Tidbit: what (my) cerebral palsy is like:

[capri0mni]

Back in May, I wrote the following analogy about what living inside my body with cerebral palsy is like:

(Quote) Imagine trying to open your door, and go inside your house. Simple, right? Now, imagine that your arms are full of a dozen loose oranges [snippity-snip]

So reaching out to turn the doorknob is interrupted several times in order to catch a threatening orange avelanche with your chin, and then you have to pause, and rearrange your load. (Unquote)

(The whole thing is here: Musing on the idea of "I," and what "Me" means to me...

Well, yesterday (or it may be the day before), that analogy came back to mind as a perfect little example played itself out:

I went to the water dispenser in the refrigerator, to fill up my coffee mug. Only, I'd left a water class on the shelf. So I put the mug in my left hand, grasping the whole top of it in my fingers, and took the water glass in my right hand, and moved to put it down on the counter.

No matter how I tried, I couldn't get my right arm to extend comfortably enough that I could put the glass down with any confidence that it wouldn't go crashing to the floor (and it's one of only two glasses I have that are actually glass... for this very reason.

The way I got around the problem? I stopped, and changed the grip on my coffee mug, so my left hand was more comfortable.

After that, my right hand and arm worked perfectly and smoothly as if I had no (or hardly no) balance problems at all.

Heh. Sometimes, my right hand knows far too much about what my left hand is doing...

Comments

[spiralsheep]

Your descriptions are brilliantly communicative. Thank you.

[capri0mni]

Thanks. As someone wrestling with getting through a story without blandly infodumping, or being overtly purple, today, that's reassuring.

My body: my very own, long-running, inside joke...