on my back as I watched oncoming vehicles trying to come to a stop, I wasn’t at all sure I would.
Wednesday is my usual day for shiatsu massage. Michele comes to the house now. The route to his studio is not long, but it involves stairs and hills, and I’m not yet ready for those. So, he brings his pads and sets up on the rug in the living room. The sessions have been my favorite hour of the week for several months. Wednesday before last (that would be February 24) the session turned odd half way through. The first part I was laying face down, and as always, it was paradise. Then I turned over onto my back. Within a few minutes, the muscles in both legs began to clench, and that was followed by trembling in both arms. To be fair to that particular day, similar things had happened before at the halfway mark, but Michele was able to quiet my body, and the second half would end as happily as the first. But on Wednesday before last, it took him longer and I came out of the session feeling a bit torn up.
This last Wednesday followed the same pattern, only Michele was able to do nothing to quiet the movement which only continued to grow in severity and discomfort. Neither was I able to control it, and all attempts only made it worse.
“This is not the Parkinson’s you’ve been diagnosed with,” Michele told me. I agreed, something else was going on. “There’s stuff inside that needs to be released.”
“The first part was heaven, and this, on my back, is like the other place!” I managed to croak between violent trembling.
“You’re more vulnerable on your back. No one wants to live in hell. Let go of it.”
So, I did.
Now the accident in Tucson had been playing in my mind for a week or ten days at that point. The central tenet of the protocol I’m now following (The Parkinson’s Recovery Project – www.pdRecovery.org) is that the body gets stuck on what is called Pause Mode, that point of high threat to existence when all awarenesses are shut down save those that are essential for continued survival. In some people, Pause is never turned off. There are chemical compensations that the body makes to afford its functioning, and at some articulative point in life – the kids all graduate from college, the house is paid off, one has retired – the reduced pressure to function undermines that effort of compensation, and Parkinsonian symptoms begin to appear. This is a short-handed version of a much more nuanced and varied process, so suffice to say that I have been entertaining the idea that the accident of 1970 is what threw me into Pause. Symptoms began to show shortly after I retired.
But playing through in the back of my mind was not what was happening on Wednesday. When I took Michele’s guidance and let go, I began in many ways to re-experience the accident, and writhed and screamed and groaned as I did that day in 1970. And shook, and felt myself seconds away from death.
The usual one hour session took two hours to complete. I had scheduled a phone call for an hour after shiatsu was supposed to be over. The call came as Michele was leaving.
The call involved a meditation session. During that, I relived the accident numerous times again. The first time, I realized that I had been seeing the entire ordeal from a vantage point outside and to the left of my body. With each repetition, the experience became more detailed and more embodied. By the end of meditation, I had replayed the accident several times from an associated perspective, each time more clearly.
I was hit as I described above, spun, landed on the pavement on my left hand, knee, and forehead, then flipped onto my back. As I struggled to rise, I saw the oncoming vehicles, turned onto my left side and dragged myself to the shoulder of the highway, where I again fell onto my back. It all took about fifteen seconds.
As he was packing the pads and readying himself to go, Michele noted that we had been talking for several minutes without my having put my hearing aides back, and I’d had no difficulty understanding. When I put the left one back, everything was way too loud. A month after the accident, my hearing disappeared one night at a performance of a graduate thesis project. I went to a doctor who gave me niacin infusions, and it was seventy percent restored – and there it stayed.
Michele also told me during that conversation that I should probably expect a few days of stronger Parkinson’s symptoms, and according to several similar experiences recorded in Recovering from Parkinson’s, they may be followed by those same symptoms going away entirely over subsequent weeks or months. So far, such has been the case for the first part of the expectation. Here’s hoping that the second part will also be borne out in time; as of Sunday night, there seem to be good beginnings.
One of the things that has gotten me through the days of strong symptoms since Wednesday night has been watching The Queen’s Gambit. One of the overriding themes that story touches on is the advantages of having a team. I am blest with health practitioners who, although many of them have no direct connections with one another, are working together to help me recover from what is almost automatically described as incurable. I am also blest with a global circle of friends who are willing to listen to – or read – my periodic rants as I grapple with re-wiring the mental and emotional habits that have brought me to his juncture.
I hope someone is working on the stirring music for the teary-eyed finale. That’s my favorite part.