Several years ago during the trip to South Carolina, I was putting one of the kayaks on the roof rack of the car and, being incautious, ran into the side mirror of the car while maneuvering the straps around. This pulled a muscle in the side of my lower back rather seriously, and left me a bit tender for a while. Worse, it’s the kind of muscle that you use for a lot of things, and so I could aggravate it with no effort whatsoever, even while trying to avoid using it at all.
And then the next summer I think, I pulled it again, in exactly the same manner – the side mirrors on the car just hit at a terrible spot, plus I’m not thinking about them as I’m trying to manage the kayaks. This was of course worse, not as much from the damage that I’d done as from failing to remember the hazard despite the lasting impression that it provided. Having done it twice, however, seemed to have produced some lasting vulnerability, since I can now start that muscle aching with little provocation. The recent extended efforts at moving house, for example, has meant that I’ve pulled it mildly several times, and so I’ve spent no small number of days with a sporadically sore side and difficulty in doing certain strenuous actions – naturally, I haven’t the liberty of not doing them, because I wasn’t smart enough to have kids that I could fob all those tasks onto. Just yesterday, for example, we transplanted almost the last of the plants that needed it, but the digging and stooping and so on left me a little sore, again, concentrated right in that portion of my side.
But earlier this evening, I turned from putting something in the recycle bin in the garage, slightly tight quarters considering that The Girlfriend’s car is right there, and goddamned if I didn’t smack that exact same muscle again, solidly, right on her sideview mirror! I knew instantly that this was a bad one, and I could barely move without somehow involving that muscle group; I could be standing still and, without ever knowing how I did it, I’d tense that muscle and boom, stabbing pain. It’s been a rough evening, and I’m on a couple different kinds of painkillers right now. I’d almost suspect I did some kind of internal injury – well, you know, to organs – but everything will be fine unless I move a certain way. The best course of action is naturally to not move, but I’ve never been able to lie still for hours on end.
Now we get into causality, because I’d forgotten to check the calendar, otherwise I would have known that it was Do The Same Stupid Fucking Thing Again Day. Would this have been forewarning, and I could have avoided this fate? Or would the hypersensitivity of trying to determine what I wanted to stay away from have caused me to fail prey to something else? I mean, I don’t think I’ve done a lot of stupid fucking things, but I’ve never tried tallying them up, either. What’s the average? Does it matter? You only need a couple to lose track of, I suppose.
I will say that I am trying to make the best of it, and have a decent excuse not to move heavy things for a couple of days, already exercised. It’s tempered by the fact that I have no idea how to totally avoid using that muscle area. It’s like wiggling your ears: you have the muscles to do it, but you have no idea how to select them, or in this case, avoid them. So at the moment, I’m prone to sudden sharp pains in my side that make me tense up, the worst thing to do, and so I then abruptly try to relax them, and then wonder how I still flexed that damaged muscle without doing anything that I thought would have aggravated it. I’m having fun.