Which of these topics is most deserving of its own post: movie nights with Best Friend, the working theory on what’s wrong with my underarm, or why I’ve joined Youngest Sister in wanting to dangle Tom from a penthouse window? I couldn’t decide, and they’re probably equally uninteresting, so let’s work our way through a medley of singles that failed to chart.
The orthopedic PT, who looked like Toni Collette with a septum ring, poked at my underarm knot for a long time before asking if I’ve had an ultrasound. When I said ‘yes,’ she asked about a CT scan. I told her they’d done one of those for my chest (due to a mystery bump), along with a shoulder MRI and mammogram. She confirmed that by scrolling through my record and skimming the reports. Then she pulled up diagrams of muscles in the region and spent a couple minutes studying them.
In her opinion, the combination of rigidity (particularly in my left trapezius and shoulder) and cervical dystonia has shortened muscles in my underarm area. She believes that’s been the case for years now and didn’t give me much hope we’ll ever banish it completely — even with medication and Botox, the left side of my body is quite rigid — and if I give that too much thought, I’ll want to cry; that’s how sick I am of this knot.* Before showing me the exercises I’m supposed to do, she wanted to work on my arm herself.
“Can I give you a massage?” she asked, already reaching for a coconut oil/shea butter concoction. Physical therapy massage can be a hair-raising experience that leaves you in pain for days afterward, so I wasn’t surprised to wake up to an achy underarm today. As she dug into my arm and the side of a pec, we discussed our dogs and siblings. Since Tom is currently both of those things, we’ll move along to her.
Youngest Sister and I compared notes on her this week and found each of us held missing puzzle pieces that gave us a clearer picture of what happened. That image, unfortunately, is one of Tom as an even bigger worm than we thought. I was particularly unimpressed with the way she tweaked the story I was told to paint her ex, T.E., as being more unstable than she was in the months leading up to what happened. In fact, much of what Tom said was a self-serving cover to obfuscate how manipulative and coercive she’d been toward the ex.
There’s a bigger story here about the dangers of trying to control phony narratives, but what bothered me the most is that Tom would so eagerly and calculatedly weaponize her ex’s mental health history against her to protect her own reputation. I’d seen through some of it before and had already called her on it, but there was so much more where that came from. “You’re a regular Charles Boyer,” I want to tell her, but she might ask “What does canned ravioli have to do with this?”
Next, and most trivially, Best Friend has suggested a few times recently that we have movie nights. We like many of the same filmmakers and he knows Crankenstein isn’t interested in most of what I watch, but I think there might be more to it than that. I’m not going to come right out and ask if he wants us to spend more time together now, before I finish turning into a mummy or lose my marbles, but I might needle him a bit by choosing films like One Way Passage or ‘Til We Meet Again.**
That’s it for tonight… almost. If I don’t have time to write during the day, I do it before bed; then I wake up the next morning and fix all the glaring mistakes. This is a before-bed post that will get cleaned up in the morning. Last night’s post was also finished late, and today I realized it contained a rough draft of the final paragraph. The final draft’s not much different, just cleaner. This is the stupid stuff I think about in spare moments: “Sonofabitch, that second ‘greeted’ should’ve been replaced!” But my regret’s never about anything important. I’m not John Horne Burns piecing together “The Gallery,” I’m writing about Akon or the “Reba” theme song, which went out with a whimper in its final, overly folksy iteration.
* I’ll continue doing everything she suggested and got her permission to cancel our second appointment since the exercises are straightforward and the neurologic PT has all the info she needs now. If none of it relaxes my arm enough to offer some relief, the neurologist said we have a couple of medication options. The potential side effects are serious enough that it’s worth trying this first.
** Terms of Endearment would be derailed by jabber about Debra Winger’s best work; The Seventh Seal would cause problems because I like Bergman and he’s prone to sentiments like “fuck Strindberg for giving us Bergman” and “John Updike is up there with Ingmar Bergman, whose grave I would dig up just to punch him in the face.”