("A delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me," Lawrence writes of getting lashed).
A physician assistant figured out why: the patient had run out of naproxen, an analgesic medication she took for her migraine attacks, which in rare instances can produce soft-tissue swelling, through both allergic and nonallergic mechanisms.
Some historians consider the whole Deraa incident a fantasy, partly because Lawrence described it sensually ("a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me" he wrote of being flogged, then kicked in the ribs), and partly because he was seen by witnesses looking unhurt afterwards.
Hungry and scared of the terrorist violence swelling through the highlands near the farm she shared with her parents, she and her children first moved to the nearby town of Huanta and finally to the Apurimac valley, where she found work picking coca plants for drug traffickers.
On its own terms it does deliver some magnificent thrills – the massed patterns of tutued swans, the low drumming of 60 pairs of pointe shoes, bourrée-ing through drifts of dry ice, and the sound of Tchaikovsky's score swelling through the cavernous spaces of the Albert Hall.
It then spills from Tibet, before swelling through seven Chinese provinces.
