As of a few days ago, I should be paralyzed. My dog Grace and a neighbor dog were playing in the front yard of our building when the neighbor dog swept me WWF style, sending both of my feet to eye level, which was followed by the ingloriously dull thud of my back connecting with concrete, and the sharp exclamation point of the crack of my head.
I didn’t get up right away, illustrations from the American Red Cross First Aid seminar I’d taken two days before catapulting through my brain as I remembered my training, or rather, what to do if I see Someone Else has fallen.
My life has always been filled with synchronicities, moments where it all adds up and I can see how that moment then is helping me with this moment now in a way I could not have imagined. Suddenly, the importance of the Red Cross class was to mitigate damages, to avoid unintentionally compounding the problem by, say, bouncing up bravely as if nothing had happened, only to ironically sever the last connecting tissues of my spinal cord.
Oh, and my medical insurance coverage ended the last week of June.
I lay still, looking up at the sky, visions of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly racing through my brain (I rented that last week, dear god), and I have the thought to just continue laying there, because then, I won’t know. I won’t know for sure that I can’t move, that my spine has been snapped, that there is a stickiness in my hair that wasn’t there before. I won’t know, so there will still be hope.
But Grace is at my face, licking me, trying to crawl on top of me, nudging me, and I have to push her away in order to stay still, which means that I can’t stay still. That I have moved.
And therein lies the description of every fear-based decision I have ever made. If I don’t move, if I stay still, there is still a chance. It won’t be all wrong. There will still be hope. But then, of course, I am stuck here, laying on the hot concrete, staring up at the sky. Trying to push away Grace.
When I realize what she’d gotten me to do, I gingerly wiggle my fingers and toes, and begin taking stock, gently moving my arms, my legs, my head, until I’ve done a full assessment. I sit up, relieved that I’d been born flexible, that I do yoga every day, as I had certainly bounced off the concrete.
I impulsively move my hand to the back of my head and suddenly realized that my end of the day, half-in-half-out pony tail has acted as a bumper, sparing my skull the full force of impact. My spine? My bony hips took the beating. Make that left hip, as the extra 2×2 inch layer of tissue from an old injury (a teenage battle with a staircase) distributed the weight slightly left so that I landed to one side.
Now, there is currently in development a blue 5×1 inch rectangular strip of reminder, and I have a bit of difficulty sitting or laying on my back, but that will pass. I know that because shortly after I stood up, I went home with Grace and did some yoga stretches (so my muscles wouldn’t lock up) and while there was some uncomfortable pulling and tugging, everything was behaving as it should have been. Well, as it should have been as long as one hasn’t been paralyzed. Which I should have been. No, could have been. But I wasn’t.
So while it may seem now like a tale about something that didn’t happen, to me, it’s a reminder of how dangerous fear can be. That being too scared to move is far worse than not being able to move. To me, it is a moment where Grace intervened and I couldn’t help but listen because she was all up in my face. Which is how Grace tends to be.