Goin' dahn

Oooh, I'm going to hell for the lies I tell my physiotherapist.
She pokes my back and neck and asks me how they're feeling. Fine, I groan, even though it kills. You see, I'm supposed to be doing exercises daily, to build up my alternate muscle strength, to allow the pressure to come off the bits that creak and groan and ache every day. I want to do the exercises, of course, because it's my only chance to improve a very painful situation. I come away from each session resolved to spent the time every day, to remember and act upon the pain that nags me the way old Mrs Brilliant used to poke me with her finger in 5th grade. I go home, do my exercises for a couple of days, and then somehow they get lost amidst the flotsam and jetsam that is life around my Private Jetty. They sink below the morass, lost among dinners to make, brochures to design, cartoons to draw, clothes to be picked up, loungerooms to be vacuumed, child to be talked to, lover to be loved. The pain also rises and falls, and I'll do bits and pieces of the stretches, just enough to get by (with a bit of help from Nurofen). And then I notice as I turn my diary page that I have a physio appointment late that week. Then the exercises rise and bob persistently at the plimsol line in my brain, and I do them, just so I can recline on that couch with my head stuffed into a hole lined with tissue and lie that I've been a good girl. Well, I try to be.