I'm sure everyone is familiar with the notion that a butterfly could flap its wings in Asia and across the world a hurricane might form from this one tiny action (at least anyone who's seen Jurassic Park should be). This is, of course, an absurd concept. If butterflies could wreak such havoc on international weather patterns, imagine what something like an African swallow carrying a coconut might inflict. Our world would be completely uninhabitable.
But the idea that seemingly inconsequential happenstances might affect outcomes yet to develop is sound, and I have an indisputable example to back this up.
Around the middle of July, I started having terrible pain in my left shoulder. The pain was radiating down to my elbow and up through my neck, and at times I couldn't lift anything heavier than an unladen swallow without fear of dropping it soundly to the earth (though, if it had been one of the kids, it would have been more screamingly than just soundly--so there's no doubt that it made life a little more challenging since I lift and carry the kids with my left arm). I treated the pain for three months with massive doses of ibuprofen, which almost dulled the pain but did little else.
Finally, about two weeks ago, I made it into the doctor to get it looked at. After spending a bit of time moving my arm this way and that, he asked me if I had ever injured the shoulder.
"Yes," I said, thinking back some years. "I have."
WAY back, in 1993--the spring semester of my freshman year of college--I decided to do a little weight lifting with my roommate to pass the time and keep me sexy for all the coeds. Prior to college, I had actually been a rather avid weight lifter. At my peak, I could squat nearly 600 pounds. I mention this now only because I wish to brag. I wish to brag about it only because it is the ONLY thing I can brag about in the realm of sporting activities ever. I have always been abysmal at sports--truly ponderous in the sense that people who saw me attempting anything would think to themselves, "What the hell is that kid thinking?"
Because I was a bit successful at it, I went about it with wild abandon, and with not even a hint of training. Basically, if I saw a massive stack of weights attached to a bar, I would say, "Let's wrap a towel around that bar (so I wouldn't impact my neck vertebrae and smash my shoulders, though I seriously doubt one towel could live up to such Herculean expectations), and I'll see if I can lift it."
Thanks to this cavalier attitude, I now have terrible joint problems, but that's a complaint for another time.
Where I somewhat excelled at lower body lifting, I was proportionately terrible at upper body work. For whatever reason, I could never really improve my upper body's maximum weight capacity. I could lift smaller amounts of weight for extended periods of time, but I could never get up to the big numbers that some of the others in my small group could achieve. My arms would tend to give up under the pressure and I would end up with my rib cage under the crushing weight of my own failure.
But, if I couldn't be successful, at least I could be persistent, and so, when my roommate suggested we start a weight lifting program, I decided it was high time that I figured out a way to fix my wimpy arms.
On our very first excursion to the weight room, we loaded up a barbell on the bench press with a weight that I figured I could easily handle--140 pounds, I think, but my memory might be inflating that a bit to save some of college me's dignity (adult me has none left). I positioned myself under the bar and my roommate spotted me. I pushed the weight up easily then lowered it to my chest. I began to extend my arms and "Pop!" My roommate heard it too, but he was far too busy removing the weights before my collapsed left arm left me stranded under the barbell.
And that was the last time that I have ever lifted weights. I saw it as a sign that I shouldn't be wasting my time in the weight room. After all, I reasoned, unless I was going to keep it up FOREVER, the effects would only be temporary--and who needs that kind of hassle for the rest of their lives? Not this guy, not when the regimen required to maintain a soft and lazy body is so much less trouble to keep up with on a day to day basis.
I never did anything about the shoulder. It hurt like a bugger for about a month, as I recall, but then it more or less went away. Sure, every once in awhile it would act up and I would have to dose it with some ibuprofen, but that was as bad as it ever got.
Turns out, even though I never managed any legitimate performances on any sports field, I DID manage to give myself a legitimate sports injury that day. I tore my rotator cuff.
