Life of Wry

My left leg does not hurt.

The rest of my body… it all hurts. Or most of it, anyway.

Mostly, I’ve been keeping it together–emotionally, I mean. Considering. I remember being on the verge of despair when, at only 59, my right hip did that thing it did and I was sure I’d completely severed muscle from the bone and saw my doctor and she sent me to an orthopedist who said I had arthritis and would likely need a hip replacement (two of them, prolly, she said). I didn’t believe it. I cried. I hated her. I got a second (identical) opinion.

After two years of trying to cure my arthritic hip with every imaginable non-surgical remedy, I’ve accepted [hangs head] the reality of my arthritis, and [grits teeth and rattles fist] hip replacement surgery cannot come soon enough.

I AM SO READY TO BE DONE WITH THIS CONSTANT STABBING PAIN every time I put weight on my right leg or twist it into some previously-benign position.

And then there are these two frozen shoulders.

I think maybe I’ve written about the one… (the right one) that was the result of 36 holes of golf on shoulders completely out of golf practice, when Peter and I played on that luscious course in Maui in June.

After four months of regular body work–thanks Hideshi and Kellie–and some focused workouts (Hideshi’s weekly frozen shoulder class and one-on-one sessions in between), I’d regained some range in my right arm and it was feeling better (like, maybe I’m 60% of the way back to normal). So much better that I thought it was time for a return to my arm weight workout routine. I wanted two strong arms during the hip surgery recovery process because they say that helps to compensate for awkward lower body immobility.

But, I made a huge mistake in resuming my entire workout routine at the weight levels I’d last worked out at. My perfectly happy and functioning left shoulder stiffened right up and now it’s worse than my right shoulder. Messing up my left shoulder was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. Trust me.. you don’t want two frozen shoulders.  If you’ve ever had one of these, you know they’re enormously painful (if you happen to move in the wrong direction) and leave you with a ridiculously limited range of motion.

And now, times two.

So, yeah, my right hip’s killing me these days, and the two frozen shoulders.. AND, a couple days ago, I tweaked my back reaching too far forward to lift a large tupper ware container full of winter sweaters. I’m not kidding. We’re looking at a week, likely, of that lower-back kind of reduced mobility, on top of the other limited ranges of motion.

I wasn’t ready for this much so soon in my young life!

I thought once I got clear of that three-years long achilles deal (injury brought about by a sudden–and joyful–surge of running hills in late 2009) I’d be back to normal.. and I kind of was but for the increasingly annoying hitch in my git-along that portended a complete hip joint failure.

Sigh. This whole failing body thing depresses the hell out of me.  But as Jim reminds me over and over, I’m on “the path.” I’m doing all I can do to manage this big messy mess until I get a new hip, and I AM doing okay most of the time. When the new hip’s in and I’m recovered from the surgery, the rest ought to resolve itself.  A few months down the line, things ought to be a LOT better. Then I can exercise, lose the damn weight and start acting like an athlete again.

I do accept that aging brings brittler bones and less elastic tissue. The whole deterioration thing is one big assault on our image of who we are and our expectations of what we’re capable of doing. I get that our job as we age is to accept this deterioration with grace and humility and manage as best we can a profound disharmony of body parts.

But man.

Today? I seriously feel like I’m about 102 years old.

And the only major body part on my whole damn body that actuallly doesn’t hurt right this minute is my left leg. The fact that no part of my left leg hurts seems like a blippin’ miracle.

~~

A very nice thing happened this Friday evening… Peter joined Jim and me for a movie and dinner afterward. I think the last time the three of us saw a movie together was when we saw Particle Fever (about the Higgs-Boson particle and the standard model and the reason we went to that famous physics research lab in Geneva).

Tonight we saw Manchester By The Sea at the Varsity. It was good, but mostly it was nice to have a grown up night out with Peter.