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Pain

I have this weird, recurring thing. It starts with a dull soreness in my left glute, kinda like someone kicked it the day before and it feels bruised. Then, in a day or so, an odd stiffness and soreness stretching from the glute all the way down the back of my left leg, going down to my ankle. Within a day or so it reaches the zenith of its pathology: pain.

Two weeks ago yesterday I tried getting out of bed. I swung my legs over to the side of the mattress, and between that everyday action and my feet touching the floor I became a crumbled mess, bent over in agony. I was in so much pain I was crying. I was unable to stand. I was unable to sit. I was unable to do anything without experiencing the sort of intense, unrelenting pain that makes you realize in seconds why anyone would unhesitatingly reach for opiates.

What I have goes by two names: pseudo sciatica, or piriformis syndrome. The sciatic nerve travels from the spine and down the leg where it provides sensation to the skin of the foot and the lower leg. Unlike classic sciatica which involves irritation of the nerve from the spine via a disc, what I got is caused by the irritation via the piriformis muscle — something you’ve likely never hear of, but it’s a band of muscle in the core of your glutes. If the piriformis is aggravated it can bother the sciatic nerve in a similar way to classic sciatica. [Update: please see the follow-up post]

I’ve described the pain to people as like having your hamstring replaced with razor wire. It’s actually worse, because of how the pain “glows” all through the leg. At its worst, the pain cuts through your thoughts, your feelings. It takes priority over everything. It doesn’t care if you are happy or if you had plans to go somewhere that day. I’m always humbled by how quickly physical pain cuts through everything, taking priority, and how it terrorizes me with its power. I end up impatient with others, downright angry 24/7. I catastrophize: this is never going to end, I’m going to be like this forever.

I can afford physiotherapy, which makes me lucky. I don’t have health benefits because I’m self-employed, so anything not covered by provincial health care comes out of my wallet. I immediately checked myself into a physio clinic and I remember being furious: this again. This being physio. Physiotherapy (and related physical therapies) is something I have a good deal of experience with and I never hesitate to recommend it to people; the irony is that when I find myself being forced to return to physio it feels as if I’ve failed at something. Something tells me I’ve been irresponsible, which is silly.

Piriformis syndrome can happen to people who sit a lot. While I’m one of the most physically active people I know (I walk to work every day, I go to the gym, I run, I practice baguazhang) my job as a psychotherapist means I’m sitting for an hour at a time. Piriformis syndrome also prefers distance runners, which makes me a prime candidate.

For the last two weeks I’ve been doing physio exercises three times a day, combined with visits to a clinic, combined with acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Progress was very, very slow. The last time I had this it lasted all of a week or so, and I was able to work it out on my own with stretching and massage. This time it’s been remarkably more painful and long-lasting.

Yesterday, on the two week anniversary of not being able to stand out of bed, it felt like something had subtly changed. My mobility felt more easy, I didn’t have the feeling like I couldn’t extend my lower leg when I was walking on the sidewalk doing errands. I stayed outside, pushing myself a little, forcing myself to stay active. Today, for the first time in many weeks (partly because of the terrible weather we’ve had) I was able to practice ba gua outside on our terrace. I nearly cried.

My relationship with physical exercise is a personal one. It allows me to connect with my body. It is embodied movement, whether it’s running a 10K circuit or doing ape offers fruit. I’ve gone two weeks without any chance of significant exercise, and so the things that gave me internal relief — running, baguazhang, gym — were off-limits, which in turn made me miserable, feeling imprisoned.

I suppose I’m sharing this because it’s important to take a moment to reflect on the relationship between body and mental health. How it directly affects my spirit. The pain is slowly receding, I have my mobility, and I know that soon I’m going to be able to run outside and feel better. But my experience pales beside anyone with chronic pain, and I am humbled when I consider anyone who has to go through life under such conditions, be they due to injury or living conditions. Not to mention the fact that, when this has passed, I will have spent hundreds of dollars on physical therapies that many cannot access.

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A book, some photos

I swear I’m not a packrat, but sometimes you hold on to things for reasons that seem more intuitive than logical. Which brings me to a book on our shelf at home — The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham. This was from Grade 9 English class, if I’m not mistaken.

