RIGHT ARM, MY FOOT!

Amazing, how long you can store pain without feeling it. Take my right arm, for example. And don’t say I never gave you anything. When I get my rehab massages, the painless arm blossoms into amazing and colorful waves of “welcome” pain, the kind I can appreciate, that I’d had no idea I was blithely carrying around. I’d been kept ignorant of it through the benign graces that have always known their body stuff right down to the ground.

As of now, it’s been about 18 months since my brain short-circuited in a minor way, randomly scrambling the communication routes originally divided between the limbs on my right side, which are now blended in a curious new arrangement and must be reaccommodated, adjusted, built upon and redirected by a select crew of innate nervous system and other operative entities who are complete strangers to me, using unknown algorithmic systems I embody but am not in charge of, thank goodness; I’ve always been inattentive to the principles of higher corporeal math. 

These cryptic entities are now busy trying to reconfigure the new situation, so I wisely remain aside;  I can feel them colluding and assembling in there, working day and night, making way-in-my-head decisions regarding things that even science has no inklings of. It is best not to interfere as though I know what I am doing; when a limb is ready to make a move, it will do so-- and thereby inform me of its success. It’s a nice series of surprises. I’ve never really “known” how to operate a limb anyway, and this is not the time to start, except in the most basic of ways; best leave the fine details to the corporeal experts that were me long before I was.

These nameless entities, which have been carrying out such complex tasks for eons and to which I am newly thankful, have generated a number of miracle-level surprises along my way, the most surprising (and informative) to me being that it’s going on without me-- it doesn’t need yours truly much at all, when I’m the de facto boss, but who the hell do I think I am, anyway. I go along with it all-- not that I have a choice. So what if a hand thinks like a foot for a while now and then? 

Broadens the horizons.

HOW TO GET OUT OF BED

More precisely, that title should read How to Get Out of Bed if You Can't Use Your Left Torsal Muscles (as for example following the impact of one's left side upon just about any highway), but that somehow lacks the titular snap I'm looking for.

In any case, this is just a brief reflection upon one of the infinite pathways there are in life, and how willing (or driven) the body is, in whatever situation, to seek and find such pathways as in the present instance, in which I offer the necessary instructions (as determined by painstaking independent research) on how under such circumstances to get out of bed with the least pain, and I thought that this little procedural recipe for achieving verticality at the start of a day, and so many times later, without the use of pulleys and levers or prestidigitation of any kind, might be of use to others with cracked ribs, or any combination of injuries from whatever cause that requires them to get out of bed without using the muscles on the left side of their torsos. For those with right-handed injuries, simply mirror the procedure.

First, while lying flat on your back and steeling yourself (by now your natural position and attitude), hook your right leg under the bedframe and, after locking your right hand behind your right knee for maximum leg/forearm comboflexpower, dig your right elbow straight down into the mattress for purchase. When ready, straighten your left leg and swing it outward into the air at a 45 degree angle from the side of the bed; this begins to lift you up, hinging you on your right elbow. You add to the impetus by tweaking the angles of height and extension of the left leg while pullpushing yourself upward with your right arm as you swing your left leg further out toward 90 degrees, your body tilting further upright, push-hinging still on the right elbow, until you achieve that formerly familiar state of verticality, all with a minimum of left torsal effort, and just a gnash and gasp or two.

Now comes the remainder of the day, and all the blessed morrows.