The Ongoing War Between Man And His Own Body

There’s a particularly cruel comedy in the fact that, yesterday, I celebrated the fact that I wasn’t suffering debilitating coughing fits for the first time in a week  by throwing my back out. I wish this was a joke, but sadly, I’m entirely serious; 2020 turns out to be a year of exciting new ways in which my body betrays me, it seems.

I noticed the back pain getting out the shower, but didn’t really think anything of it, which was likely a mistake; I figured I’d probably just bent over strangely washing my legs or something, but that it was a twinge that would soon right itself. This was, at best, extremely optimistic, given that a few hours later, I’d be struggling to rise out of a chair and found it difficult to walk between rooms. (The pain came and went all yesterday, but at its worst, I moved like an 80-year-old man whose back was broken decades earlier in an unfortunate jalopy accident.)

I remember being told that I was at the age where my body would just give up on me and fall apart, and I remember being somewhat cynical of the very idea; sure, I thought to myself, I might not be the healthiest man in the world but I’ve never had that many problems with my body. Oh, friends; if I knew then what I know now.

Honestly, my ultimate feeling about the whole thing isn’t sadness or self-pity or anything like that, as easy as it may be to give into such things. Instead, it’s a sharp and fully-formed frustration that I couldn’t just have, like, two days of my body working before things started going wrong again. Is my body so determined to pack in as much dysfunction and disrepair that my maladies have to overlap like this, for real? My schedule for sickness is so busy that we’re having to double-book?

I’m writing this early in the morning, lying in bed. I haven’t tried to get up yet, so right now all I really know is that there’s at the very least a dull ache back there waiting to be discovered when I push myself up. I’m not worried, though; at this point, I’m pretty confident that, should my back have cleared up overnight, my foot’s probably gone gangrenous to make up for it.

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