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Let’s get something out of the way, in case that book cover looks cool. It has absolutely nothing to do with the story, its characters, the themes. I am afraid to say there are no weapon-wielding anthropomorphic insects, which was a crushing blow as I turned the pages at the time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book, and John Wyndham (The Midwich Cuckoos, The Day of the Triffids) was no slouch.

However, a couple of years ago, when I took it from the shelf to have a look, I found two photographs inserted. You see, back then I was a yearbook photographer, and these were a couple of photos I’d probably printed off at the time (this would have been 1985?) perhaps to give to one of the people pictured should I have seen them in the hallway between classes. It’s possible it was just a fancy bookmark. I don’t honestly remember, but I’m struck by the good condition of the paper (printed on glossy stock, which was verboten in the darkroom because of its cost and scarcity). If you look at the bottom margin of the upper photo below you can see that I didn’t square the cut.

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This is not a John Hughes film. At the end of the day, we’re looking at three teenagers standing at the rear (smokers’) entrance to Memorial Composite High School, in Stony Plain, Alberta. I sorta knew a couple of them. The guy in the middle was an asshole straight out of Stephen King’s Christine. I suppose I could grab my yearbook and look up their names, but all that’s going to give me are facts, right? What strikes me about the Wyndham book, the photographs, is how much of a time capsule it all is, as a somewhat complete package. Of a kid who was yanked from town to town, school to school, who didn’t get to have much say of where I went, what I had to endure along the way, who became more preoccupied with getting through it as opposed to (cue Hughes, whose movies I grew up watching) Having The Time Of My Life.

I suppose there’s a clever thing I could do: to connect the misrepresentation of the cover of The Chrysalids vs the more complex content, to the misrepresentation of how high school is sold to us vs the reality of growing up for many of us. So I will.

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Hello, world (2019 version)

For all intents and purposes, I abandoned this blog. Not willingly or intentionally. To be honest, I didn’t (and still somewhat don’t) know what to do with it. You see, it contains a lot of crap; this is what happens with any blog over time: you change, the world changes, your knowledge/opinions develop. You end up with a blog where you squint at parts, hoping nobody looks too closely at the early stuff. I’ve been doing this since 2006, so cut me some slack.

I’m here to say that I’m back. I just don’t know what form this is going to take. You see, at some points this blog has been philosophically driven, psychologically driven, artistically driven…and I always feel bad when I change the mandate.

Why can’t you be more consistent? Does that question sound familiar? For those of us who are outliers (not by choice but by design), there is a great deal of downward pressure on us by society to fit the fuck in. Because if you’re not consistent then you’re difficult, and difficult means people have to spend more time than they anticipated trying to figure you out. People who are difficult or inconsistent typically find themselves struggling to figure themselves out — why the hell am I taking a path that only makes things harder for me socially?

Often, there’s no choice. Because being consistent typically means disregarding complexity, and if you have an innate appreciation for complexity then this is going to be a problem. And so, getting back to this blog, I’m not going to sweat the inconsistencies. I’m not going to pretend to stand by everything I wrote in 2012 or 2009 — this is why most posthumous memoirs shouldn’t be published: if the author had an opportunity, they would probably throw them into a fireplace for fear of looking like an asshole/monster. Thankfully, I don’t think I come across that badly.

Kerry Clare has some interesting points to make about returning to blogging. For me, I can relate to wanting to shift away from the disposability of social media. Particularly as I’m wrapping up work on my next novel, I think I have time for this.

I hope you’ll stick around.

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The Brain & Science – The Problem With Wanting It All

As a psychotherapist, I have taken an interest in the rise of neurobiological research being applied to my field. At first, particularly upon hearing about “interpersonal neurobiology” (or IPNB), I was excited — I was seeing the intrapsychic and biological converge into what appeared to be a fascinating model of understanding human behaviour. But here’s the thing: while I have a deep reverence for the subjective life of the individual, I’m also interested in looking at things empirically, where applicable. Without this latter aspect, I feel we fall prey to magical thinking.

