Fruit Loops and Steroids

About 2 weeks back I woke up with this awful pain in my shoulder. It felt like I'd been punched for a few hours by a particularly angry Donny Yen or something. I tend to sleep on my side -- frequently waking up in the mornings with my arm pinned under my pillow, so I just assumed this was the cause and committed to powering through my day.

A day later it was still aching, but I had things to do -- took some aspirin, tried to move on.

Some days it was in my shoulder. Sometimes the bicep, all the way down to my wrist. Worse at night, really rough in the mornings, but mostly the kind of thing you can deal with and forget during a busy week.

Eventually though I realized it wasn't going away -- so I knuckled under and saw a doctor.

I hate doctors. 

I don't like being sick. Like everybody else, I go through seasonal periods of feeling crappy, and occasionally deal with localized pains or whatever -- but it's like pulling teeth for me to even consider going to see anyone about it.

To my own self-serving mindset, there's a difference between feeling junky and having someone in a labcoat tell you that you're officially defective.

If I can power through things or drown them in over-the-counter symptom dampeners, I will. What's the point anyways? All doctors ever do is tell me I'm fat. 

"Lose the weight, get that blood pressure down -- that should take care of that twisted ankle." 

Anyways, this arm thing was getting bad, to the point where I was worried it was something internal. Stretching, aspirin, whiskey, late night servings of Fruit Loops -- these things clearly weren't working. So I went and saw a guy.

He called me fat (natch), but then after hearing my tale and prodding my shoulder for a while he started talking about inflammation and bursitis. Very common, he said. What you need to do is take some steroids. A shot now, a week's worth of pills. See if that clears it up.

Then he went into what seemed like an extensively long discussion on how he could give me the shot in the arm, but studies had shown the shot to be more effective if administered in the booty.

Being a sports fan, I was well aware of the divine relationship between steroids and a needle in the ass -- so I didn't really have a problem with this. If that's how Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong did it, then I guess that's the way it's done, right?

But the look on the face of my 12 year-old son when he heard this news was pure gold. 

I seriously thought he was gonna get out of his chair and fight the guy.

Anyways, took the shot, been mostly taking the pills. The pain isn't like it was, but it's not totally gone yet either. And I guess that's the lesson -- doing something about a problem is better than just wanting it to go away, but magic bullets don't really exist. 

Weather's supposed to be really nice this weekend. Need to take advantage.

[Now Playing:  David Bowie - "Velvet Goldmine" ]