Poetry Train Monday - 179 - No Pain, No Gain

I'm on Day 21 of NaNoWriMo.

I had a lot of catching up to do on my NaNoWriMo manuscript this weekend, since I'd planned to be at 37,500 words by Sunday night when I laid out my original word count graph. This year - my fourth NaNo - I had vowed to be finished ahead of time. Not 15 minutes to midnight on the 30th, like last year. Or the other years.

No, this year I was going to finish before the 30th. That was part of my word count plan. And for the first time doing this writing marathon, I was keeping pace with the other writers who'd finished early in previous years.

I'm a year-and-a-half into acupuncture treatment for my migraines and chronic pain issues, and I was having the best writing sessions ever. No crushing pain. No mental fatigue. No having to sleep with a heated Magic Bag on my neck. This NaNo was turning out to be awesome.

Then I went to my every-three-weeks acupuncture session last Saturday. My acupuncturist treated my back (which is always more of an ordeal for me) and then did gua sha.

This is what my back looked like when I got home.















That's my body shrieking. No, really. My office has had renovations recently and I'm highly chemically sensitive. I'm hanging in there, but only because I was able to move to a different desk. Still, I've been exposed to a multitude of things that bother me, and it shows in my gua sha marks.

Gua sha urges the body to detoxify, so with this much internal warfare going on, I felt hideous all week, as if I had a really bad case of flu. I muscled my way through daily word count for NaNo, but I couldn't keep up my previous pace. By Friday I was 10,000 words behind schedule.

But here's the good news. We had a swift temperature drop here in Nova Scotia over the weekend, which usually brings on a migraine for me. I had some signs of an impending migraine on Saturday morning, including the dreaded floating prism visual disturbance, which usually preceeds intense nausea and other wonderful miseries.

But remember my detoxing gua sha from last week? The visual disturbance lasted all of ten minutes or so. Nothing grew. No miseries. No narcotic painkiller.

It's all good.

I've caught up on my missing 10,000 words. My NaNo word count now stands at 36,011. So for the Poetry Train this week, I give you this opus:

No Pain, No Gain


Gua sha stripes are red
They lay you flat like flu
No pain, no gain it's said
But they sure as heck fix you


© Julia Smith, Nov. 21, 2010


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