Play & Book Excerpts
Soul-Happy
(She Writes Press)
© Anette Nilsson
Chapter 29: Plateau
Danny’s deep-toned voice tells me to push, and I do. I do everything Danny says.
Twice a week, I come to his office and do whatever he orders. Mother Karin has left, and we miss her. Dandelion leaves on the yellow bus each morning, and I am still finding my way with my new body.
Danny’s good-natured hands remove the Velcro on the snappy ankle weights. The background noise in the PT space is National Public Radio, and Danny chats about his golden retriever and teen girls while stretching my bum foot. Danny is someone you just listen to. There is zero humbuggery in this man. He knows the human body and its marvelousness. Its intelligence. Its potential. He has been working with it for thirty-some years. He speaks with kind, firm straightforwardness.
He is just my kind of man.
“If you get tired, rest. If you get sleepy, sleep. Listen to your body. No overdoing at home, okay? Listen to it, okay?”
I nod vigorously. I am one patient Danny need not push.
“We want you moving forward,” he says.
“You think the doc was right?” I search Danny’s all-American eyes, hungry for something I can moor my will to. He knows his trade, healing bodies. “That I shouldn’t expect much improvement?”
Today is a day like any other in early spring, except it isn’t.
I’ve just been to see God.
I had an appointment with him yesterday down the LIE, exit 33. The right foot and leg may be out of an inhospitable bed, no crane or wheels needed, but truthfully, progress seems like a Danish spring hare: You think you see its white bunny tail coming toward you on a field dressed in fresh, verdant green but then it’s gone—maybe altogether an illusion. The lower right leg is an atrophied stick half the size of its peer. All muscle and nerve have left. The foot droops, its bottom has lost its capacity to sense anything but burning, and the toes still resemble huge potatoes. Only the wizardry of the AFO keeps this formerly fit, toned limb in place and facilitates some sort of forward motion.
At 2:30 p.m. yesterday, I met the specialty physician whose unpronounceable area of medical expertise and decades of studying have granted him God status. As he pored over complicated tricolor curves on a printout generated by attaching electrodes to my foot, his accented English—he sounded like he’d stepped directly out of an Eastern European movie—told me things were looking very bad. In fact, “not guuud, not guuud.” So not good that the nerves were too damaged for repair. I stared at the blues, yellows, and reds on the paper and their power, resting in God’s hand. Then I made sound return to my voice and the office space.
It takes true mettle to go against God’s judgment, even if he’s a bad-looking one you hardly can understand. But I had to announce that, truly, it couldn’t be that I would need the plastic brace and the sneaker ship forever.
The harsh, striking sound of God’s gavel was the last din in the office. Its echo still hasn’t left my mind. No improvement is to be expected, it sang, but a life dragging an AFO and huge foot along is. When I opened my eyes again, God had packed up the medical device spewing futures made from tricolor curves and left without saying goodbye.
Though Danny has never seen a bum foot like mine before, he trusts not printouts but the human body. And the body knows that where there is a will, there is always a way. Always. “It’s too early in the game to make predictions,” he answers. “You’re not even off first base yet. Let your body heal. When you heal, it heals. I’d be surprised if you didn’t make improvements.”
I like Danny not just because he is on my team but because he is a man with his own faith: optimism.
“Let’s put on twos today, all right? Building your core is what’s going to get you moving forward. Any day we can increase reps or weights is a good day.”
Danny snaps on Velcro, and I lift.
Of course, I beg to differ with God, whose religion is to know what he’s been schooled in, nothing else. Unlike me, he is unaware of the emerging energy medicine paradigm embraced by author Dr. Caroline Myss and others, which posits that the body isn’t just a biological machine but also an energetic entity expressing our experiences, psychological stresses, and feelings with symptoms and disease. Indeed, every illness corresponds to a pattern of deep-seated emotional and psychological beliefs that have influenced specific areas of the human body. This God’s training has turned him ignorant of what lies beyond medical school and is leading him to perpetuate a science of limited possibilities. He is blind to the magic powers of an individual and her body, and equally blind to the fact that whatever ails the soul must express in the body.
This truth I first recognized when anal pain forced me into taking frequent lavender baths, connecting me with ancient wisdom. Like a prized possession, I have carried this insight with me ever since, and have acted on it repeatedly by seeking truth. And reading Myss’s bestseller has only validated and deepened my understanding of the undeniable connection between body and soul. Today, I may be hobbling on a limb that won’t make any green light. Today, I may not know if my toes are touching water or fire or a car brake. Today, I may not be able to bend down and tie my shoes. All those trivial, daily leg-moving actions I used to take for granted are inabilities, feats of Grand Canyon proportions. Yet today is a good day because I put on two-pound weights for the first time, and tomorrow, I am seeing the energy medicine practitioner again—my fifth or sixth visit—to release hidden issues in my bum foot and leg. My walking will improve. The AFO and sneaker ship will be gone—because I will it.
And because God and his curves say it will not.
IMAGINE A WORLD with fewer Gods and more Dannys bringing hope and potential to those who are healing. Uniforms who nourish the formidable healing potential we all carry, our innate beat to balance ourselves. Which no curve can ever capture. And no Rx ever can replicate. Words hold energies, intentions, truths-in-the-making. Fewer Gods and more Dannys—that’s a medical revolution worth imagining.
Danny’s deep-toned voice tells me to push, and I do. I do everything Danny says.
Twice a week, I come to his office and do whatever he orders. Mother Karin has left, and we miss her. Dandelion leaves on the yellow bus each morning, and I am still finding my way with my new body.
