Not long ago, perhaps a week now, suddenly my left shoulder hurt. A lot. I couldn’t sleep on it, and I prefer to flop around all night, sleeping on either shoulder. I don’t like to be deprived of the opportunity and being only offered a one-position option.
Arthritis, probably, the barometer had gone down, sometime I react to that.
As the next couple of days progressed, the pain became unbearable. I was reduced to lying in bed and gritting my teeth and sweating through it. I began to imagine maybe the Blastomycosis from ten years ago had returned and I would die. Naturally, by now, I am remembering to pray, but I try not to plead.
During the height of this I was trying to write up maybe five times the new listings I usually do and had been manic at my computer. Oh, oh, maybe I should Google “manic at my computer with left shoulder pain”. Sure enough, I found somebody who had typed their left shoulder into oblivion. I moved a light so I wouldn’t crane my neck, changed keyboards, moved the keyboard (I take lots of notes and have a wad of them at the left of the keyboard and lean a little to the right to accommodate for that).
I consciously changed my posture. I took some aspirin. I tried to stay away from my war game even though one of my cities was being blown up by a marauding bad guy.
I missed stuff I usually attend. After I had to skip a Thursday night thing I dearly love to attend, I decided enough was enough. I decided to go to a doctor Friday.
Unless you read me ten years ago you don’t know how hard I’ll resist that, and I just chose the option most obvious-go to the new place that didn’t sue me for ten thousand dollars of fooling around while failing to produce a diagnosis a decade ago.
For whatever reason, the new place is obviously a favorite of our Central American population and in fact any signs on the wall are in about five different languages. They were quiet, without that strange hospital/factory atmosphere. The receptionist seemed slightly startled by my approach which was “I need to see a doctor please”. There’s some paperwork, she informs me and she assists me smoothly through that. Then there’s the part where I don’t have an appointment.
She calls to someone “there’s an, ah, old guy out here with shoulder pain”. I don’t remember ever being called that before, but I think oh good, that’ll get some attention, I might be a heart attack, even though that wasn’t on my list of likely suspects.
They worked me in after a short wait, in which I was beginning to think I was quite out of place because everyone else who was waiting spoke Spanish and I don’t. But I’m accustomed to being out of place: I qualify under various other attributes besides language.
The nurse practitioner (I think it was) who saw me asked some stuff, eliminated some things and finally came up with maybe we should take an x-ray. However, that was up to me, and I had just blown my backup supply of money getting in the door. Let’s not, I shared.
Ok, she tells me, the most likely culprit is that you bumped it against something or moved funny when you put on your shirt, or some other scenario like that. These things can happen when we get “older”. There it was again. I know I looked like death warmed over because I FELT like death warmed over, but two times in one day? Come on, I can keep up in conversations among people MUCH younger than I am, and they’re often surprised when I tell them my age (despite my overall gray-ish appearance).
She prescribes some prescription version of Aleve and a muscle relaxer. I tell her that second one sounds helpful, it feels like a muscle that won’t let loose. I go get the stuff.
It helps a little bit and when I think about it, I DID have an incident one night. I tend to wander around in the middle of the night, usually checking the computer to see if anything has blown up. I vaguely remember smacking into the corner of some wall and thinking boy, I can’t be doing much of THAT. But that’s all I remember.
I assign the task of recalling that to my Very Deep Memory. The wheels are still turning when I decided to come upstairs tonight and check the usual things.
I manage by throwing things on the floor. People have never scoffed at the idea right to my face, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. The Important Things that I throw on the floor will follow me around, finishing that journey upstairs next to the computer where I will take care of them. Slightly Important Things wait on the stairway, Unimportant Things never get out of the spot in the living room where I relegated them to floor duty.
I hear you: piling things on the stairs is dangerous. I guess it is, because tonight I was coming up the stairs, which have a left turn at a landing, and I wobbled a little bit and smacked my shoulder into the corner. There could be no doubt whatsoever, judging from THAT pain, that this is where the original incident occurred.
So I’ve moved most of the stairway waiting line to other places, and I wont make the useable part of the stairway so narrow in the future. And I don’t have to worry about the manic typing which was a huge concern: a lot of good it does to work like a fiend only to wind up in bed writhing in pain.
The lessons I’ve picked up here are so many that I believe it’s roughly the equivalent of a semester of college with 17 hours of courses.
The main lesson is that I’m Older Now and must be careful because I might totter. But I got other lessons: I found some health care people who were almost pleasant, and for the first time in over 15 years I had to have a prescription filled and I found a pharmacy that was pleasant enough, and I still love my job.
All for around fifty bucks. To quote The Who, especially considering my advance age, “I call that a bargain-the best I ever had”.
