Sunday 16 December 2012

Hated by My Left Side & Right Brain

It is absolutely ridiculous that the left half of my body hates me.  It's the right half of my brain that controls the left half of my body, so obviously the right hemisphere of my brain is having issues.  Almost every injury I've ever had has been to the left side of my body.  I broke three bones in my left foot many years ago, it's my left ankle that got damaged in my skydiving accident, I got a crack in my left wrist along with a ganglion cyst that needed to be drained and a shot of cortisone administered, I've dropped a one-litre shampoo bottle on my left foot which ruptured a vein, my left knee is the one I injured as a teenager and damaged the meniscus, and even though I need surgery on both my hips, my left is by far the worst.

Now, in the span of about 12 hours I have managed to burn both my left foot and my left hand, in two completely separate incidents.  The first time I spilled boiling water on my foot, and the second was hours later when I burned myself on the toaster.  So, I think it's time I took a serious gander at my brain.  Sawing open the skull is not an option, so I'll have to just think things through using the logical, left hemisphere of my brain.

 To begin with, the right hemisphere controls the non-linear, more creative thought processes.  It also processes spatial information.  There's definitely a malfunction somewhere in there, because obviously it is not processing spatial relationships very well at all.  It's supposed to be the big-picture side of the brain, and it's not working.

There are a couple other things I need to consider here.  For one, my fine motor skills are currently not working as well for two reasons.  The first is that I'm on medication.  The second is that I'm not as physical as I once was, and I've lost some muscle.  I recently read an article on proprioception, which has to do with understanding the positioning of our bodies.  The more we practice doing movements, the better we are at them, and the better we are at recovering our balance.  If we twist our ankles when we have been sitting idle for a long time, we really hurt ourselves, and the reverse is true, too, because we're out of practice with understanding our body positioning.  If we've been using our bodies we don't hurt ourselves as badly.  It's not the same as muscles, but it works in conjunction with them.  I was thrilled to read that article, actually, because it explained a lot regarding my general state of physical ineptitude.

The second thing to consider is that I'm right-handed.  That means the left side of my body is never going to be as graceful as the right, and that's saying something because the right side of my body is a klutz, too.  It also means my left half isn't as strong because I don't use the muscles as often.

(I have to say, every time I think about anatomy I keep feeling like we're all missing out on the miracle our bodies are.  The more I know, scientifically about everything around me, the more miraculous it all appears to me.)

This doesn't change a damn thing for me, though.  I'm still a klutz, and I still keep hurting my left side.  What I really need to do is figure out what to do about it.  I don't think there's much I can do right now.  Being on medication makes it a bad idea to do serious exercise, even if it were physically okay for me to do it.  I'm already giving the creative part of my brain a workout every day, now that I'm constantly writing again, so I'm doing what I can there.  I guess, like everything else, I'll just have to wait until the day comes when all is right with my body again and I can move on with my life.  Limbo sucks!  

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