Danny’s good-natured hands remove the Velcro on the snappy ankle weights. The background noise in the PT space is National Public Radio, and Danny chats about his golden retriever and teen girls while stretching my bum foot. Danny is someone you just listen to. There is zero humbuggery in this man. He knows the human body and its marvelousness. Its intelligence. Its potential. He has been working with it for thirty-some years. He speaks with kind, firm straightforwardness.
He is just my kind of man.
“If you get tired, rest. If you get sleepy, sleep. Listen to your body. No overdoing at home, okay? Listen to it, okay?”
I nod vigorously. I am one patient Danny need not push.
“We want you moving forward,” he says.
“You think the doc was right?” I search Danny’s all-American eyes, hungry for something I can moor my will to. He knows his trade, healing bodies. “That I shouldn’t expect much improvement?”
Today is a day like any other in early spring, except it isn’t.
I’ve just been to see God.
I had an appointment with him yesterday down the LIE, exit 33. The right foot and leg may be out of an inhospitable bed, no crane or wheels needed, but truthfully, progress seems like a Danish spring hare: You think you see its white bunny tail coming toward you on a field dressed in fresh, verdant green but then it’s gone—maybe altogether an illusion. The lower right leg is an atrophied stick half the size of its peer. All muscle and nerve have left. The foot droops, its bottom has lost its capacity to sense anything but burning, and the toes still resemble huge potatoes. Only the wizardry of the AFO keeps this formerly fit, toned limb in place and facilitates some sort of forward motion.
At 2:30 p.m. yesterday, I met the specialty physician whose unpronounceable area of medical expertise and decades of studying have granted him God status. As he pored over complicated tricolor curves on a printout generated by attaching electrodes to my foot, his accented English—he sounded like he’d stepped directly out of an Eastern European movie—told me things were looking very bad. In fact, “not guuud, not guuud.” So not good that the nerves were too damaged for repair. I stared at the blues, yellows, and reds on the paper and their power, resting in God’s hand. Then I made sound return to my voice and the office space.
It takes true mettle to go against God’s judgment, even if he’s a bad-looking one you hardly can understand. But I had to announce that, truly, it couldn’t be that I would need the plastic brace and the sneaker ship forever.
The harsh, striking sound of God’s gavel was the last din in the office. Its echo still hasn’t left my mind. No improvement is to be expected, it sang, but a life dragging an AFO and huge foot along is. When I opened my eyes again, God had packed up the medical device spewing futures made from tricolor curves and left without saying goodbye.
Though Danny has never seen a bum foot like mine before, he trusts not printouts but the human body. And the body knows that where there is a will, there is always a way. Always. “It’s too early in the game to make predictions,” he answers. “You’re not even off first base yet. Let your body heal. When you heal, it heals. I’d be surprised if you didn’t make improvements.”
I like Danny not just because he is on my team but because he is a man with his own faith: optimism.
“Let’s put on twos today, all right? Building your core is what’s going to get you moving forward. Any day we can increase reps or weights is a good day.”
Danny snaps on Velcro, and I lift.
Of course, I beg to differ with God, whose religion is to know what he’s been schooled in, nothing else. Unlike me, he is unaware of the emerging energy medicine paradigm embraced by author Dr. Caroline Myss and others, which posits that the body isn’t just a biological machine but also an energetic entity expressing our experiences, psychological stresses, and feelings with symptoms and disease. Indeed, every illness corresponds to a pattern of deep-seated emotional and psychological beliefs that have influenced specific areas of the human body. This God’s training has turned him ignorant of what lies beyond medical school and is leading him to perpetuate a science of limited possibilities. He is blind to the magic powers of an individual and her body, and equally blind to the fact that whatever ails the soul must express in the body.
This truth I first recognized when anal pain forced me into taking frequent lavender baths, connecting me with ancient wisdom. Like a prized possession, I have carried this insight with me ever since, and have acted on it repeatedly by seeking truth. And reading Myss’s bestseller has only validated and deepened my understanding of the undeniable connection between body and soul. Today, I may be hobbling on a limb that won’t make any green light. Today, I may not know if my toes are touching water or fire or a car brake. Today, I may not be able to bend down and tie my shoes. All those trivial, daily leg-moving actions I used to take for granted are inabilities, feats of Grand Canyon proportions. Yet today is a good day because I put on two-pound weights for the first time, and tomorrow, I am seeing the energy medicine practitioner again—my fifth or sixth visit—to release hidden issues in my bum foot and leg. My walking will improve. The AFO and sneaker ship will be gone—because I will it.
And because God and his curves say it will not.
IMAGINE A WORLD with fewer Gods and more Dannys bringing hope and potential to those who are healing. Uniforms who nourish the formidable healing potential we all carry, our innate beat to balance ourselves. Which no curve can ever capture. And no Rx ever can replicate. Words hold energies, intentions, truths-in-the-making. Fewer Gods and more Dannys—that’s a medical revolution worth imagining.
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Anette Nilsson is the author of Rafters (Lowell House), a children’s chapter book, and Soul-Happy, her memoir (She Writes Press, March 2026). She has a dual degree in political science and criminology from the University of Toronto and studied for an M.A. in education at Queens College, CUNY. She founded a tech consulting firm in Minneapolis and taught both IT and English. She was raised in Denmark and spent most of her adult life in Toronto and New York. It is her vice to want to move to each new place she visits. Anette now splits her time between Denmark and Port Washington, New York.
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Anette Nilsson
Photo Courtesy: Anette Nilsson |
