
We’re camping in the lounge room. While people in other places are in COVID lockdown, here in small, quiet, pretty land we’re in injury lockdown. One of us can’t walk properly and one of us has a large plastic cone on her head.
I am now familiar with the excruciating pain that is plantar fasciitis, probably brought on by excessive walking of the ever enthusiastic Miss Daisy. Suddenly not being able to walk is odd. How to get dressed without putting weight on one leg? How to get in and out of the shower-over-bathtub arrangement? How to even get downstairs to the bathroom in the first place?
I’ve been thinking a lot about a colleague who lives with chronic pain. I don’t know how she does it.
Miss Daisy, feeling suddenly underwalked, decided to turn the house into a bomb site. Unfortunately, this happened on the same day that a painter came to give me a quote. He picked his way through the chewed sticks and egg carton fragments downstairs without comment, but I believe there was a hint of disgust when he saw the crushed snail on the bedroom carpet.
The next day I could put some weight on my foot. Daisy was at the vet, being spayed, so I hobbled around picking up detritus and did many loads of washing. Cyclone Daisy thinks washing line is a fun game, the aim of which is to get everything down into the dirt, so while she was under anaesthetic I stealthily washed and dried pretty much everything. She’ll never know.
The first 24 hours of lounge room camping featured a crying, pacing puppy. We’ve both been very tired since. Thankfully, there’s now a fair bit of napping happening. Our days involve moving from the lounge room to the garden and back again. She sleeps or watches dog TV (the view from the back fence). I read, snooze and enjoy the moment by moment pace of each day.

The highlight of this week was a hypnosis session. On a friend’s recommendation I booked in with a professional counsellor and hypnotherapist from Victoria.
In our preliminary chat she really nailed how I was feeling and what I wanted to address. She was funny as well as perceptive. “This is not stage hypnosis,” she said. “I won’t make you cluck like a chicken…although I could!”
Most of what we did in the first session felt like guided meditation in glorious, opulent colour. When she asked me to imagine being in a long corridor with many doors, I found myself in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, which was sparklingly wonderful.
At times my brain heard what she was saying and thought, “That’s an interesting word arrangement/repetition.” I tried to remember it afterwards but couldn’t. My subconscious did, though. Since then I’ve noticed significant positive change in my self-talk.
I’ve also experienced very welcome and exciting “unstuckness” in a particular area of life where I previously couldn’t get out of a thought loop. That’s a whole blog post in itself, and I will write about it, but for now I’m so delighted with the options it’s opened up. There’s lots of research, planning and exploration on the horizon.
Right at this moment, though, enforced rest at Camp Lounge Room is our only option. That’s fine by me. Daisy may have a different opinion.
