Unfair!

though most times I get the grumps or complain about anything at all I’m immediately inundated with messages about how I don’t know how to count my blessings and really just need to shut up. It’s one of those little things about me I’ve never really been able to solve: if I talk about something that isn’t overwhelmingly positive, it is immediately assumed that I’m complaining about it or that I’m expecting someone to solve it for me. Usually this effect is strongest when I bring up things I hadn’t even considered taking in a negative light. If I try to explain that I was just talking about it, no negativity implied, I’m informed that I’m being very defensive. I guess I just have a forceful personality? Beats me [eyeroll]. I figure if I haven’t sussed it out by now, at 51 years old, I’m just plain stuck with it and I can stop all the dancing.

     So what am I grumpy about? Well, I’ve been home sick a year and a half now and was starting to be able to get back into the world, just a little bit, when all this came down. That’s still not it though. Nor is it about the chronic pain I’ve lived with for decades and the fact that I can’t take ibuprofen anymore because of the autoimmune colitis (which is completely in remission, thank goodness… as long as I don’t take ibuprofen). It’s also not the financial problems keeping us continually in the red, always rushing to deprive ourselves of enough to be able to cover the rent. About all this I can, and for the most part do, maintain sanguinity. No, this new source of grouchihood is something entirely, and I hate this word, unfair.
     I don’t even believe in "unfair". Sure, people can be unfair to each other – my current financial situation, for example, is the result of ten years of very hard work being yanked right out from under me by a petty bully trying to show off in a new position of authority (and who has now blithely moved on, utterly unscathed, leaving me and assorted other human rubble behind in the scar of her passage). So OK, that’s unfair. Man can be unfair to man, and to other creatures. But there is no universal unfair – to go there is to embrace some form of religion. To say that a person who works very hard and is kind deserves a good life, to say that if someone who’s had a long hard day comes home to a flooded apartment at the end of it this is unfair, is to imply that the universe, in some form, is dealing out some kind of cosmic rewards and punishments to us widdle human apes, giving us a gold star for trying hard or whatever. And, at least as far as I’m concerned, that is not happening. But there is a little colloquial wiggle room about the word, so I will go ahead and say that on top of everything that was already going on, and on top of the effects of COVID-19 on certain vital medical plans regarding a family member, and so on, it is profoundly unfair that I am now also injured.

     Remember that table that the neighbor gave me a few days ago? I was so careful. So very careful. And I got away with it too, almost. I kept my motions slow, planned, tai-chi-like. I followed every instruction from my months of rehabilitative therapy: lift only with the legs, keep the center of balance at the pivot point, no bending only crouching, hands within shoulder width, frequent breaks, the whole damn shebang. And in the end, with the beautiful table at which only this morning my kid was teleconferencing with school out in the open air (before it started raining) on the laptop the school lent us for the duration, situated right outside the living room window, I was stiff and sore but filled with that sense of well-being that I can only get from sheer physical labor and which is thus for the most part now lost to me. I hadn’t hurt myself. No extra pressure on the four spinal hernias, no collapse of the arthritic knee, not even a stab in the ankle that’s been tricky since I sprained it a few years ago. I was, righteously, proud of myself. Well, shucks, I still am.

     Cue the next morning. Got up, no more affected than I expected to be, and did some gentle stretches, made my cup of coffee, sank gratefully into my comfy chair. Reached for one of my slippers on the ground next to me. Sprained a rib.

     Folks, I’m not talking a bit of an intercostal muscle strain. Nope, with a fairly sickening very audible “pop” and a sensation as of something, well, bursting in my 4^th rib’s costochondral joint, I collapsed into gasping, whimpering horror. And, well, that’s it… suddenly I get to be in immense pain, the kind that excites my central nervous system and makes me tired, and my right arm’s movement range is down 75%. I’m sitting here for the third day in a row clutching a hot water bottle to my ribs and being irritable with myself for allowing it to make me irritable when those around me really don’t need that right now. It is what it is.

     Under no circumstances would I have gone to the emergency room about something so home-treatable, but I will say that thanks to the prevailing coronaviral situation I have also not gone to my GP, as I normally would have, for a referral to my manual therapist to see if he could help with the surrounding tissues and free this joint up a bit. Right now, though, for obvious reasons, there shall be no laying on of hands. Par for the course for this kind of injury would be about a week of extra ibuprofen and rest, but the former of those is denied me forever (I did write my GP for suggestions, though, because the pain makes it hard to sleep, and Valium, which I have in low doses for occasional back spasms, only helps so much at bedtime), and I’m bloody fed up with the latter. Most people aren’t going into this global quarantine just as they’re coming out of a couple of years of severe burnout and health problems and are probably grateful for a chance at enforced rest, but I was just starting to walk out again, to cautiously put myself back into the world. So I guess I can forgive myself for being kind of fed up right now.
     Well, that’s it, really; I decided to go ahead and be grumpy today and that’s OK. So what?  I’ll be through this new indignity in a week or so. My kid’s studying down here but in a while, after school, we’ll put on something uplifting or just plain stupid, and have ourselves some snacks and a good time. For now, though, I’m going to go refill my hot water bottle.
     Be safe, be well, be strong. Be happy. Enjoy this insane mashup I made a few years ago.