My physical therapist said I was well on the road to recovery from the tendenoidal impingement of my rotator cuff. He said it a lot better than I did, but maybe you get the idea anyway.

And he said no more sleeping on my side, ever. He said it in such an offhand way, as if he was saying, Oh, and no more painting the house, as if it were something I could avoid doing. No more sleeping on my side. Ever. Oh, okay.

Well, how the hell do I do that? I can avoid painting the house, have done so quite successfully for many years, but that was largely due to the fact that I was awake and therefore I could be distracted. When I was asleep, I couldn’t be distracted, but then again, well, I was, you know, asleep. I didn’t have to actively do anything to make myself not paint the house.

Coincidentally, I’ll be asleep when I’m sleeping on my side, which I’m not supposed to do now. How the hell am I going to stop doing that? I tend to sleep on my side. It’s the way I sleep. When I turn out the lights at night, I roll myself up into a comforting, quilted ball of snugness. When I snore myself awake in the middle of the night, I roll over to go back to sleep. Now I’ll have to lay flat on my back, as if I’m dead. No more rolling up in the quilts like a rollie-pollie.