OW!

Getting old is hard to do: you do it quickly and only get older. My Aunt Marie, a brilliant woman in her own right used to tell me: “Joe, don’t get old!” She used to tell me: “Joe, don’t get married, if you get married, don’t have kids, and if you have kids, drown them.” She was a kidder though.

This has been a rotten winter so far, my mother in the nursing home for rehab for a while, the blizzard, first the pain in my kidney from the two stones, and now this back pain that reaches around my lower back and up the spine. I think it is from over exercising with some weights. No, I wasn’t lifting my lunch, but two dumbbells I have.

I can stand with some pain, I can lay back in my recliner without pain, but I can’t sit up without pain. Recently I went to a fund-raiser where they had a live band and TLW (The Little Woman) wouldn’t dance with me because of my back. Although she was right and considerate, it was killing me I couldn’t go out on the dance floor.

I went to a board of director’s meeting and the comfort level was way down with my back, I wanted to hurry everyone through their sentences so I could go home. Of course that never happened.

Earlier in the day I met my daughter at a doctor’s office for a routine assessment she has to go through for her benefit, and she was in a wheel chair. The attendant took her off the wheel chair and asked if I wanted to wheel her into the doctor’s office from the bus she arrived in. As I did, I was tempted to ask her to let me sit and she could push me, but then realized it would hurt to sit in the thing. Driving is a pain in the back as well as eating at the table.

As I write this I have a schedule of things I need to do, calls to make and plans to draw out for a busy spring and summer. I’m doing manuals on a community trust and a membership book, and letters to send out and emails to compose. I think I will do all this laying down on the floor!

So, enough about me, how are YOU doing?

What ever you ARE doing, don’t get old!