My Neck Injury

When I was in college, I overextended a muscle in my neck. I was doing something so foolish, so extreme, that I deserved the vicious pain that followed.

I was getting out of bed.

More specifically, my loft. Getting out of a loft bed is much more strenuous than getting out of a normal bed, just so you know. It involves turning over with exact precision so as not to fall on the floor from six feet up, finding a ladder with only your feet because it's too dark and you can't turn on the light to wake up your roommates, and then positioning your body accurately over the ladder, again so as not to fall from your six-foot-tall bed.

I know, I know. You can't believe I endured such a wretched situation. But I lived to tell about it.

That one particular day, I turned over and got ready to hoist myself out of bed and toward the ladder when I felt a snap in my neck. The next thing I knew, I couldn't move my neck or head without excruciating pain. So I made my way, very carefully, down the ladder and called the campus health clinic. I canceled my morning classes and made my way to the clinic.

My car was parked in the dreaded F-lot. If you lived in any of the south campus dorms, you know that F-lot was where all cars went to die, or at least hibernate for all of the semester, because it was much easier to walk anywhere, including Detroit, than to retrieve your car from F-lot. Even if I had been able to retrieve my car, I would have had no place to park, since MSU has about 27 total parking spaces for a campus that serves 50,000 students.

In short, I walked many, many miles that day, with my head held high, and not because I felt proud. I just couldn't move. I arrived only to have the doctor tell me that I had pulled a muscle. He gave me a soft cervical collar, and probably some heavy-duty pain meds and sent me on my way.

The most embarrassing part of all this was that, during dinner in my dorm's dining hall, I was swarmed by concerned friends all asking, “What happened? Did you get in a car accident?” Imagine my embarrassment if I had told them I had sustained the injury by getting out of bed. So my response was, “Yes, it was horrible. Ambulances and fire trucks everywhere. My car was totaled.” At least I didn't have to worry about them discovering that my car was, in fact, still intact.

It was still parked in F-lot.

Exercise Can Kill You

It's been several years since I've had the motivation, energy or mental wherewithal to attempt to get in shape.  If you've ever been through a trauma or a sustained period of grief, you get exactly where I'm coming from.  It takes all your energy just to survive.

Now, after three years of trial and grief and struggle, I feel like I may possibly be able to thrive.  Maybe even grow!

Unfortunately, the years of stress have taken their toll on my 44-year-old body.  I am in serious denial about this.  I still think my body should behave like it did twenty years ago.  I should be able to go out and walk a few miles without breaking a sweat.  If I don my running shoes, I should be able to jog by the end of the week and run a 5K by the end of April.

Ha ha ha ha ha. I'm so stupid.

My body mocks me.

Last week, we had one gorgeous afternoon when the sun was shining and the temperature was, remarkably, above freezing.  I knew I had to get out and take advantage of it.  I donned my running shoes (which have never experienced actual running, by the way), put on a long-sleeved shirt, and gloves and I was off.

It was quite the glorious walk/jog, I'll have you know.  Even with the thaw, there were still gigantic snow piles that I had to leap, slushy puddles for me to navigate, and icy patches to negotiate.  I even had to duck under some branches that had been broken by the ice storm we had in December.  It was like a delightfully sunny, snowy, slushy obstacle course.  And to top it off, I jogged up and down the skywalk at the end of the street.

Not too shabby for an old lady, hey?

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I kept hearing this little voice telling me:  Take it easy.  Don't overdo it your first day.  Don't push yourself too hard.

I brushed it off, thinking it was my cynical, tired old body trying to tell me it would be sore the next day.  So what?  I could handle soreness.  I was going to beat my body into submission.

Plus, it felt too good to stop, so I pushed myself.

In addition to the inevitable soreness and fatigue that followed, I also developed a cough.  This is normal for me for a day or so after a workout like that.  But when the cough lingered into the weekend, my chest and my back started to hurt.  And I could hear funny rattling noises bubbling up from my lungs when I breathed.

