how am i gonna live today? with a positive, positive, positive, positive attitude...

Well, I am trying to have a positive attitude anyway. If I am fully honest, I haven’t blogged recently due to the fact that I have had kind of a rough week.

Well, actually my rough week started in 2001.

Okay, that’s only partly true.

Basically, I got in a car accident in 2001 and hurt my shoulder. I did the physical therapy thing and haven’t really had an issue with it. Well, my left arm is longer than my right thanks to that… and my left shoulder slopes down, so I can’t keep any straps on my shoulder… and it sometimes ached when it would rain… okay, but other than THAT, it was fine. Anyway, at the beginning of the summer, Lance and I were driving to Best Buy, and he was playing the license plate game (basically like “slug bug” for out of state license plates), and he called “Ohio” and hit me in the arm. He never hits hard in this game… and I think he only plays it because I talk incessantly when we are in the car because he is a captive audience, so random state names are sometimes the only thing he has to add to the convo. Evs. Anyway, so I start BAWLING crying after he hits me. At first, he thought I was kidding… and then he got this shocked and kind of sickened look on his face and was like, “Wait… are you serious? Like, for real?” Anyway, it hurt for a little while and then stopped bothering me again.

And then I developed a divot.

I’m really not 100% sure what else to call it… it’s just… a divot. It’s in my left arm right at the bottom of my shoulder muscle, and there’s just a big crater-y thing in my arm. I wasn’t too sure about it, so I went to my family doctor and told him the whole story (yes, including the license plate game part), and he told me I had good range of motion and good strength, so I probably just needed physical therapy again. Well, I don’t really like physical therapy that much, and I figured that if I was okay, I didn’t need it desperately or anything.

And then the divot deepened.

(This sounds like the dumbest golf story of all time. Such is my life.)

I finally got nervie enough to schedule the physical therapy, but I was doubting whether that was what I actually needed, so I asked a guy from church who is a physical therapist to look at my shoulder and see whether he thought that PT would help or whether I should go see a specialist. We walked over to their house one evening last week (they live in our neighborhood), and he moved my arm all around… and even discovered that my arm could move around in the socket, which is notsogood. He said that he would recommend at least having an ortho guy take a look at it because he couldn’t really figure out exactly what would be wrong (whether neuro or muscular or whatever) and gave me the name of a guy he said was really good with shoulders.

Sooooo Monday I go see the ortho guy. I tell HIM the whole story, and he moves my shoulder all around too. And yes, he even moves it around in the socket to see how much motion there is… but he was MUCH rougher than Richard was. Anyway, now I have to go on Tuesday to get an MRI (and they will be injecting me with something… possibly in the shoulder – ouchie pouchie!), and then the next Wednesday, I have to go get a nerve test where they will poke me over and over with needles to see how my nerves/muscles respond. The doctor pre-apologized for the nerve test. I take that as a terrible sign. And – fabulous – I was sore for several days after my appointment, so that was not fun.

Depending on what these two tests reveal, I may be facing a surgery on my shoulder here pretty soon. I’m nervous about all of it – the tests, the appointments, the possible surgery, recovering, paying for all of it. I’ve been praying about it a lot, and I am hoping that great joy is just around the corner…

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PS – Update from previous post: Buddy is doing MUCH better (praise the Lord!) and really wants to be back to his normal, active self. We currently will not let him, which he does not appreciate… but we can tell he’s feeling a ton better, so we are thrilled with that. There – my daily dose of positivity.