All thumbs? I wish.

All right. Guilty. I’m a self-centered and self-absorbed idiot who doesn’t really count her blessings. Or even notice them much until they are taken away. I don’t think I’m TOO different from most people, however, so here I am to testify. Amen and hallelujah.

I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to avoid pain. It is a full-time job. There were days when I didn’t want to get out of bed because it hurt. There were moments when I seriously weighed how hungry I was vs. how much it would cost to get up and walk into the kitchen. Like the old joke about old age, if I bent over to do something, I wondered what else I could do as long as I was down there.

I have had a couple of falls in the past two weeks, the middle one of the three resulting in a possibly broken wrist, which meant about a week in a cast before the orthopedist I finally saw commuted my sentence to a removable splint for a couple weeks, pending a second x-ray. That was bad enough, and it caused me to re-evaluate my left hand, particularly my fingers and thumb—as indicated in a previous post. The new splint allowed me to return to some (not all!) normal activities like washing my hair, holding a blow-dryer, picking things up, typing with two hands… But I was not destined to get off that easy. No sooner had I tasted a modicum of freedom than..I tripped again. Over a speed bump in a parking lot. Yes, God, I see you laughing.

THIS time, in a supreme effort to avoid landing on my injured wrist and definitively breaking it, I managed to wrench myself to my right side, land on my hip and pull muscles (I thought) in my right leg and rib areas. Getting up from the parking lot surface would have provided fodder for You-tube. But the aftermath wasn’t funny. It hurt to walk. It hurt to turn. It hurt to sit down. It hurt to stand up.  Getting into or out of bed required strategic thought.  I never realized how many separate actions—all requiring muscle movement—were involved in getting out of bed. Try—just try—getting up without pushing against something with your hand, or swiveling your legs or torso. It ain’t easy. Getting dressed is no party either. Buttons, hooks, zippers, ties…hard to do without two fully-operative hands, though much more possible than with a single one. God bless elastic and Velcro and cotton knit shirts that stretch. But even if physically do-able—it hurt. Every morning, I’d gather up my determination and decide to get up and get dressed, no matter what, because, sooner or later, I’d be back to normal.

That isn’t a hope that the elderly have, for the most part. Their aches and pains are there to stay, and gradual improvement and eventual recovery isn’t in the cards. Or even in a pill bottle, no matter how many medications they have in their arsenal.

So, thank you, lord, for a preview of old age, for making me see what the world was like for my mom and is for others like her, who face this sort of stuff every day with no end in sight.  I know my bones and my bruises will gradually heal (praise god) and I will go back to my previous heedless carryings-on.  But I will have had this warning to stop and look and pay attention to where my feet are, to get myself to a place where I have better balance and flexibility so I will perhaps bounce instead of break the next time gravity plays tricks on me. At least I hope so.

But for now, I’m counting blessings-- having someone with the patience to help me do all the things I can’t; having medical care to ease all the middle-of-the-night worries that march through my mind like determined sheep, leaping fence after fence while I try to sleep;  avoiding that broken hip, the dual broken wrist scenario, the head injury, and all the other mind-numbing possibilities that inhabit the darker recesses of my brain.

Oh boy, I’m lucky.