I finally went to see my doctor today.

He actually laughed as he listened to my lungs and reported, "Jen, you have pneumonia!"

Now, you have to know a bit about my relationship with my doctor to understand why he laughed.  We've been friends for years, since my husband and I met him at MSU.  Dr. P and I did random evangelism on MSU's campus.  Dr. P and I once went into the woods and built a lean-to from scratch, just for fun.  Dr. P knows that I did missionary work in the Philippines where I subsisted on fish heads.

He laughed because he knows I'm a little too hearty to subscribe to the idea that I would catch pneumonia from playing outside.

But indeed, I caught pneumonia from playing outside. 

It probably won't kill me, but I will be much more wary of exercise in the future.

Soccer Mom

Here is another post in my "rerun" series.  It was originally posted in 2009.

Today my girls had soccer practice. They're involved in a Parks and Rec team, a very low-key activity with the main goal being for the children to have fun. And really, that's about all I've seen so far.  I'm not seeing any learning of useful soccer skills, such as how to actually make your foot come into contact with the ball. But at least they're having fun, right?

Tonight, the soccer coach decided that at the end of practice, the children should play a scrimmage against their parents. In her words, she thought it would be "fun". Well I don't necessarily agree with her definition of fun, because in my estimation, it would be more in the category of torture. I hate playing sports. I guess it would be more accurate to say that I am deeply tormented by memories of any attempt at playing sports throughout my life. I had extremely bad experiences of gym class from the earliest elementary years all the way through 8th grade. You have no idea how heartily I rejoiced once I finished Junior High and I was no longer required to participate in Physical Education.

The year 1976 was an Olympic year, so our gym teacher thought it would be "educational" to set up gymnastics equipment. I really have no memory of any of the other equipment besides the rings. For some idiot reason, the rings were suspended about 20 feet off the ground. OK, so it was probably not quite that high, but I was in Kindergarten so I was only about 3 feet tall and everything looked really high to me. We had to climb up on a small platform to reach the rings. The platform was high enough to scare me, but then my teacher had to hoist me up on the rings and make me do a somersault. And I'm sure I was visibly terrified because I knew at any moment I was going to plummet back to earth with an ungraceful splat. However, the teacher made me do it anyway. You know I could probably go back and sue that gym teacher for all the emotional distress that he or she caused me, if I could remember his or her name.

In about 2nd grade, Ms. PE teacher had the brilliant idea to teach us basketball, and by teaching I mean she simply said "Play." So, I had no stinkin' clue how to actually dribble a ball or what responsibilities that players in different positions had. We just had to play, and it appeared to me that everyone else knew what they were doing except me. So, when we had basketball days in gym class, I would conveniently excuse myself to go to the bathroom until gym was over. I think my teacher eventually caught on, but it still never occurred to her to actually teach us some darn basketball skills.

In 5th grade, I tried to sprain my ankle during dogdeball season. I would run really fast down our gravel road and purposely step in the potholes. I used to deliberately irritate my older brother so he would inflict some kind of brotherly agony upon me, and then I would shout, "go for the ankle!" I once had to get a plantar wart removed, and I asked the doctor to write a note excusing me from PE for the rest of the year. He didn't. I even tried climbing up on our gigantic console TV set and jumping off. But it was all for naught, as I was still forced to participate in the misery of team sports.

Even in college, a friendly game of volleyball with my dearest friends would throw me into a panic. I could usually hit a volleyball with some degree of consistency as long as I was not involved in an actual game. But if the ball ever came to me during a game, I was either completely immobile, or I was flailing around like an injured animal. And then of course, I would say some dumb thing like "the sun was in my eyes," or sometimes I would choose the simpler option which was to feign death.

Suffice it to say, I have never had any desire to participate in team sports, even for "fun". Because although it may be "fun" to some people, I'd rather have one of my limbs severed.