My shoulder hurts. I don’t remember any specific injury, it just started hurting yesterday and it’s still sore today. I can’t raise my arm above my head. I can move it OK forward and back, it’s lifting it that is restricted. If I were a baseball pitcher or another kind of athlete, it would probably be called a rotator cuff injury. I am not a pitcher or other kind of athlete so it’s just a consequence of being old, I guess.
I have a bit of a leaning towards being overly sensitive to pain or discomfort in my body, and in the past, my thoughts when I was hurting or ill would fall swiftly down the slope of bad expectations, usually landing in the general area of a cancer diagnosis, self-imposed. Or whatever the worst possible outcome for that kind of pain would be.
For instance, pain in and around my stomach could be stomach cancer or appendicitis. If it’s late at night and I’m all alone, usually appendicitis, because there would be no one around to take me to the emergency room if my appendix burst, so clearly the worst case scenario would be me, dying, alone, unnoticed, in great pain for my final moments.
The cancer self-diagnosis is worst when I have no insurance, no job or am underemployed, but honestly, in America, even people with great health insurance and good jobs can face medical bankruptcy. America’s single innovation in the world of healthcare is the ability to drain money from people in order to stay alive. Go, USA. No, seriously, go.
America’s leadership in the realm of charging money from people desperate to live has surely increased my self-inflicted hypochondria. If I knew that I could get medicine when I am ill without cost, surely I would just take care of physical ailments as soon as they occured. But I have to calculate how many hundreds and thousands of dollars my being sick might cost, with the compounding cost of being unable to work for any length of time, which is a double-whammy, since many Americans work in order to have the option to pay for the option of medical care.
Housing is also medical care, though a more subtle one, impacting mental as well as physical health. We work to afford that, too. We have little choice.
But this arm thing? Even my creative mind is unable to spin it into a symptom of cancer. I say unable but it just takes more effort, and with my current state of being, I’m reasonably happy with my life and work. I’m not able or willing to devote my mental energy to that level of imagination. Not these days. I’m relatively happy.
No, this shoulder pain is most likely a repetitive strain injury, carpal tunnel syndrome, something like that. Something chronic, incurable, and caused directly by my bad choices. That’s the ticket, if I want to let my negative inner voice win this round (I don’t but I must acknowledge it.)
My arm still hurts, though, and that’s annoying. I’ve been taking ibuprofren for it. I need something stronger, though. Maybe some Tiger Balm or ice- or heat-packs? It’s distracting. Ouch.
I’m sore you’re hurting. I see you. ❤️