The more I looked into some of the new ideas permeating my field, I became aware of a few things. While certain concepts, such as the idea of neuroplasticity, were taken from science, the more I looked at who was writing about this, the more I noticed that the people applying these complicated concepts to psychotherapy weren’t neurologists or geneticists. One of the oft-referenced authors in the field of IPNB is Allan N. Schore, who is a psychologist and researcher. His books are popular with those looking to harmonize neurology and psychotherapy. And while I respect his multidisciplinary work, I have difficulty with binary conceptions of how the left and right brains work (whereas, supposedly, the right brain is responsible for emotional attunement, the left brain for insight and analysis). Why do I have difficulty with this? Because many neuroscientists would contend that this is too simplistic a way to look at the brain.

This is a blog post and not a long-form essay. I could go on. I suppose what irks me is the amount of material being written about a myriad of complex neurobiological research findings that skip over the necessary cautions that are the hallmarks of science. Correlation is not causation. How big was the sample size? Continue reading “The Brain & Science – The Problem With Wanting It All”

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Keep Moving / Being Wrong / Keep Moving

Sometimes I feel that I stand in-between too many things. Un-firm. Undecided. This is in part due to my fond appreciation for not only a lot of disparate topics but also disparate approaches. I believe in the vigour of an approach which involves good research. I also believe that we can lace “good research” with wishful thinking so that the evidence it produces is wishful thinking presented as fact. I believe that there are charlatans who willingly or naively provide a distraction that slows us down. I also believe that we dismiss many things as charlatanism not because they pose a danger but because they conflict with the politics of our personal or professional lives. I believe in intuition. I also believe intuition alone brings us too close to a raw reflexiveness which doesn’t serve long term needs.

So when someone asks me What do you think about x? I sometimes find myself considering a number of things and contexts to understand the question. The drawback is we’ve created a world where this sort of complexity is undesired. Certainly, in some industries and roles, complexity is unnecessary — a prime example would be assembly line work where the task is to simply crank out carbon copy iterations of something already conceived-of and revised to an acceptable standard. If you want to know what roles robots and AI are going to swallow up in the future, it’s those things. Complexity, on the other hand, keeps us guessing, reminds us that there are no set answers, or if there are they are kludges we developed until the next discovery forces us to revise our notions, our presumptions.

In an essay in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Ferris Jabr profiles someone turning to exotic flora in order to stave off our imminent depletion of effective antibiotics. The researcher in question turns to the lore of sometimes ancient civilizations, the extracts and tinctures from nature that one might rightly think come from fantasy, or from a presumably primitive culture. From some pharmaceutical industry perspectives, this is quackery. And yet, in one example, Continue reading “Keep Moving / Being Wrong / Keep Moving”

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The Trouble With The Trouble With Physics

I’m on my second attempt reading Lee Smolin’s 2006 book The Trouble With Physics. I am reminded of a similar situation with another book, Joyce’s Ulysses. And, similarly, my second attempt with The Trouble With Physics is not a reappraisal but a confirmation: this is hard to read.

Smolin’s book is making a case for the fact that string theory is a failure; a spectacular failure that its adherents defend with a most byzantine theoretical web; that, because string theory is de rigueur in so many of the top schools, with so many reputations at stake, no one wants to recognize the fact that string theory — an attempt to harmonize the ideas of quantum theory and relativity so that we might understand the foundation of the universe more clearly — is a dead end.

The problem I’m (still) having with the book is that Smolin is writing to an audience that is willing to take a steep (try 90 degrees upward) climb in order to understand the various concepts and theories which not only formed the foundation of string theory, but the issues that weren’t resolved through the original work of Newton, Einstein, etc. Smolin lays out in the beginning various fundamental aspects of how things work that we simply don’t know — instilling early that scientific inquiry is, if anything, about the need for curiosity. However, given Smolin’s densely described approach to get us ready to understand his arguments, and while I don’t doubt the necessity, I think he would need to double the length of his book to do so effectively for interested readers who are not physicists.

What is more successful, and the reason I continue to read it, is how Continue reading “The Trouble With The Trouble With Physics”

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Election Day

[I wrote the following as a Facebook post originally, reacting to various things happening around the Toronto mayoral election]

I’m not a fan of the “election as representation of democracy working” idea. Waiting for an election to engage ourselves in the very public workings of our world is like waiting for the fire alarm to let us know when dinner is done.

