This time I have broken all records: I've been away from the blog, and, I feel, lost to normal life, for four whole weeks.
On the Friday after the wedding described on the previous blog, I got a pain down my left leg, as I have had before on a couple of occasions previously. I thought it would get better in a couple of days and I carried on with normal life, although I missed my Arabic class on Saturday morning, just in case. On the Tuesday, I taught my English class, but by the evening the pain was almost unbearable. Contrary to expectations, it kept getting worse.
My GP prescribed three days of complete bed rest and strong painkillers, but after three days it was getting worse. Another three days of complete rest brought no result: I was only able to sleep on my right side in the embryonic position; getting up brought excruciating pain. Eventually I went for an MRI test: nothing much, except "evidence of disc regeneration at several vertebrae, a slipped disc lower down bringing pressure on the leg nerve." (Otherwise all right? as Basil Fawlty would say).
To cut a long story short, another fourteen days of complete bed resulted in four weeks of total disruption of normal life. Classes cancelled, sisters-in law pitched in to cook after hubby left for London twelve days ago. Only in the last couple of days have I been able to stay up a little longer and do bits and pieces around the house.
The silver lining, though, has been that I've been able to catch up with a lot of reading I've been meaning to do for a long, long time but I never had the chance. Starting from the classics (Northanger Abbey), I moved through Graham Swift (Waterland, Out of This World, Last orders), A S Byatt's Possession, Tracy Chevalier's The Virgin Blue, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Irene Nemirovski’s Suite Francaise. I also revisited my E M Forster favourites A Room With A View and A Passage to India, as well as Umberot Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
I stopped short of War and Peace, which I am saving for another crisis.
