I was finally able to sit down again in comfort this morning; the first time since last Saturday when I had my little accident. There was a pile of paperwork and emails awaiting me. It's amazing how far behind you get with just a week's break.

Although I feel a lot better this morning, and I can even put my socks on with relative ease again, I'm still finding myself bending down with some gingerness, as if expecting a twinge of pain (which doesn't come). I feel as if I've discovered a vulnerability where none seemed to exist before. I've taken it for granted that my body will always be there for me, and haven't given a second's thought to putting it through it's paces. I don't know if I'll feel that way again.

My visit to the chiropractor, the third in as many days, yesterday, made a huge difference. She'd taken x-rays the day before and, yesterday, went over them with me. It was quite a shock. I didn't actually want to look at my x-rays at all, since I'm rather squeamish, and feared that I might faint. But when she told me what she'd seen, I knew I had to see it with my own eyes, otherwise I'd be forever thinking in the back of my mind that maybe she was pulling a fast one on me in order to have the opportunity of treating me at (costly) length.

I've long known that I have one leg shorter than the other, and it's caused me a recurring problem with my knee joint, which requires that I wear orthotic soles in all of my shoes. I also have a shoulder-stance issue, where I carry one of my shoulders much lower than the other. What I didn't realize is the effect that all of this has had on my spine. She showed a comparison of my lower spine with a normal spine, and it was clear that the curve was dramatically wrong. Moreoever, as the body has tried to self-correct, abornormal bown growth has begun to crowd around some of the misaligned vertebrae, and the two lowest vertebrae have been pushed so close together that they're almost ready to fuse, causing arthritis. Quite a mess. So last weekend's accident was just the outward sign of a long-term problem.

So it looks like I'll be setting up shop in the chiropractor's office; she wants to see me more than once a week for the next four months. Hopefully, by the end of this treatment, I'll come out healthier and stronger than when I went in. But it was all quite a shock.

I received a hilarious card from my father this morning. My uncle Eddie passed away last week, and while that wouldn't ordinarily be much cause for merriment (although none of us, including his sister - my mother - were in the least fond of him), the story that came with it apparently left my Dad in fits of giggles after he hung up the phone from hearing the news. In my Dad's not-politically-correct words:

A few years ago your Uncle Eddie had been thrown out of his flat for nonpayment of rent and had to stay at the YMCA, from which he was rescued by a friend of his, his present Landlord, who used to be called Kenneth, but is now known as Katrina. Katrina had another friend called Leonard who is now called Lena. Maybe it's just as well Eddie passed, before he changed his name to Edwina. Your Mam said "Now Norman, that's cruel!" but it did give us a good laugh.

A funnier thing is that my brother Neil has suddenly become a very dutiful son, and it was he who made the journey back up North to attend the funeral on behalf of our side of the family. I began to wonder if Neil was thinking, as I was, that maybe my Uncle Eddie, with his various transsexual friends, was a more interesting character than any of us suspected.