how do I do these things?
I fell asleep writing my blog last night causing it to be posted closer to morning than midnight, much to my disappointment. My fingers were still on the keys of the laptop when my husband took the photos that will never see the light of day. And despite the fact that I was able to fall asleep so easily, it was definitely not a restful sleep. I had somehow hurt my shoulder the day before, making it impossible to find a comfortable position to sleep in, and by morning I was completely engulfed in pain. I don’t even know what I did. I almost never do. I have so many incidents where I run into walls or trip over dogs, that I have stopped cataloguing everything. It is either dislocated or I’ve torn the rotator. Either way, the shoulder has proven to be a big problem for me.
I am right handed. Not just mostly right handed, but completely right handed, as in…my left arm and hand are used purely for decoration, and balance. And clearly, they are not much help at the balancing.
I couldn’t dress or undress myself, shower by myself, or feed myself this morning without great effort. In fact, my husband had to help me with the first two. But all of those things pale in comparison to my major dilemma…
One tends to forget about the simple things you wouldn’t be able to do every day without the use of your arm. Things like using the bathroom. Things like wiping yourself after using the bathroom.
Yeah, it’s pretty bad. I have been struggling with the task as a temporary lefty, but it’s not easy. And it has definitely upped the ante of the quandary of whether to wad or fold. I won’t get into all of the details, but trust me when I say; you need to take good care of your dominant arm!
Using the bathroom wasn’t the worse challenge created by my dislocated shoulder.
Driving was also a near impossibility for me today. Because of that, I allowed Lauren to drive the car today on the way back from her morning group meeting, and due to the prankster on my GPS, we ended up on the on ramp to the five lane freeway that runs around the perimeter of Atlanta. This is probably the scariest place we could have ended up.
In between our pleas to the powers that be to spare us from a horrible highway death, I carefully guided her across all five lanes of traffic as directed by the prankster GPS. GPS may not lie, but it does like a good laugh at my expense apparently, because once we were on the opposite side of the fast moving traffic lanes, the GPS instructed us to head back to the far right to exit.
As I’m sure you can imagine we survived. And it’s good thing too. Today is Lauren’s 17th birthday, and we had a party planned, and a cake to eat.
We took the kids bowling for the birthday celebration. I didn’t bowl. That is definitely something that would have been dangerous with my left hand. Wadding and dabbing is one thing, but wielding a fifteen pound marble is quite another.
If my shoulder isn’t better by tomorrow I plan on making a sling out of a cashmere scarf. I figure if you’re going to be a klutz, you should at least do it in style.
Until the next time…I’ll be holding it as long as I can!