She soon suffered from “stone” in the bladder; “quartan, tertian, and continuous fevers,” and from fainting fits; also from contraction of the muscles (_nervi_) of the hands, so that the latter were all but useless and could not even hold the staff on which she had to lean in walking, till they had been “tightly wrapped round in certain clothes.” Yet “she would, at times, strike her hands so vehemently against each other, that they resounded as though they had been wooden boards.” “When lying in bed she would sometimes, as it were, plant her feet beneath her, hang her head down” backwards, “and raise her abdomen and chest, making thus, as it were, a highly curved arch of her person.” Indeed sometimes “she would for a long while stand upon her head and shoulders, with her feet up in air, but with her garments adhering to her limbs, as though they had been sewn on to them.” “Often, too, by day or night, she was wont to run with a most impetuous course;--she understood that, by this her course, she was compensating Christ for His earthly course of thirty-three years.”[53] “On one occasion she had a vision of Christ, in which He said to her: ‘Join thy hands to My hands, and thy feet to My feet, and thy breast to My breast, and thus shall I be aided by thee to suffer less.’ And instantly she felt a most keen pain of wounds,” in all three regions, “although wounds did not as yet appear to sight.” But “as she bore the memory of the hammering of the nails into Christ upon the Cross within her heart, so did she exercise herself in outward deed. For she was frequently wont, with the middle finger of one hand, impetuously to wound the other in the place appropriate to the stigmata; then to withdraw her finger to the distance of a cubit, and straightway again impetuously to wound herself. Those middle fingers felt hard like metal. And about the sixth and ninth hour she would impetuously wound herself with her finger in the breast, at the appropriate place for the wound.”--After about two years “Christ appeared to her in the night of Blessed Gregory, Pope” (St. Gregory VII, May 26?), “pressed her right hand firmly in His, and declared, ‘I desire thee to suffer with Me.’ On her consenting, a wound instantly appeared in her right hand; about ten days later a wound in the left hand; and thus successively the five wounds were found in her body.” “The wounds of the scourging were also found upon her, of a finger’s length, and having a certain hard skin around them.”[54]