Therafy this

2013 was a pretty heavy-duty therapy year. Most recently, I've been doing a kind of therapy called physical therapy, which purports to fix bits of your body. In the past when I've done this, I referred to physical therapy as the kind of therapy where when it's done you actually feel better. I suppose that this is true for those of a certain age, but by the time you reach my semi-advanced state, there is never any assurance that I will ever feel better. Something always hurts- you just deal with it and discuss things like "managing the discomfort."

This is kind of discouraging. I like to be physical and active, and having to think about how you reach or bend or lift or sit, it takes some of the fun out of things. I don't mind the physical therapy itself, though some of it is suspiciously like someone giving you tasks to complete, which is not sufficiently different from being married and having kids to go out of the way for.

This time through I'm dealing with shoulder pain. It's particularly annoying because it's in my right shoulder and it makes writing on a whiteboard tricky and occasionally painful if I'm not careful. I put off doing the PT (as we in the know call it) because you can't just go and get it. You need a prescription, which means you need to see a doctor, which means you need to get x-rays (at a minimum). I put it off for weeks. But I finally got around to it and now twice a week I meet up with this nice woman who stretches and prods at me, then dispatches me to the gym to do exercises.

I haven't asked her yet if she's just making things up at this point- at first there were sheets of paper with diagrams, but now she just tells me to do things. It's kind of amazing how many different shoulder exercises you can make up. Things to push, pull, lift, wobble, stretch, and just plain old hold. Eighteen different things (really) to do with my shoulder, all in the name of managing my discomfort.

When does it end? Who knows? When I asked my internist about why my shoulders hurt, he said "because you didn't die when you were 40," which isn't terribly helpful. In the past, its gone on for months. Hopefully not this time through. I'm kind of overly therafied, or therafried as we in the know call it.