Sculpin

So this is a neat thing: I have a gig. Kind of a weird one, but it sounds like fun. I’ve been hired into the Standardized Patient Program at the UW. Basically, I’ll be a sort of medical actor/educator. My job is to play a patient for med students to interview and examine. More about that when I actually have some kind of experience to talk about! So far I’ve just watched some SPs at work; my first training is in a couple of weeks.

Sheesh, I’m going to be paid to act. How often does that happen? What a weird job! But I like the people there, and I like that it’ll use both sides of my brain.

I was a little concerned that my new classes in aikido would be a problem. Josh and I started lessons in January, and there’s been a whole lot of limping going on. After my first class, my left knee couldn’t hold me up reliably; it’d give out suddenly, and I’d crash into a wall or a sofa. I wasn’t injured, just extraordinarily sore. The soreness was epic. It’s gotten a lot better since then, but still, I’ve gotten stepped on and bruised; I’ve taken an elbow to the face; and I think I’ve got a pretty good shot at dislocating a shoulder in the next couple of years.

So I can see how I might confuse the med students, limping in all beat up and bandaged. But that’s nothing. They’ve got a guy there who does bike stunts. I would certainly not be the first standardized patient to come in with some interesting physical things to work around.

I’ve wanted to do aikido for a very, very long time. In high school, I had no money. (Not to mention how broke I was as a dropout.) In college, I couldn’t make the time work. After that, I worked at a startup, and then I got sick. I came back from that, I had one aikido lesson, and the van hit me. So now, finally, I am back and I am doing this thing.

Aikido is fun and fascinating, and I’m glad to be trying a discipline with more complicated movement, but I’m unsure. Sometimes I think I might have been better off doing tai chi. “Well, duh,” somebody’s thinking now, “You like your shoulder where it is,” but it’s not the injury potential. I’m just having a hard time in there, session after session. Part of it is that it’s just intrinsically really tremendously difficult, but what gets me down is that again and again I hit the same problem that I don’t know how to fix. I thought the CFS would be the limiting factor, but that I can work with. No, the hard problem has been the minor nerve damage in my left hand from that burn I took a few years ago. I hadn’t realized how strong the outside of my hand would have to be, and I don’t know if I’ll regain enough strength there. I keep having to slide on the side of my hand, and it folds on itself and collapses painfully. It’s probably time for me to talk to somebody about that, or a couple of somebodies.

On the other hand, I bring some weird strengths to the aikido practice as well. My time in Pilates has mostly served me very well there. If nothing else, aikido’s shown me more what it is that I’ve been doing in Pilates. (More about that later, probably.) I’m well aware of my hara, and I’ve learned to think my way through some movement chains in useful ways.

Also, you know, I fought my way back from a serious illness, all the way from being housebound until I could walk six miles; then I got hit in a crosswalk and had to do a whole lot of it all over again. Aikido is pretty hard, but I remember that it’s not nearly as hard as learning to go up stairs was: two stairs on one day, then three, then four, and then the amazing day when I did six stairs, oh hell yes. And after a couple of months, I could actually leave the house and get back up the stairs again. You learn a lot about your capacity for badass tenacity that way. Not that I can recommend it, exactly. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean, and I know some readers have been there, are there right now, or are having an even deeper exploration of their capacity to be badass. (Hi, Desolina.)

That said, it was a whole lot more important to me to go up stairs than it is for me to do a perfect front roll. So we’ll see. I figure it’d take eight weeks to get a taste of it; a year to settle in; three years to understand if it’s right for me over the longer term. I’ve done my eight weeks, and I’m ready to try the rest of the year.

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