Today is a bad day.
The third in a series.
And I know there can be bad days. All my therapists have warned me that the healing process involves both worsening and improvement, which alternate each other in no particular or easy order. That the graph of cures is characterised by an undulating curve. That there can be surprises even on the same day, that everything can change in a few hours as a result of too much or too little exercise. In short, it's all about balance, even in rehabilitation (irony of fate, eh?). You have to listen to your body, but not too much in order not to encourage maladaptation. Doing thousand series of exercises at any hour of the day, changing speed and intensity over time, with the risk of incurring in a deterioration. But, when you feel a little bit better, if you don't give it a try to go a little 'further' (and I'm not talking about marathons, but rather simple walks at granny speed with some specific exercises), you will never see improvements or understand what makes you feel better, what helps your neuro-vestibular system to rebalance itself in the right way.
I know that there could be particularly bad days and that there will still be as many as the bruises you get from falling off the balance board like a "cooked pear", but every time it happens and it feels like you're back to square one, it hurts like hell.
But you get back up. You try again. And you think about all the good things, fighting to get your life back on track. To return to your everyday life. To savour again the joy of having reached a peak. To enjoy a dinner with friends in a restaurant. To read more than three pages of a book. To throw yourself headlong into a sunny day, without plans or pills.
And in all this, the people around us also play a fundamental role, which can be both positive or negative. To all those who share a similar path to mine and are tired of justifying themselves or answering the usual phrases of those who don't understand (I know it's not easy to do so, but that's why I feel it's right to share this thought, to pay attention to something that's difficult to see because those who suffer from a neurological disorder don't walk around on crutches) such as "well, you look good", "you'll see it will pass soon", "it's all downhill now", "don't think about it and it'll get better", I know that some days you want to answer in an awkward way and explain that even if you look pretty fit today it doesn't mean that you are so or that you haven't been down for three days. That unfortunately it won't go away any time soon. That every day is an uphill climb because in one day you face a thousand challenges. That you are so busy trying to be back on track between exercises at home, at the physiotherapist's, at the psychotherapist's, walking and eating that even if you wanted to, you don't even have time to think about it, and that you are so tired from all the concentration such activities require that you don't even have the strength. In one of my sporadic moments of reading I found this sentence which I find to be a perfect answer to all the circumstantial comments as it is polite, short and concise: "Yeah, it's in my head. That's precisely where my brain is."
And last, but obviously not least, to all those wonderful people who are with me on this journey and have helped me getting to this point in my rehabilitation, I want to shout a light-hearted thank you. Recovering from a neurological disorder is a long and difficult journey, but your kindness and knowing that you are by my side makes everything a little more bearable.
Monte Bar, Switzerland, November 2015
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