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Imagine being half asleep for years and then one day you were fully
awake. Ultimately I can never adequately describe what a huge
difference it made suddenly having unfettered nutrients going to my
brain and body after years of emaciation.
While I had muddled through two scripts for 'the other science
fiction television show' that I liked in the previous year and a
half, my mind was now on fire with two new ideas to type up and I
roared through them and was shocked by how easy they were to write
and how satisfying they felt. Daina and a couple of other friends
were willing test readers and gave me high marks for both of them and
the scripts were soon off to my agent who was equally positive about
them. She felt they were a step up from my previous effort and was
eager to send them in for consideration.
After the past year of running errands with Daina and going on hikes
with her patiently waiting for my uncertain shuffle as I trailed
behind her, now I was unintentionally leaving her in the dust as
I walked at my full stride for the first time in likely five years.
On our hikes I was wanting to jog up and down the path ahead of her
while she preferred to walk. With my sense of balance restored, I
would delight in standing on one foot indefinitely as I waited for
her to catch up to me on the trails.
My adrenal glands were back, too, as I soon discovered every time my
apartment door bell rang and I was jolted by the unexpected sound. I
would have to take a moment to calm down from the burst of adrenaline
before answering the door. And even though I knew it was likely to
happen before I reached the door, the second ring of the bell equally
shot me to the ceiling. With Daina, I asked her not to ring a second
time, in the case of strangers I was out of luck and just had to live
with it for the next few months until I had become reaccustomed to
the door bell ringing.
Also returning with a vengeance, was
my stuttering.
In the later years of my emaciated mind, my subconscious often forgot
that I stuttered. Now it assured I would never forget
it ever again as I found myself stuttering with seemingly every
single word. I had to revisit all of the tricks I had learned in my
childhood years and then assure I didn't develop any physical ticks
as a part of using them. As Medicare covered speech therapy
regardless of my stuttering being a preexisting condition, I tried to
make an appointment with the speech therapist I had first seen for
two sessions in Nineteen Eighty-Five, as I had gained so much from
such a brief time with her. Unfortunately she was gone and they
had a different therapist in her place. I decided to see her
expecting the same level of skill and insight only to find that she
had a completely different approach to stuttering problems. She
didn't seem to have any interest into what caused stuttering, and of
the variations thereof, and just used the same method for all-comers
without variation. Her course of treatment was to have her patients
cold call unsuspecting businesses on the phone and ask unnecessary
questions about their stock.
Stuttering on the phone to people who aren't expecting it is
always the worst experience. At least in person you can roll
your eyes and shrug your shoulders to let the clerk know you are
sorry about the speech impediment until you finally get out the words
you need. Even calling people who know you and are aware of your
stuttering is so much easier because they know to be patient and wait
it out. The most frustrating times are when people try to 'help
you' by guessing what it is you are trying to say, then not only are
you trapped still trying to say what you wanted, you also have to now
say that their guess wasn't what you were trying to say on top of it,
adding irritation to both sides.
And so this new therapist's method of 'helping people' overcome
their stuttering by calling unsuspecting businesses and asking them
random questions, while they were likely trying
to help other customers in the store, came across as a
humiliation experiment intended to make one's stuttering even worse.
Her broad smile during these calls didn't help dissuade that feeling
and I soon dropped her and returned to coping with my stuttering on
my own.
The physical therapy for my pinched spinal nerves provided a chance
to ensure my quick weight gain didn't go straight to my belly as they
had me work out on various training machines while the staff watched.
Curiously, I slowly gained an audience with my repeated sessions as
more and more of the staff felt the need to watch me using the
machines. One time a male staff member came into the work room and
saw me twisting and turning as I built up my core and I overheard him
tell my physical therapist I couldn't be doing that because I
would hurt myself, but she assured him that, in
my case, I was
able to move my body that way without problems. While I don't know
what they were referring to, I did remember a time in one of my
college science classes when the teacher told us that men and women
have differing mobility talents that the other sex didn't. His
example was to place a chair on the floor next to a wall. He asked
for volunteers from the students, one a man and the other a woman,
and first had the woman bend over while standing next to the chair
until she was at a right angle with the top of her head touching the
wall. Then she was to pick up the chair and stand up. She did, but
when the male student tried he couldn't, even though he was deemed to
be stronger than her. He could pick up the chair, but its
slight weight made it impossible for him to straighten up to a
standing position as he held it. When I got home that night after
class, I tried that experiment for myself and found I could pick up
the chair and straighten up without a problem. At the time I didn't
think much of it, but now these years later, hearing the male
physical therapist whispering in shock about my mobility range, I
wondered if I was unwittingly showing off a woman's ability to twist
and turn even though I was deemed to be male...?
In the previous years, I found I hadn't needed to worry about my
mixed-sex issue for myself as I thought I wasn't going to live much
longer anyhow. Now that I realized, if
I was going to live a full life span, I would have no
choice but to address it.
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