Folding My Cards

A few weeks ago, I announced with great happiness that I had started swimming again. I went out and bought a pair of fins to give my legs a better workout. The fins were not right for me and I went to the other end of the city to buy a better pair. But after having gone to the pool 4-5 times, I realized that I could not continue to do so without doing myself serious harm.

I am held together with old Scotch tape like the picture above. You remember the stuff. It would get yellow and lose its stickiness and fall off, leaving ugly yellow marks behind. That's me. Whenever I try to introduce more movement into my life, the tape comes loose and the pain sets in. Thankfully, I have yoga, though even then, it's often one step forward followed by 1-2 steps back. At 54, I am holding the fort against total decrepitude. If I were a house, I wouldn't be worth salvaging, aside for a few components.

In addition to everything I've mentioned here on umpteen occasions, I also have recurring pain in my mid-back (right between my shoulder blades) and in my neck. When I move my neck, it crackles. I've had the mid-back pain on and off since my mid-twenties. Acupuncture used to help a lot. Now, not so much. Due to my hip, the only swim stroke I can do is the crawl and this has really exacerbated the back pain. Oh, and my hip gets unstable from the kicking, even without the fins. So, good-bye pool.

I've got to go to the doctor and get an x-ray of my upper back, but I'm pretty sure it's arthritis. I've got a whack of yoga exercises to do for this, but it's exhausting doing all these exercises for my neck, my back, my hip, my...whatever. And the kicker is that it's not to improve my health, cardiovascular or otherwise-- it's all just to keep the old scotch tape from completely falling off.