The shape I’m in
Recently I had an injury that was only getting worse. This was despite my steady application of my mother’s remedy for all ailments. That’s right, I was ignoring it.
To be accurate, Mom actually has two treatments she prescribes for whatever ails you. They are:
- Tell yourself you’re fine, and it’ll just go away;
- Take a shot of whiskey and go to bed.
These have served her well. At age 90, she’s still robust and stern and will gladly set you straight if you don’t stop it right now. (Whatever it is you’re doing.) So for the past two or three years, I’ve been telling myself that this leg problem was just fine and that it would go away. Unfortunately it hasn’t, and treatment #2 hasn’t made a dent in it either. In the past couple of weeks the pain had grown so distracting l that I felt like the guy in the Magritte painting who can’t see around the apple. So, reluctantly, I turned to a different sort of healer, the sort with no reported success in our family history. I called a doctor.
I’ll set aside for the moment just what it took to get in to see said doctor, a doctor on my “plan” (whatever that means), and one whom I’m theoretically entitled to see. I will say that I made this call in early December, explained the situation (“I’m healthy and fit — except I can barely walk! It’s excruciating!” and was offered an appointment on… February 23rd, a full seven weeks later. “But… I can’t walk!” I repeated to the young woman on the phone. As with most people I’ve encountered in positions of low authority, she was eager to flaunt her power to disappoint. “We can prescribe medications to alleviate the pain,” she chirped. Evidently, it was okay if my leg fell off, so long as it didn’t hurt so much will it do so. So I called the same doctor’s office in the neighboring city, poured on as much honey as possible, made a friend, and presto! got an appointment for the next day to see the very same guy.
I’d been to this doctor for this same condition two years before, when he gave me a cortisone shot and told me that this problem, which feels somewhat like a buzzsaw cutting into my right flank, would go away. “It’s bursitis,” he said. Eventually it would clear up. And he was right. But he never said that it would come back. In fact, it’s never fully gone away; it’s always lingering there, waiting to reassert itself, like the Clintons. Sometimes it’s more powerful, while other times it’s just nagging away at the edge of my perception until it gets its way. Again, like the Clintons.
The doctor asked me what I was doing that was causing bursitis in my right leg.
“What do you mean?” I asked. How do I know? I didn’t even know it was bursitis.
“You’re doing something to aggravate it.”
“Walking on it,” I said.
“Something else.”
“Everything I do with the right leg I do with the left leg. The left leg is fine.”
“But you’re doing something.”
“Again, walking. And seriously: I use both of these legs in tandem. When I’m using the one, I’m using the other. It’s not like I’m hopping around town just on the right leg.” This line of questioning seemed like an exact replica of his fruitless interrogation from two years earlier.
“Well,” he said, “You’ll figure it out. In the meantime, I’ll give you a cortisone shot for now. And then you’ll be fine and it’ll just go away.”
(Shades of my mother!)
So, two years later, same mysterious diagnosis — “You’re doing something!” — and same temporary treatment plan: immediate alleviation, followed by a long period of hoping. Which calls for ignoring the time-honored saying “Hope is not a plan.” Given that I could barely stand let alone walk, and that my wife had taken to referring to my perambulations as “hobbling around,” meaning that now I was visibly lurching around town like Quasimodo, I opted for this incomplete treatment plan. At least it was something.
A few minutes later, a raven-tressed assistant in her mid-20’s was dabbing antiseptic wipe onto my bare flank while both of us tried to overlook the fact that I was mostly undressed in the crucial areas during this treatment. Then the doctor interrupted our special alone time to return with a needle filled with what looked like window sealant, which he injected deep into the internal cracks of my walking apparatus. He readied his exit, but not before giving me a final instruction: Don’t go to the gym. For two to three months.
Now, I do my best to breeze through life. Really. But my best is pretty miserable; just the way I hear our language getting used is enough to wind me up. To the degree that I can seem calm and collected, it’s because I go to the gym. Four times a week. The gym is my release valve. After 15 minutes of stretches, 45 minutes of cardio, half an hour of lifting, then the sauna, the steam room, the jacuzzi and a shower, I’m too bedraggled to have any stress. In fact, I’m so de-stressed, you could probably run over my sternum with a tank and I wouldn’t have it in me to worry about it. The idea of skipping the gym for two to three months seemed impractical in the extreme. I’d have to take up heroin.
I explained detail that there was no way I could lay off exercise for two to three months. Then he offered a compromise: that after three weeks, I could take walks. Was he really suggesting that not only could I not go to the gym for up to three months, I shouldn’t take walks for three weeks? Why not order me up a wheelchair? Why not just put me in a home now and get it over with? Why not shoot his glue gun into my brain and be done with it?
“You don’t want to aggravate it,” he said. “Or do permanent damage.” This sounded reasonable. Even if it was advice about a condition that he’d assured me for two years now would just magically go away.
So…. I stayed away from the gym. For two weeks. In those two weeks, my stomach and my brain immediately lit up with the idea of “Vacation!” Like: “Hey… if we’re not going to the gym… we’re kind of on vacation! Let’s live large!” So for two weeks I just ate and drank whatever. Cookies? Hand them over. Popcorn? I’ll have three bowls, thanks. Late-night cereal? Sure — and two servings. No, don’t cut the fat off the ham. More butter, please! And crack open some more wine while you’re at it. You’re not working out at the gym while watching their constant reruns of “My 600 Lb. Life.” Just eat and enjoy.
Two weeks of this and I felt like I was sinking into a bog. I was loaded with stress, and with food. I was notably less cranky now that nobody was spearing my hip with every step, but my brain and my entire being felt clouded and anxious. Finally I got some advice from another medical person about cardio and routines I could do that would in no way involve putting weight on my right leg, and so on Sunday I went back to the gym, feeling very much like Moby Dick pulling into harbor.
After my workout and my shower, I crossed paths with the standing scale in the men’s locker room. My plan is to live as long as possible in good health because I have a lot of things I’d like to do and see, including attend Dick Cheney’s trial in the Hague. (It’s on my wish list.) So I weigh myself on this scale at the gym every time before getting dressed, to keep tabs on my progress, or lack thereof. Overall, the scale has reported happy news to me all year. (Setting aside that trip to New Jersey, The Weight Gain State.) But now it looked at me with sinister intent. “Oh, no,” I thought, “this is going to be bad.” I got on, naked in apprehension after two weeks of eating crap and doing nothing, and found that… I’d lost four pounds. I got off the scale, zeroed it out, got on, set it again, and I’d still lost four pounds. As the French say, Incroyable! (And they know something about eating.)
The ways of the body are mysterious.
Sufficiently caulked, my leg isn’t hurting me any more, so I’m back at the gym, while being careful not to exercise that leg needlessly. But I haven’t changed my recent (over)eating habits, freshly armed with the excuse that, well, it’s the holidays. Regarding my weight loss, I don’t have an explanation. I do know that I haven’t eagerly shared it with the people I know who are working hard to lose a pound or even an ounce and getting nowhere. I’m sure that the story of my Christmas miracle — the miracle of weight loss through gluttony and sloth — isn’t one they’d appreciate.