Sign your name across my skin

I’ve never really got the fascination with tattoos. It seems to me a very extreme (and permanent) way of expressing how you’re feeling at that exact moment, but doesn’t really take into account how you might feel in years to come. After all, over the course of a lifetime names come and go, ideas and trends change and something that might be considered cute and girly at 18 will probably look downright stupid at 50.

And surely the effects of gravity on skin is not a tattoos friend? That bright and delicate flower you might have on your shoulder when you’re young enough to think it’s a good idea, will surely just become a faded pile of squiggles around your mid drift when you’re old enough to know better.

I’m not sure if my aversion to being drawn on is my reluctance to have someone shoot ink into my skin with a needle, or because I have absolutely no desire to have something covering my body that in a few years I would no doubt regret. More than likely it’s probably because even at 34, my mother would still kill me.

Whatever the reason, I have managed to reach this point in my life with a completely ink free body. Not a Tweetie Pie, Celtic cross or a initialed heart is to be found on any inch, nook or crevice of my being.

It was the girl in front of me in the spinning class yesterday morning, that got me thinking about tattoos in the first place. She had children’s names (well I presume they were anyway) written in huge letters across the bottom of her back. It’s not that it looked terrible, it just seemed an odd thing to do. And a very popular thing to do, judging by the number of people walking around these days with the contents of a baby naming book etched on their skin. In fact an hour later I was in a Pilates class (yes, I was feeling particularly keen that day), and I noticed that two of the woman contorting like pretzels on the mats in front of me were also listing their offspring – this time around their ankles.

I started to wonder if I was the only one who believed having their names on a birth certificates was no longer enough.

Now of course I can completely understand the idea of celebrating your kids. But wouldn’t a t-shirt, or a photo frame do? Do you really need to wear their names on your skin for the rest of your life to show how much they mean to you? Who knows, perhaps I’m an uncaring parent, but I can categorically say I have no wish to have so much as their initials on me, let alone their annual school photos tattooed all the way down my back.

I guess that’s something they’ll just have to live with. And perhaps discuss in therapy later. That said, I do however have a set of silver dog tags with their fingerprints on. These I can wear whenever I want – and take off whenever I want. Makes perfect sense to me.

Who knows, maybe there’s something about getting a tattoo that I just don’t get. Along with multiple earings, nose rings, tongue studs and bellybutton piercings. I’ll admit it does indeed sound like I have an issue with pain, but I’ve had two kids so it can’t be that. I think it just comes down to taste, and preferring my art hung up on the wall, rather than looking back at me in the mirror.

Reaching dizzy new heights

For the last three months I have been swimming around underwater, drunk as a skunk and battling a severe case of morning sickness. OK so that’s not strictly true, but I may as well have been as this pretty much sums up how I have been feeling. Everyday I have had to battle with a complete lack of balance and contend with a blinding headache. And these are just two of the perks that you get to experience when suffering (and I don’t use this word lightly) from vertigo.

Vertigo is one of those medical conditions that you probably haven’t even heard of before you get it and have absolutely no idea how horrible it can be to live with until you do. I know that I had always been under the illusion that vertigo was something people only suffered from when they peered down from a tall building, descended down a steep set of stairs or threw themselves off a bridge attached to an elastic band. For the record, that last one does come with it’s own medical condition. It’s called insanity.

It is actually a symptom of a balance disorder, which gives a constant sensation of spinning or whirling and the illusion of movement, when no movement is actually present. An example of this would have been when I sat at the traffic lights the other day and the road in front of me looked as if it were moving towards me at considerable speed. It was quiet a surreal experience and had I not known better I would have sworn that someone had laced my green tea with a hallucinogenic mushroom or two. Throw in some dancing trees and a talking dashboard and the ‘trip’ would have been complete.

This sensation of constant movement is apparently classed as ‘subjective vertigo’. The perception of movement in surrounding objects is called ‘objective vertigo’. What do you know, it’s my lucky day. I seem to have been blessed with both types.

Now I have never had a good sense of balance at the best of times. I am likely to pass out on any fairground ride faster than the ‘Tea Cups’, I feel sick if I towel dry my hair upside and I couldn’t walk in a straight line even if it were 2 feet wide and came with a built in hand rail. So no, having a medical condition that affects balance is never going to be a good thing.

It came on out of the blue, just a week after my husband came out of hospital with his own clot to worry about. After a 3 day imploding headache, the loss of my peripheral vision and no sense of feeling in my hands I decided that I had reached dizzy new heights that I couldn’t deal with anymore. I checked myself into Emergency. One night and 5 different doctors later and the world was still spinning. I was told I was suffering from a migraine and was sent home the next day. 2 days later in a state of desperation I threw myself into my doctor’s chair and begged him to fix me.

30 seconds later he told me what was wrong, handed me a box of tissues and then told me there was nothing he could do. Funny how he knew to give me the tissues first.

Not knowing what had brought it on made it seem even more bizarre. It could have been stress (husband with blood clot – check), some sort of virus, a problem of the inner ear balance mechanisms or even something wrong with my brain. I heard that thought, I do have one. They did an MRI and double checked.

