Back Again

 

So is this what being over seventy years old is all about? On Friday I pulled a muscle bending over to load the dishwasher. Searing pain in my lower back. Honestly, if it weren't for the fact that you shoot heroin directly into your vein with a syringe, I might be a junkie today. I hate needles. As it was, I took two Tylenol. They didn't help. So two hours later I took one of the pain pills that the dentist gave me after my root canal. It didn't work. Before bedtime I took the one pill left over from my visit to the back pain doctor thirteen months ago. Those pain pills didn't work then, and they didn't work on Friday. My final pill of the evening was one Benadryl. Not for pain relief, but because those usually knock me out for at least six to eight hours. So it's just another part on my body that has gone bad and probably won't ever return to what I think of as normal. It seems that after I turned sixty five, when something would go wrong, the doctor would just shrug his shoulders and say something like, "You're getting old. Get used to it." Sometimes I think that it would be so great if I could feel like I did when I was fifteen years old, just for one day. Then I remember. I had pimples, a bad haircut, I had to go to summer school, I had to share a bedroom with three brothers, I wasn't allowed to drive a car yet, and I couldn't buy alcohol. It had to be the dorkiest year of my life. Which reminds me, I haven't tried vodka yet. Good old vodka, it usually makes the pain go away. For awhile at least.