The Book of Jobina

OK, I’m exaggerating, but what the heck is going on here? After my latest post, in which a session of Reiki left me feeling better than I had in months, I went in the next afternoon for my steroid epidural. The night after that, I began to experience what can only be described as a five-day-solid agonizing migraine headache, complete with light and noise sensitivity, nausea, sweats and dizziness. In getting the shots done on Thursday, I’d hoped to make sure I was comfortable for our extended visit with M’s family, including her 90+ year old grandmother, who I dearly love and don’t know how many times, if at all, I’ll get to see again. Instead, it turns out that I experienced a rare, but possible, reaction to the shots – either a bodily rejection of the steroids or the result of a pinprick leak in my cervical spinal column, causing pressure changes in my neck and skull that left me feeling like I’d been tossed in a sack of hammers and rolled down a hill. For five days.

Is there some higher message or meaning in here? Why do I keep experiencing these debilitating injuries and illnesses? Am I supposed to pack it all up and go live in a cave somewhere, communing with the animals and existing on shoots and berries? Or, conversely, am I supposed to be counting my lucky stars that I live in an industrialized, “first-world” nation, with a job that, even though it’s not exactly my soul’s calling, furnishes me with the medical insurance to treat all these issues and at least not worry where my next meal might come from if I have to spend a week doped into hallucinations with multiple pills?

I am truly thankful for my family and especially for M, who has been the most wonderful, supportive angel of a partner through all this I could ask for – despite the fact that my illness put even more stress on what was an already emotion-fraught trip for her. I am going to make an appointment for another session with my Reiki master as soon as possible, too, to see if that can help clear up the aftereffects of this latest problem. The ache in my head is very dull now, but I still feel – physically and emotionally – hung-over. The loving ministrations of my cats (I swear having them wrapped around my head purring all night put the last whammy on that headache) and going into the place of peace and no pain I experienced during that last Reiki session truly helped me get through this without completely losing my marbles.

I don’t know how to be clever just now, but I’m easing back in. Further bulletins soon…