und fallend giesst

My arches have started to fall, a reminder that the patient Earth will reclaim her own. Actually it's just a touch of plantar fasciitis, probably as much due to my nightly attempts to get my hamstrings to stretch as to gravity. I got a bit of advice off the web and plan to pick up a pair of running shoes less neutral than my old pair.

After I stretched my calves the other night, I felt a tendency in them to cramp after I got into bed. The pulling-apart pain of plantar fasciitis is like that of cramp. I lay motionless, trying to relax the muscles by force of will, and imagined what it would be like to be unable to move due to shackles or injury. It brought the suffering of detainees in stress positions more clearly into focus.

I've heard that one of the consequences of being long bedridden is deformation of the ankles and feet (which would explain Uma Thurman's in Kill Bill II). It's currently slightly uncomfortable for me to sleep flat on my back - our bed is not long, and my feet end up at the tightly-tucked-in foot of the bed. I would guess this is in part the cause of the above problem for people in PVSs. Thinking about this made me feel even more pity for Terri Schiavo, though it's just a tear in a sea of troubles. Sometimes one can only understand something awful through a small detail. Of all the horrible facts reported in The Gulag Archipelago (another fallen arch), one of the most affecting was the proscription of sleeping with one's hands under the blanket - the guards had learned that trying to sleep with one's hands out in the cold was a small but special torment.

I guess that in the future we'll all dehydrate to death thanks to medical advances. We need to come up with the appropriate equivalent of "starve". It'll be sad to no longer be able to cry, to feel a drop of salty water fall down one's cheek on its way back to the sea.