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Monday, June 09, 2014

Putting Humpty Together Again

I guess my readers (all 5 of them) are eagerly waiting to hear about the progress of my toenail. Well, what an experience it’s been! Only I could view it as such because that’s how my brain works. I managed to keep the half nail attached for a couple of days with plasters. I woke up one morning and the nail had fallen off. I was glad because I could see the nail that was left and there was a bit more of it than I had thought. But the soft nail bed was exposed and this made me feel just as grossed out as when I wasn’t sure what was lurking underneath the dead nail.

That first night I went to bed and had a struggle getting to sleep. I tossed and I turned. No matter what I did I was acutely aware of the fact that my toe nail was missing. I whimpered. I tossed and turned some more. I prayed to god that I would never EVER be tortured and have my nails removed because this was unbearable. Even the air irritated it. It wasn’t actually painful, just very, very uncomfortable. My toe felt nervy and raw and sensitive. The next day I woke up and felt fine. I went to work and by the end of the day I was aware of that horrible nervy sensation again. I put in another restless night trying to drift off to sleep but being kept awake by a sickening feeling. By the third night I had my toe bandaged up my Nurse Nelly and since then it’s been unproblematic. It must have grown enough for me to feel like it’s not so exposed and tender now.

I love analogies and last year, at the beginning of my course, we had a class that was about ‘body dialogue’. This is the idea that our bodies are telling us everything we need to know if we just listen to it. We did an exercise in class and we talked about certain parts of the body and how they felt. What would that part of the body say if it could speak? I recall that day having a twitch in my eye and I said it felt restless and twitchy, like there was a little man with a fishing rod who had hooked my eye and was constantly tugging on it. I pondered it at the time but now I wonder if that little man with the fishing rod was trying to get me to look in the direction he thought I should be looking.

The physical discomfort of my big toe matched the emotional discomfort I went through at Christmas. For some reason I like it when this happens. It’s like the physical aspect of it is a sign that it’s working its way out of your system. You are truly healing. I can’t attribute all the pain I felt at Christmas to my ex-boyfriend. I had a whole lot of other hurt I needed to get out of my system before he even came along. I suspect he did too. But it’s ok because I’m training to be a counsellor and as someone once said “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again but we can because we’re counsellors”.

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