Don’t Impinge On Me

Remember when your injuries came with good back stories? In my own storytelling archives, I have “My knee is ripped open because my best friend rode her bike down a hill, while I held on to the banana seat behind her wearing roller skates, steadily gaining velocity until I wiped out on a pile of gravel” (age 8) and “I’m wearing a sling because I got tackled playing no-tackle football in gym class and broke my arm,” (age 14) not to mention, “The scar on my chin is from when I fell underneath a cantering horse” (age 16.)

Those were the days. Now I can’t lift my right arm above my shoulder, because I blew it out throwing a pine cone for the dog to fetch. That’s not a story, that’s a Sordid True Life Confession.

It happened eight months ago, and it turns out that eight months of willing an injury away does not prove the effective antidote that you might think. Back in the fall I even visited a physical therapist, my friend Dawn who gently encouraged me to go see a doctor and gave me exercises to do. You know I didn’t do the exercises – I didn’t even lift the shoulder to hold a phone to my ear to call the doctor.

Instead, I followed the path of slowly reducing the number of things that I could do with my right arm, starting with a complete ban on dog-pinecone-throwing. Then I switched from my little leather backpack, which pulled backward the shoulder back uncomfortably, to a purse I could put on my forearm. Then I had to switch the purse to my left arm. Now I put money and a credit card into my pants pocket and pray no one asks me for ID.

Similarly, I went from shifting carefully onto my right side to sleep, to sleeping on my back, to placing a rolled towel under my right shoulder so the pull of gravity wouldn’t wake me up at night. There are at least three shirts hanging in my closet that are off limits to me now, requiring as they do a zip up the back, and depending on how I pull a t-shirt on it’s an exciting adventure in pain. Reaching back to hook or unhook a bra is so excruciating that I just ordered one that zips up the front, like what a toddler would wear if toddlers wore bras. Sexy.

The last straw was the February Dance Party. You know that quiet part of “Blister in the Sun,” and how you explode out of it into the loud chorus afterward? I went WAY too hard, waving both arms overhead, then had to sit down on the stairs to the DJ booth to recover from the jolt of pain. When I can no longer wave my hands in the air like I just don’t care, something has to be done.

So I went to see my doctor who put me through my shoulder mobility paces, such as they were, for about 60 seconds before she referred me to a Shoulder Specialist. She thinks I may have Shoulder Impingement Syndrome. I liked the sound of that – “Syndrome” automatically conferring a whisper of seriousness to things, and Impingement being a straight up fancy word that we should all be saying more often. “You’re impinging my ability to reach the pretzels,” I plan to murmur to the stock boy at Safeway. “Dreadfully sorry, did my car impinge your egress?” I’ll ask the San Francisco homeowner who’s pissed that my bumper is hanging 1.5 inches into his driveway, but what else can I do as there is only ever one open parking and legal parking spot left in San Francisco at any given time, and it is definitely NOT on the street where you are looking?

My regular doc explained that my shoulder is basically operating like a door that you’re trying to close, when someone has wedged a piece of wood between the door and the frame. Untreated, it’s just never going to close right, frozen into an ever decreasing range of motion. My shoulder’s been shimmed, and not in the fun ‘60s “shimmying” sense of the word.

Unfortunately, Shoulder Doc can’t see me until the end of March. Now that I’ve managed to screw up my shoulder so royally, about all I can do is pop Advil by the handful and wait.

But maybe there’s a silver lining. Does a bleeding ulcer from self-medication strike you as a more dramatic story than throwing a pinecone?