Ironic Injury

We have a nice little back porch covered in hydrangeas. As the wet season started a couple weeks ago, the wood has gotten kind of slippery and was covered in leaves. Taking the good Man role, I grabbed the leaf blower and cleared it off.

This left that green slime that forms on everything in the Northwest. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it's fairly frictionless, so naturally, as I started down the steps to finish up I found myself in the air and bouncing down the stairs. The cracking sound in my shoulder was only drowned out by the extremely profane screams of pain.

I really thought I had broken it. I could feel myself starting to go into shock, and it hurt like… let's just say it hurt a lot as no colorful metaphor is going to cover it. I managed to turn off the leaf blower, stagger inside through the haze of nearly passing out, got my breathing and racing heart under control and checked it out.

Not broken, not even dislocated. Not good, but could have been worse. So I spent the rest of the day on the couch with ice, ibuprofen and a couple movies. Seeing Will Smith falling out a window, landing on his back and getting up just fine was a little harder to suspend disbelief for when a simple fall down the stairs had me laid up all day.

The pain slowly subsided over the next week and I figured it was healing up fine. I was chatting with someone on the phone on Tuesday, lounging on the chaise, and as I put my arm behind my head the shoulder popped out of the socket. Dislocation on a quiet afternoon… Then it happened again yesterday when closing the car door.

I managed to get into the doctor yesterday and he took all of three minutes to say, 'torn labrum.' So the rotator cuff is torn and because the shoulder is popping out, it's probably going to need surgery.

It's amazing how pain is so exhausting, and knowing that it's really injured, surgery requiring really injured, makes it even more overwhelming. I don't know if my lack of coordination and concentration is physical or mental, but man it's annoying.

While I know it's the cost of being over 40, I remember that when Mozart was my age he had completed his entire life's work of 600 compositions and secured his place in history. Oh, and he'd been dead for seven years.