cecil the groundhog and the weather-related injury

i need to warn everybody that in the next day or so, i probably will visit my pot of st. john's wort and stand next to it and inhale. (that's my extremely low dosage method, which my blog readers have read about many times by now.) that means there might be more incidents of 'saying what the voices tell me to say.' i have a lot of stuff that needs to get done in the house and in my life in general.

chronic illness is much more of a problem for me than the mental phenomena, the voices, the attacks, etc. chronic illness is the reason why i can't get up early in the morning and just run outside and start doing things and interact socially, do more work, do projects, etc.

on a day like today, when it's raining, my 'weather sensitivity' is acting up. i learned about weather sensitivity a few years ago and of course, it's one of the dozen different sensitivities that i have. it means that every time it rains, i feel like my body has been repeatedly run over by a truck, or a train, or a steamroller, or some other large vehicle, all night long. however, for some reason, my old ski injuries aren't bothering me today. that seems to happen when it snows, not when it rains.

speaking of the skiing injuries, which i have talked about before, i should mention the groundhog injuries, because it's kind of a similar story.

when i was in college, i used to eat meals at the dining hall and sometimes would bring an apple core outside with me afterwards, or some other piece of fruit. we weren't supposed to bring food out of the dining hall, but fruits were an exception. i was feeding the leftover apple core to a groundhog.

my roommate named him 'cecil,' because she misheard what i was saying when i told her about the groundhog. i forget what i said, but it sounded like cecil. i think i said something like 'he's a little groundhog' and it sounded like 'cecil the groundhog.'

cecil lived in a little white pvc pipe that opened out onto a hillside by the road. i put my apple core on the edge of the pipe, and a while later, it would be gone. every once in a while i would see him crawling in and out of there. to get to his pipe, i had to walk down a pretty steep hill. (as you have probably guessed, the 'pretty steep hill' plays an important part in this story.)

in the mid 1990s, i forget which year, there were several massive ice storms that covered the area with freezing rain. i was in shepherdstown, wv, which is close to the borders of pennsylvania, maryland, and virginia. the whole area got hit very badly. every inch of every object was covered with ice. it was beautiful. and you absolutely could not take a step outside without falling.

well, i decided that feeding cecil my apple core was important enough to try to do it after the ice storm. now you know why the 'pretty steep hill' is part of the story. i started down the hill towards cecil's pvc pipe, took one step, fell on my ass, and slid straight down the hill on the ice, barely missing a couple of trees, and stopped about a foot from the road. i think i tried to throw the apple core into the pvc pipe on the way down, but that might be something i added to embellish the memory to make it more entertaining. the apple core slid to the bottom of the hill with me.

i could not get back up the hill. i tried. i would have needed a rope. i had to walk all the way around, using the flattest pathways, because all steep hills were impossible. so even though my dorm was right above me, i ended up walking about a quarter of a mile to get home.

when i got home i found out that the entire backside of my leg was black and blue. it was not just one small bruise. this was an area about ten inches long. there were cuts and bruises on my hands and arms as well, but the back of the leg was the worst.

the hardest part was trying to explain to my friends how i had fallen and why i was trying to climb down the steep hill even though it was covered with ice. 'not having any common sense' was the consensus as to why i had done that.

so i might be in pain today from weather sensitivity, but it's a good time to remember other weather-related injuries.