This is the first time I have been stumped… I just hit the five-minute mark sitting here with my microphone on and wondering how to start this entry.

Why the confusion? Every day since my accident I had a pretty good understanding of what went down during the day. I would take some pain pills, try and move a little bit, eat a couple of meals, and play with my family if it didn’t hurt too badly. But take a quick peek at this!

Yep! Last night I couldn’t pick my nose with this hand. Not that I tried, mind you, I just knew better than to try moving the fingers.

Today my friend took me to see a physical therapist of a different breed. His background is in something called Ursa. Calling him a physical therapist doesn’t really make any sense, but I don’t know what else to call him. His name is Lino Cedros and here’s his website.

I’m going to run you through a quick breakdown of what he did and said. Certainly not because it’s the most exciting way to tell a story, it’s just that I want to get this experience out of my head so that maybe I can begin to make some sense of it.

I sat down in a chair and he came up behind me and started feeling my collarbone. I was a bit apprehensive, but he was so highly recommended, and I met two people in the waiting area who sang his praise, that I decided to just close my eyes and let it happen. He had his other hand against my two upper ribs on the right side. He told me they were out of place and then made some kind of strong squeezing between his hands and told me to press my hand straight down. I felt some radical movements inside my body. He asked me to raise my arm and it went pretty close to straight up.

He had my attention.

He dug his thumb into my C6 and manipulated my neck for about 30 seconds. He sat in front of me with both his hands holding my hand and his thumbs on the inside of my wrist. He wiggled it a bit and then forcefully separated my hand from my arm what felt like about a half an inch. I felt a ton of bone movement, and a fairly bitter taste shoot through my mouth.

Lino whispered, “there it is”.

He then moved down to the inevitable — he took a hold of my fattened middle finger and in about half a second I had to evaluate how much trust I had in this guy.

I let go.

This is a finger that I have gone several days without touching. If I look at it too long it hurts and here’s this guy who I had only known for five minutes — built like a weight lifter — with it in his Herculean hand. He squeezed it and bent it side to side while I loudly whispered, “oh mother, oh mother, oh mother”. I can’t quite remember feeling pain like that since I passed a kidney stone 20 years ago.

He told me that my fingers were so swollen from a massive buildup of lymphatic fluids. That stuff isn’t supposed to park itself in the fingers! The numbing was explained because lymphatic fluid was blocking all oxygen from the nerves.

I spent the next 20 minutes staring at my hand as the modeled colors of red, white, blue, and purple slowly gushed down towards my wrist… well past the second knuckle where the stagnation had been living for the last month.

Tonight, as I write this, the numbing in my ring finger is down about 40% and my middle finger, while still numb, is very colorful, less swollen, and more sensitive than I it has been since the accident. I have a lot of feeling of blood moving, lymphatic fluid draining, and real internal warmth.

I am able to close my hand a little bit further tonight. I expect the draining to keep going for a few days and hopefully I will be able to close my hand completely before I see him again next week.

It was a real interesting day.

So tonight I have been thinking why nobody told me my ribs were out of place, or that my fingers were puffy because of lymphatic fluid had taken up residence.

People have always seemed to come into my life when I am ready for them, and I certainly feel that today was no exception. Since the accident, my goal has been to get my body back to a healthy place and although I had been doing what all the professionals had advised, I believe there has always been a special guardian angel around me who kept asking, “what else?”.

And thank God for that.