Flat out on the couch

Well, it wasn’t a great start to building house number five with VBC. I had a few muscle spasms in my back so I decided to have a couple of days off to let it settle down but they just settled in for the week.

By the end of the week they had started to ease but it was still enough to cause concern so I went to a physio. After an hour, I left feeling no better and with one extra niggle to deal with, which turned into a second week of laying on my back on the couch, which all sounds okay if you’re at home with a TV that speaks English (ours does but it’s very hard to understand).

Finally, things started to come good around Thursday of the second week so the Journo and I decided to go explore the countryside on Saturday on a motorbike, which you can now rent here in Siem Reap.

We had a great morning out on the bike, chatted to some buffalo and had a nice lunch at a little restaurant, about 30 kilometres out of town, run by a Cambodian woman who speaks French perfectly, apparently – but very little English.

So after lunch we head for home to complete a lovely day after a fortnight of back pain. It was just nice to get outside and get that open-air feeling without a care in the world.

About three hours after getting home I started to get this other feeling, not quite as nice as the first one – more of a giving birth to an angle grinder while it’s running out through the stomach. So Sunday brought a trip off to a clinic to get checked out and resulted in an armful of pills and a couple of my favourites – needles. And it looks like I will be down for a third week. But hey, things can only get better, or so they say. Well screw them.

On the third night of not being able to sleep because of stomach pain my back started to play up again, so it’s off to the couch again to at least find a position that helps that.

Finally, after five days of eating like a sparrow and crapping like an elephant, my stomach pain has settled somewhat and my back pain is almost gone and we got up to another power-free day in Cambodia. Oh well, might go lay down on the couch.

The Joker.