Honestly, I feel like I’m falling apart here. I mean physically. Mentally I am okay! But physically…grumble, grumble, grumble.
First, there was my shoulder. It started hurting in the summer. I ignored it and ignored it, hoping it would get better, but instead it started getting worse. Finally, in November, I started going to a chiropractor.
I used to go to a chiropractor when I was in my 20s. He was great and I felt good, but I always felt like I never quite believed a lot of the claims he made. Everything seemed very speculative. We moved, I stopped going to him, and I still felt the same (good!) and for the next several years I was chiro-free.
This chiropractor is very nice. He’s calming. I like his soothing voice. Other than the heavy sweet-spicy scented candles that are always burning at the receptionist desk, I enjoy going to his office.
We seem to have pinpointed my shoulder pain to actually originating in the muscles of my upper back, in the region my former masseuse “Esther” used to call the “chicken wings.”
Sometimes my entire arm down into my fingers goes numb. When that happens, my new chiro pops or rolls everything back into place. It is heavenly!
So I’ve been going to this new guy and have been feeling good.
Then January happens.
We go to lunch at my inlaws’ place in Laguna Woods (formerly Leisure World but call it that on pain of death!) Jane is still on limited activity from her concussion. She has a ball she keeps bouncing but is of course doing it very dangerously so I grab it from her. Thirty seconds later I have bounced the ball into a river, and thirty seconds after that, Scott is in that river, retrieving the ball. Yay, heroic, woo hoo.
He climbs out and thinks it will be hilarious to pretend to push me into the river. His push literally lifts me off both feet and I am freaking out, like already imagining myself having the same CT scan we just had for Jane a few days before. Concussion buddies! So he’s grabbing me and I’m grabbing him and I wind up just killing my shoulder.
The next day, I’m running errands with my entire arm numb down into my fingers.
You know how on Gilligan’s Island, Gilligan would get hit on the head with a coconut and have super powers, or the professor would get hit on the head and become a ladies’ man, and then in the last two minutes of the episode, they’d get hit on the head again with another coconut and go back to normal?
That’s what I did to myself! I was lifting a heavy bag and Gilligan’d myself back to about 50% normalcy. Woot. But though I can feel my fingers, “50% good” still leaves the other 50%. Fifty percent is an F.
So January is just getting started and I am the Hunchback of Notre Temecula.
Then last week I get bit by a huge German shepherd! (They say he’s six months old but I don’t believe it.) I’m dropping Mo at a new (to us) drop-in daycare place. Mo’s already back in the waiting room/induction center and I’m just standing at the counter filling out paperwork and thinking of how awesome it’s going to be to have a dog-free day at home, when suddenly another customer’s dog runs over and bites me.
(And the kind of funny thing is that I DO have one previous experience with this place: one of the few negative Yelp reviews I’ve written. I tried them for DIY dog washing and was unimpressed. Now the owner, who didn’t make the connection, is like, “Oh, don’t think it’s always like this! This is very unusual.” I hope so! And I will say, Mo had an amazing time and came home way too tired to eat the couch, which is the goal.)
It was completely unprovoked; my back was to him. He really clamped down hard, then when I spun around and got him off my first leg, he immediately sank down for a chomp at my other leg.
Pain, bruising, shakiness, worry, Tetanus shot.
So now both legs are in pain, plus my Tetanus arm. (Never again will I doubt my kids when they complain three days later that their vaccines hurt.)
Completely vulnerable and in pain, I realize I have a dentist appointment scheduled for this week. Yay! Time for some deep scaling.
So that is my litany. It’s only mid-January, people! How are we going to survive 2012? I am actually afraid to do my paperwork this afternoon because I know I’m due for a few paper cuts.
Today I am turning to chocolate. I have the last of my Gayle’s nonpareils (why are they called that? But whatever; they are so good! Maybe that is why.) I am hoarding them. I leave the Laffy Taffy and Smarties to the kids. I get the good stuff. Let the healing begin.
Chocolate cures everything.