Spinalroots

I didn’t mention in the last post that while in hospital I also ended up with a pressure sore just below the base of my spine. It was more a cavity than your average pressure sore and considering that it happened so fast and in a fleshy part of the body, where it would be unusual to get a pressure sore, it may well have been infection that tracked round and rotted out a hole. Either way I was left with a cavity that needed healing and such wounds are notoriously slow to heal, if they do at all in bodies of depleted quality. On being discharged from hospital, the doctors expected it to take a good three months to heal. I, however, had no intention of it taking that long.

The day after arriving home I set to work applying a clapping technique to the buttock and tapping on the sacrum. Don’t be fooled by the casualness of the terms as both techniques are grounded in a sound scientific understanding of the workings of the body and require skill to deliver effectively. It’s not possible to work directly on the wound, but being at the edge of the buttock, by enlivening the tissue of the buttock this will directly influence the healing of the cavity. Likewise, being just below the sacrum, enlivening the sacrum will also impart into the cavity. The bones are not the inert structures that they’re often thought to be and in fact have a vibrance and quality that can be improved upon just as can the flesh of the buttock. Slowly the granulation (growth of the flesh) started and the cavity began to shrink and then as the healing got going it rapidly disappeared. One month after leaving hospital it has all healed.

I’ve also been applying the clapping technique to the pelvic floor where the wound from the operation is. This technique, just as its name implies, uses the open palm of the hand to clap the flesh. The art of the technique is in the looseness of the hand and wrist, and in fact the looseness of the whole arm, including elbow and shoulder. If there was any stiffness it would be a slap rather than a clap and would invoke a reaction at the surface. With the looseness (the hand effectively falling as dead weight) the impact will go deep, creating a suction force to draw up the juices and promote connection between the layers. We also use a good fluffy towel over the body, several layers thick, to amplify the inputs.

With regular twenty minute sessions the flesh sprang back to have a plumpness to it. There was a tenderness to the whole area, particularly around the sitting bone, but slowly the connections improved and the sensitivity eased somewhat. With slow steady improvement and increasing comfort, I noticed the other day that the scar line was breaking down at one point. It then opened up and there was a release of fluid; clear interstitial fluid. There was a lot of it as well. It came out in stages over a couple of days, the last stage being the most dramatic, and ended up in the flesh being very much consolidated. The plumpness that the tissue had before was soft and swollen, rather than firm, as the cells had swelled with fluid to protect the damage. As the connections improved, and the quality grew, the tissue no longer needed the swelling so the cells released their fluid into the spaces between them. The tissue was then like a sponge laden with water and the fluid slowly worked to the surface and found its way out of the body. Once this process had finished I noticed a dramatic shift in the quality of the pelvic floor. The flesh, no longer swollen, had a firmer quality to it and the tenderness at the bony level had suddenly reduced. I’m very pleased with how it is healing.

Before leaving hospital a doctor described to me the healing process, which didn’t include the release of fluid. He talked of a process beginning with the development of internal scar tissue, which goes on for months, followed by a long slow reorganization, bringing the tissue back into alignment in the structure, taking eighteen months to complete. It doesn’t have to be this way though. If the physical quality of the tissue is not addressed, through manual techniques, then because of the damage it will stay lifeless and all nature can do is create scar tissue to reconnect everything, but if the tissue is enlivened and the connection between the layers encouraged then it will heal without extensive scarring and in a relatively short period of time. I might add that many hours of work are necessary to achieve this, although the results are well worth the time and effort.

There are some things that the National Health Service is brilliant at, they’ve picked me up a couple of times and put me back together, but when it comes to the ‘art of healing’, the establishment has an awful lot to learn and I’m thankful that I don’t have to rely on them.