At least that's what the doctor surmised two weeks ago. "Why," I asked, "is it just now acting up, sixteen years later?" To which he gave me a typical doctor response: "Sometimes bodies just do unexpected things" (which I translated as, "Hell if I know, but I'm not going to SAY I don't know"). He prescribed me an anti-inflammatory to see if that would help the swelling go down.
The downside of taking an anti-inflammatory is that all non-Tylenol style pain killers are out of the question (and Tylenol has never done much more for me than, say, a spoonful of sugar would). This isn't a problem as far as the every day bits of my life go--the prescription he gave me actually seems to be helping my shoulder, so I don't have much cause for a fistful of ibuprofens right now--but it IS a problem in regards to the every night bits of my life.
As I'm sure I've mentioned before (several times, actually), I'm a terrible sleeper. I just don't have the knack for it. I have a tough time getting to sleep at night, and once I'm asleep, if I wake up after about four hours, I can't go back to sleep. Unless I'm taking a PM of some sort (specifically, Advil PM--the generic versions and the Tylenol versions just don't work for me). The PM don't help me get to sleep at all, but they let me go back to sleep if I should wake up in the middle of the night, which is better than nothing.
Now I don't have that working for me, and last night, a little before 4:00, Button woke up for a feeding, and I woke up with her (I also had two Nick Jr. songs playing back to back, over and over again, in my head, which further exacerbated matters). I got almost exactly four hours of sleep.
Typically, I can survive on that much sleep in a night if it only happens once every few days, but my level of functionality is somewhere right above zombie and right below unmedicated celebrity.
First thing this morning, I decided to do some laundry. I opted for the whites because all of the baby's clothes get tossed in there regardless of color (because cold water just doesn't seem to get rid of her stinky cheese drool smell like one would hope it would) and she was needing some clean sleepers. I didn't have QUITE enough for a full load, so I cast about looking for some things to add. Because I wasn't thinking straight, I decided to throw in two small area rugs we have in our back rooms because they had some muddy footprints on them.
Of course, I forgot that the older of the two rugs was on its last legs. The rubber non-slip surface on the bottom of the rug had started to fall apart the last time I washed it. So, of course, this time the rubber backing completely disintegrated--but not in the "doesn't exist anymore sense," in the "this load of laundry is now covered in clingy rubber crumbs that will need to mostly be shaken out and removed by hand before the entire load is rewashed sense." So that was what I spent a fair bit of the morning working on.
But then I had another, even worse, lapse in judgment shortly thereafter. Gabe had not had a poop in at least two days (currently, I'm only capable of remembering "yesterday" and "before that"--at least until late evening, then we're down to "earlier today" or "some other time"). He'd already had one earlier this morning that was a gut buster, so I sort of turned my nose off for the morning. At some point, however, he decided to go ahead and have a second, more powerful dump, which was, strangely, almost odorless. It took me about twenty minutes to notice, I think (it couldn't have been much more because I'd just changed his diaper not thirty minutes earlier).
As I was changing his diaper, again, in a state of lax brainedness, I failed to notice that he had, thanks to all of his jumping around and sliding off the couch onto some pillows, managed to smear his poop nearly up to the middle of his back. I also didn't notice that he had slung his blankie underneath himself when I laid him down. So, after taking off the old diaper, I'd let his legs down to the point where he USUALLY doesn't smear poop on the floor or whatever is beneath him, only this time there was something to smear there. And he smeared it onto his blankie.
A terrible, terrible meltdown followed wherein he refused to let me put blankie in the wash and I had to hand wash the befowled section and return it to him, still very wet.
And then he lost the only binky he will use and we had to go to the store to buy more, but I'm suddenly far too weary of discussing this day to go into any details about this.
So, for those of you who have skipped to the end because you couldn't stand to read this entire post, here's a sum up: Because I injured my shoulder when I was 18 years old, I couldn't get any sleep last night, and because I was tired, I did stupid things, including letting Gabe smear his own poop on his blankie.
No comments:
Post a Comment