Now this is just plain odd.
Last Saturday we went to see the band Sparks play up at UCLA's Royce Hall. (For those who care, they performed the entirety of their classic album Kimono My House as well as their most recent release, Exotic Creatures of the Deep. Plus a thirty-minute encore that ended with I'm a Suburban Homeboy.)
Now, we did a lot of wandering around in the afternoon before the show--walked perhaps seven or eight miles up and down the Hills of Beverly and the staircases of UCLA--but we both felt fine when we went to bed.
The next morning I woke up with my right foot so sore it hurt to walk. The morning after that, I couldn't walk at all, only hop and hobble along on my left foot; my right ached so severely I could barely think. An x-ray showed I had sprained my ankle rather badly--or sprained it rather well, all depending on how you look at it.
So now I'm in a splint and limping from place to place.
It's not the pain I mind so much, or even the inconvenience, as the fact that I still don't know how this happened. I don't recall twisting my ankle or doing anything unusual. How can you go to sleep and wake up with a sprain? Am I sleepwalking? Sleep-breakdancing? Is this one of those things where events in your dreams are affecting reality, as when the giant hawk grabs you with its talons in the dream, and you wake up with scratches?
As it happens, I'm reading Jonathan Carroll's latest novel (The Ghost in Love). He's not the guy to be reading if you're worried about the boundaries of reality getting blurred.
But there's probably nothing so interesting involved. I'm probably just a spazz.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
Well, if it's any comfort (and it probably isn't) I did much the same thing with a shoulder a couple of weeks ago. I woke up with a shoulder so sore I was very limited in my mobility. Scratching my back was impossible. I'm still trying to figure that one out too.
Funny, this never happened to me when I was 20.
Ouch!! I can't say as I've ever sleep-breakdanced but Joan says I hold rather lengthy discourses in languages other than English in my sleep (apparently I speak rather fluent German, which I don't speak when I'm awake). I have on occasion awakened with mysterious injuries but rather than put them down to the action of some unruly succubus (or breakdancing), I think it's more likely that I simply wasn't paying attention. I do believe I'd be capable of not noticing I had, say, broken a finger if I was in the middle of something and could not be bothered. Whether this is some mystical Buddhist feat of concentration or whether I'm just really scary and should not be allowed to drive a car is a subject of much debate.
Maybe you landed a somnambulistic kick on "Das Ubernerd"...
David,
Did you do any drinking during the day/evening? It tends to numb the injury, somewhat. I injured my right foot on the night of the January book launch down in London, walking back from Browns and Goldsboro Books. I was hobbling for two weeks with that one – but I did remember the pain at the time; I believed I could walk it off, until we got to the hotel and found I couldn’t even get from the bed to the loo without hopping.
There’s also a question of cramp (stay with me here…) – in Scotland I once got blinding cramp in the middle of the night in my left calf, leapt out of bed and landed straight on my right foot, jarring my right ankle and knee (which I didn’t notice as the pain was too great in my left calf). Again, I was hobbling for a couple of weeks.
In both cases, drink was involved. As were hotels. There’s a moral there somewhere…
Hi, Janet--
Well, when I was twenty I did things like this to myself, but I damn well knew how I caused them...
Hey, Jen--
Speaking in languages you don't know is a little scary. Does your head spin around?
Hi, Tim--
I wish.
Hi, Matt--
Oho, interesting! Though the drinking consisted of no more than a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, we were staying in a hotel. Somehow that must be the key to the whole business.
Hotel or not, I don't think I've ever had a sudden cramp as bad as what you describe. If asked, I'd rather not have one, either!
Well, whatever the etiology, I hope it's better soon - whatever the asetics may say I don't think pain is good for the soul!
Post a Comment