When living in a time where antibiotics are dispensed like Strepsils, it’s rather unsettling to be told that the prescribed remedy for what you have is, wait for it… ‘waiting’. Especially when it can take up to 3 months to go away. Worse still is being told not to get stressed.  Not being able to locate the butter in fridge can make me stressed, what hope did I have of staying calm when I couldn’t even cross a room without drifting off sideways or pick my son up without wanting to throw up all over him.

I left the doctors armed with a boxes of tablets to try and combat the dizziness and nausea. Ironically one of the side effects of the tablet was dizziness. I then went home to lay down and feel incredibly sorry for myself. Had I known back then how long it would last I think I might just have crawled into a hole and lost all will to live.

There are of course lots of suggested alternative cures on the Internet and plenty of books written about how to deal with Vertigo. Somewhere I read that using energy saving light bulbs can make it worse and strawberries can make it better. So I ate several punnets to compensate for all the bulbs that we use in the house and hoped they would cancel each other out.

I found vertigo exercises to try, limited myself to how much I worked everyday and tried to keep as calm and stress free as possible. I found someone to help treat the tight knots in my neck and back and made myself start going to Pilates again. I ruled out the Body Balance and Yoga class as I thought that trying to achieve a ‘Downward Dog’, ‘Tree’ or ‘One legged King Pigeon’ pose probably result in last night’s dinner coming right back out to greet me.

Then last week the whole family came came down with a virus, something that, unpleasant as it was may just have proved to be that proverbial cloud with a silver lining.

If you are eating, please don’t keep reading:

The force with which my Sunday Roast left my stomach, coupled with the piece of chicken that shot out as I blew my nose afterward (disgusting I know, but medically relevant) seemed to unblock my ear and reduce the severity of the vertigo. It has now been 3 days since I stopped popping my pills and (touch wood) I am finally feeling a bit better. Obviously if you find yourself suffering from vertigo, intentionally making yourself sick isn’t a route I would recommend, but on this occasion it seems to have done the trick for me.

So to cut a long story short, if you ever find yourself unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a bout of vertigo be reassured by the knowledge that as horrible as it is, it will eventually go. Until then, try not to get too stressed, it only makes it worse.

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Pain in the backside

18 years ago I broke my bottom. I literally broke my bottom. I fell back against a bar stool (sober I might add), chipped my coccyx and as a result have had a right royal pain in the backside ever since.

Over the years I have endured excruciatingly long plane flights, cooped up like a battery hen, eyes watering with pain and cursing the lack of legroom. I have had to suffer the humiliation of carting around a cushion shaped like a toilet seat and have spent countless hours and god knows how much money to voluntarily be poked, prodded and cracked on chiropractor’s table around the world.

Has any of it really helped? No, not really. Once a bad back, always a bad back. Short of a full spinal transplant any treatment only temporarily elevates the problem, it never solves it. All these years on and my back is as bad as ever. Worse probably, as the pain from my chipped bottom has now worked it’s way right up to my neck, which is now as tightly strung as the metal ropes on a suspension bridge.

Last year as my bones seized up in the cold and I was resorting to climbing out of bed at a right angle, I decided to buy one of those all singing, all dancing massage chairs (a cheaper Chinese version off Ebay which has so far has proved to work just fine). Not overly enthusiastic about the huge new addition to our bedroom (until he tried it himself), my husband claimed it took over half the room. Not true at all. A third at a push.

“I always wondered what sort of people had those chairs in their homes” he said at the time. Now he knows. Those in pain without a qualified masseur as a husband.

Now this is the sort of  chair that would probably look right at home on the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise. Not for the faint hearted, it has more buttons on it than all of our remote controls combined. It can also squeeze you into a vice lock and pummel you senseless before you have even had a chance to settle back and relax.

Recently, with my Vertigo picking up speed, a crick in my neck and my shoulders knotted like a Boy Scouts tent rope, I thought that perhaps it was time I got myself some further treatment. Reluctant to go back down the ‘You really must relax while I crack your neck like a chicken’ route, I started hunting around for a slightly less painful alternative and was given the details of a nearby McTimoney Therapist.

This form of chiropractic treatment is a much more gentler technique than the normal bone popping variety, combining soft tissue release, trigger point therapy and sports massage. It still works to adjust the bones of your body, to maintain correct alignment of your spine and pelvis and to ensure your body’s nerve supply works efficiently, but unlike some other treatments that I have tried, this one is designed to eliminate the cause, not just treat the symptoms.

Two sessions in and I can already feel a real improvement. I can now turn my head without first moving the rest of my body, so that in itself is a bonus and makes driving somewhat safer. While there is undoubtedly plenty of work to do and stubborn muscles that still need to be coaxed into submission, for the first time in along time I feel like I might actually have a chance to get to the bottom of the problem. The place where 18 years ago it all began.

Having a bad back can take over your life and limit everything you do. It becomes so much a part of who you are that over the years you actually forget what it is like to live painfree.

If you are living in Perth and suffering away with a dodgy back, migraines, sciatica, sports injuries or general aches and pains, then I would highly recommend that you give McTimoney therapy a shot and call Paul Dupker on (08) 93422523 / 0424296620.

And no, I’m not being paid to say this … though if this tip helps you out feel free to pay me for the good advice!

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