From Wit’s End

We flew back from Arizona on March 7th. While I zipped through Josh Harris’s new book “Boy meets Girl” on the flight home, I had to get up and walk around on the airplane because of strange sluggish circulation feelings in my legs.

Later in the middle of March, I was in the house and the phone rang. I hurried to answer it, and I slipped on some water that was spilled around the dog’s dish. The end joint of my right pinky finger jammed into the wall as I caught myself, and the rest of the inertia went into my calves as they slipped and skidded on the wet floor, and they got a bit pulled. The phone was for me, but it was just a pre-recorded message from the doctor’s office reminding me that I had an appointment later that week. I wrapped a bag of frozen peas around my pinky and walked stiffly to my computer to e-mail Leanne.

Well, my pinky was at first achy, and then stiff, but in about a day it was back to normal. But over the next few weeks, my legs had only begun to bother me. To this day i’m not absolutely sure which of these two incidents contributed to my leg trouble that gradually grew over the rest of the year, or if indeed either of them had anything to do with the onset of Restless Leg Syndrome. I’ve done a bit of reading up about it on the internet, and nobody is really sure what causes it, which is why it’s called a “syndrome”. In some people it can be trauma-induced, some think it’s caused by iron-deficiency or malnutrition, and in others it just shows up in old age or in my case as early as one’s mid-twenties. However I got it, it was to prove to be one of a few factors that conspired against any kind of healthy sleep patterns for me for the rest of the year.