What was *that* all about?

I had a rotten two weeks earlier this month. I attribute it to a painful and persistent shoulder injury. Don’t ask me how I injured myself; I honestly don't remember doing anything unusual. Now that I’m over 50 I probably sneezed the wrong way, slept funny, or rolled my eyes too hard.  Anyway, for some reason my right shoulder went on strike. 

Typically, I don’t worry about all the regular, random, body weirdnesses that come and go, like rashes, twinges and runny noses. I subscribe to the “time heals all wounds” approach and leave our overtaxed medical profession open for the truly sick and wounded. But I was in so much pain and it was so constant that when I couldn’t Outwit, Outplay and Outlast it, I made a physio appointment.

My regular schedule of enjoying work, running the household, food-foraging and meal prep, driving kids around, keeping up with the elders, paying bills and rocking my role as emotional support animal was completely manageable until this shoulder thing sent me over the top. By four pm each day I was succumbing to ibuprofen and heating pads. I had zero patience left and was feeling supremely sorry for myself. 

(In defense of my tale of woe: our dryer also broke, our bathroom skylight started leaking, and I was trying to coordinate the installation of a new water heater at the boat-access-only family cottage two provinces away. Negating my tale of woe: we were spared in the Nova Scotia wildfires, my kids aren’t in jail, we have a boat-access-only family cottage, and I don’t have some new form of shoulder-cancer… so of course I am grateful for my privileges. My mother-in-law needn’t point out that there are people worse off than I am.)

Anyway…. for two weeks my shoulder was bothering me, and it was bothering me how much it was bothering me!

Recognizing my long list of privileges, and priding myself on being able to handle pain very well, why did this shoulder thing completely derail me?

I moaned to my sister about it over the phone, and without a pause she asked “are you worried it’s the same thing that Mum had?”

<GOINK>

That was it, wasn’t it? 

It wasn’t that my shoulder hurt. It wasn’t the pain, or even the shame of hitting my threshold. 

It was that I saw myself racing along the same track that created my mother today.

In her late 50s my mother hurt her shoulder (by sleeping the wrong way in a hotel bed). She ignored it. The pain came and went. She would reach for something and “ooch!” She would pick up something and “eeech!” Once she retired, the pain became consistent and worse, and she would sink into her green, wing-backed chair earlier and earlier in the day, washing back ibuprofen with glasses of white wine.

Fair enough! Pain is the worst and it can be all-consuming.

She stopped going to pilates and started going to physio. She tried massage and acupuncture. She went to her (grumpy, unhelpful, condescending) doctor over and over again. She had x-rays and cortisone injections. She became paralyzed by pain, and, when the ibuprofen and wine provided relief, she became paralyzed by the anticipation, the expectation of pain.

It was awful to watch: someone you love in constant, crippling pain. It took all my siblings — all four of us — to convince her to accept the inevitability of shoulder surgery. By this point, in her 70s, it was a three-year wait list for surgery… so then we convinced her of and coordinated her trip to the Cleveland Clinic in the US. (I stand by our Canadian healthcare system — it keeps kids healthy, people in crisis alive, and GoFundMe pages minimal. But anything remotely ‘elective’ does mean unbelievable wait times.)

My mother’s bionic shoulder works like a dream. But the damage was done, the mojo was lost. She stopped driving, stopped traveling, stopped moving. She never returned to the boat-access-only family cottage. 

When the physio asked me what my goal for recovery was, I said, “I’d like to avoid a shoulder replacement. Or, if I need one, get me on the list NOW.”

But that wasn’t it. 

My recovery goal was simply to recover. To lay different track than my mum had. To resist the pull of the heating pad, the comforting chair, the inertia, the control, the safe thing, the sure thing, the long, slow slide. 

It wasn’t the pain that derailed me. It was the implication. It was the foreshadowing that I will age exactly the same way, on the same schedule, as my mother.

The stories we carry inside us — about physical pain and mental weakness, about the inevitability of fate — they’re fascinating, aren’t they? I told everyone who would listen about my puzzlingly sore shoulder; meanwhile, there was this other, darker, dystopian story running through my head. 

I’m pleased to report that my shoulder feels much, much better. I’m going to attribute the healing to physical things: heat, rest and physio treatments. If I was a more magical thinker, I might wonder if my physical pain went away the moment I loosened my grip on that defeatist story I was holding in my heart.