I’m not writing this as a call to action. Maybe I am, if you see “call to action” as some very simple public awareness of the society we contribute to (and benefit from).

I have been appalled by the emboldened show of racism during this election. I would like to think that it represents – along with the Ford family – the last hurrah of a particularly old-fashioned and repulsive scourge in our society. However, this morning’s Toronto Sun editorial cartoon kind of pushed me over the edge. I can no longer think of “last hurrahs”, I can no longer “like to think” of optimistic horizons (though being white makes that infinitely easy).

I suppose I’m putting this out there to make it known that it’s important to call this stuff out. That it’s important to do more than roll our eyes and say to ourselves “Well, it’s just the Sun”. I’m saying this as someone who voted today, and of the candidates I voted for two out of three have been targeted in a most ugly and public fashion because of their race and/or perceived ethnic background.

There is what you can do on Election Day, and then there is what you can do in-between. We have to do better than this.

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About Tattoos

I once saw a man in his late 30s/early 40s walking around a store. He was white and blonde and wore a short-sleeved shirt, not unlike a suburban version of Nick Nolte. As I watched him browsing with his daughter, who looked no older than 5 years, I noticed he had LOVE tattooed on one forearm and HATE tattooed on the other. In that moment I imagined him one day getting into a fight (which I can tell you he didn’t look the type to get into) and thinking to himself “Oh no, I’m hitting him with my LOVE arm!”

One of many reasons I don’t have a tattoo.

 

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The Importance of Self Care

I was reading this article in the National Post, about a psychiatrist whose trained specialty is analyzing and working with violent sexual predators, who recently experienced a breakdown as a result of what is believed to be symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). He has worked on cases involving Paul Bernardo, Robert Pickton, and most recently Russell Williams: all of them so-called sexual sadists, all of them convicted murderers.

To put this into context for those reading from outside Canada, each of these convicted – by virtue of the severity and depravity of their crimes – is a poster boy for reinstating capital punishment (which, for the record, I do not support). They have individually terrorized regions of the country when they were active. It’s important to understand all of this due to the nature of being a mental health professional – someone trained to see people as people no matter who they might be or what they might have done – working with people of this description.

The article describes how Dr. John Bradford simply lost his ability to keep the burden of content (and ostensibly the affect of said content) from seeping into his consciousness, whereas before he was able to separate the explicitly graphic information he worked with from getting to him. What stood out in the article for me was the following:

“What he wouldn’t realize until he went into therapy was that the videos from his many cases had been gradually taking their toll and they rushed back to haunt him on that long drive home.”

 

In particular, the phrase “until he went into therapy”, which implies that he wasn’t seeing a therapist until this point. Assuming this conjunction isn’t sloppiness on behalf of the writer, I find it appalling that Dr. Bradford could have such a role and somehow not be mandated by his employer (or his governing professional society) to be in some form of regular personal therapy. It boggles my mind, actually.

We live in an odd time when the general public are being told (rightfully) the importance of mental health and not allowing toxic environments to fester within them and yet someone tasked with watching videos of killers’ victims doesn’t walk into a therapist’s office until he is exhibiting signs of PTSD and is forced to take a month off work?

Let me be clear: to my knowledge there is no explicit mandate for said procedure. I am not implying that Dr. Bradford was in any way professionally negligent. I am however suggesting that the past and current culture of psychiatry, with its “detached” experts, should reconsider its standards for those tasked with a specialty like Dr. Bradford. Self care goes both ways: it allows patients/clients/non-professionals to seek help and understanding for their issues; it also allows professionals an opportunity to explore how their work impacts their lives.

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SARS Essay in Torontoist

Torontoist just posted an essay I wrote about this being the 10th anniversary of the SARS breakout in Toronto (which went on to kill 44 people and cost the country $2 billion), and the fact that nothing is being done to commemorate it. That is to say that commemorations are not necessarily celebrations, but can be sober remembrances of mistakes made in our past.

Read it here.

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