Imagine This

If you're lucky, this will stay only in your imagination, easily dropped into your vault of fading, disappearing memories.  But let's just give it a shot, shall we?

Imagine being in a favorite restaurant with a favorite person, having an absolutely wonderful meal, great conversation, and no place in the world you'd rather be at that particular moment. For no really important reason you reach across the table to move something on it closer to you. What it is doesn't matter, except to know it is small, mildly desired, but just a bit inconvenient in its present location. The reach is a very routine action, nothing special in it either.

Or at least until you feel your shoulder dislocate as you start to bring your arm back.

It's not the first time it's happened, but usually it happens with a hug. There's something about that particular angle and motion that finds a particular vulnerability. Mostly you haven't noticed it before, except when the person hugging you withdraws abruptly in shock, announcing, "I just felt your shoulder pop!". It usually hasn't been painful, or at least not like this, though some level of pain has become normal, the wallpaper to your daily life, and usually quite unwelcomed, even when it doesn't radiate down into the elbow, then down to the fingertips. Because it will do that too.

It disrupts normal life, the kinds of actions one does routinely without giving thought. You think about it and it gets done, like toweling the back of your head after a shampoo, or scratching that itch on your back, or opening a cabinet door the height of your head. Suddenly you need help dressing, pulling that tight elastic waistband up to your actual waist in back, or tugging that long-sleeved top over your head, up past your shoulders and down your back. If a sleeve twists you can't reach over to untwist it without more effort and pain than you'd like to start your day with, especially when it's fresh from the laundry and shrunk back into its original shape and size. Day 2 or 3 it usually eases out, and day 4 it hits the laundry basket just on principle while you start over with another top. There's no bothering to give the old one the sniff test, since your sniffer no longer works, you just make the assumption.

By now you think you're used to it as part of daily life. Every day you are grateful you don't live alone and have somebody who's happy to assist you in getting ready to face the world, tugging that top into place. They can easily reach high shelves and get things down or put them back up. The medical visits are so frequent now that's it's only a matter of day and time each week when you see the physical therapist.  Or occasionally somebody else as well. And you're studying what surgery would be like, what restrictions it would place on your life before they finally lift, like being unable to drive (legally) for weeks.

But this simple little reach across the table is qualitatively different. The pain flashes instantly, and in pulling your arm back you have to try various wiggles to get it back tucked in the shoulder. That doesn't ease the pain, of course. You walk out at the end of the meal with everything you need in a bag... in your other hand. The popped one hangs, straight and still. You're still driving. You can grasp the steering wheel to hold it steady while the good hand grabs a new position to turn it. But another person has to fasten your seat belt, and unfasten it when you're home. When you finish the task of putting everything in it's place, whether it's the refrigerator, the counter, or kicked off onto the floor near the door or your chair, and you can sit down, you have to stop yourself from taking a pain pill. The ones you're on already are strong, and only taken in the morning, with coffee and food. Somehow you have to tough this out until then. You wonder if this could possibly be the rare night you can find a comfortable way to lie on your bed so you don't wake in two hours and  return to your recliner because it lets your shoulder hang rather than you rolling on it as you turn in your sleep.

Your own favorite chair gives you pause. You wish your feet up, but there's a lever on the side of your chair that raises and drops your foot rest. The wrong side! A minute or two are wasted in deciding whether it's worth what it's going to take to  get that footrest up, knowing it will have to be reversed in order to go to bed later, or even just the bathroom.

Somehow your night passes. The morning pill is taken with gratitude, as on every morning these days, even though you note that the pain from the day before has somewhat eased. The fingers don't tingle, the elbow isn't stabbing you. Your chair is a great place to do your range of motion exercise to get the joint ready for its day. You refer to is as doing your windmills, sitting and leaning down over your knees, and circling both arms in larger and larger circles in both directions, forward and reverse, trying to get those circles at least as wide as last time, if not wider, which is the point. While the pain of the night before has eased off, for the first time now in the quiet house you can hear your right arm moving as it bumps into your shoulder several times with each rotation.

Soon you are going to have to get dressed again for the day... with help for sure.  You have commitments to meet, errands to run, and your day starts with another session of physical therapy. You muse on whether that's going to be an "interesting" conversation about last night with the therapist. Will she be able to hear that joint the way you can? Will you even ask?