is there an improvement happening?

I don't want to jinx things, but the past few days have come close to a Buddhist miracle: my left hip has suffered very little pain—so little, in fact, that I've actually forgotten to take aspirin after long stretches of time. I'm wary, of course: the onset of this pain was rather sudden; if its disappearance (if disappearance is indeed the word) is equally sudden, that still leaves me with much unexplained. But wariness notwithstanding, I'm grateful for any reprieve from my regularly scheduled agony.

Today is Seokga-tanshin-il, the Buddha's Birthday, lunar April 8, known as Vesak in the old Indian tongue (and Buddhist Vesak comes soon after Jewish Pesach). I just got out of bed and stood up with absolutely no pain. I shook my left leg around: a twinge, but nothing horrible. I have to go to the office today to keep working on grading midterms; I'm thinking about doing the 15-minute walk to campus without taking any meds. We'll see how that goes. I'm hopeful that we're in for another Buddha's Birthday miracle.

NB: if my body is spontaneously healing itself, this rules out osteonecrosis. Then again, it could mean that some of the meaningless "therapy" I'd been receiving from the local clinic (which I haven't visited in nearly a week) has actually been working: it's my understanding that one way of dealing with osteonecrosis is electrical stimulation, which I had been receiving. If the electro-therapy has been working on previously necrotic bone, then that means we can still rule out osteonecrosis as a present condition. Either way, it's looking as if I'm not necrotic. So don't count me out quite yet.


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