I'm Too Damn Healthy!

Had my physical today. People my age get regular physicals to either confirm our invincibility or to affirm our mortality. Other than a couple nagging injuries and a blasted freakish spine doolio that can be completely benign one day and MAKE MY LIFE A LIVING HELL the next, I am waaaaay too healthy. Blood sugar is great, blood pressure is fine (with the meds, of course), cholesterol is excellent, and my hangnail is gone.

Ah, the miracles of modern medicine. A great doctor to monitor my day-to-day functions, an excellent neurologist to watch my back, neck and arm, a super neurosurgeon to fuse disks, and a pain doc to inject my back and shoot radio waves into me...and I'm good to go! Actually I feel damn good right now. Tomorrow morning? Who knows, but right now all the disks and facets and vertebrae and joints and muscles and ligaments are in harmony and are at peace with their adjoining body parts.

This is what old people do. We talk about our surgeries, our ailments, our aches and pains. I'd never had surgery in my life 'til my first back surgery. I guess that was around '84 or so. Following that, each section of my body was in a rush to be next to go under the doc's knife. Shoulders , tonsils, the back again, neck. Seemed like everything was coming unglued. A few months after I had my neck fused (I had put that off for about ten years 'til it got too nasty to ignore), I managed to flip my riding mower over on top of me. Literally. The damn thing was running (my feet were planted securely on the blade pedal) upside down while I lay beneath it. Musta looked really cool when it flipped. I saw sky, said, "Oh shit", and that was it. I kicked it to one side, cut it off, stomped around my neighbor's yard for a good while, then realized the mower might be damaged. Pulled the plug, drained the oil, let it sit a while, and it was good as new. That's about the time I noticed I was unable to lift either arm. I went to work the next day and the first person who saw me in the building was like, "OMIGOD. What the hell have you done to yourself?!" I musta been walking like something from a George Romero flick. Whatever...got things checked out and no permanent damage was done. Just strained the shoulders (again) and aggravated the piss outta my neck, but the little titanium brace and the dead guy's bone held in place by the brace were just fine.

Shoulders. My favorite body part to destroy. Tore the right rotator cuff making a throw whilst playing softball. Played ten years in pain...couldn't throw overhand at all...everything from me was sidearm. Years after Brad joined the team, he told me he had asked his brother early on, "Who's this cocky bastard throwing sidearm all the time?" He said his brother told him I was lucky to be throwing at all. But I could play. That was all that mattered to me at the time. My kids got a little jumpy from me screaming every time I reached for the glove box in my Bronco, as I contorted my arm to compensate for the shoulder's inability to function as it should. I'd get cortisone injections deeeeep down in the joint. The doc would admonish me to not throw at all for at least two weeks. But I felt great and I'd play the night after the shot. That turned out to be a bad move. I had arthroscopic surgery that cleaned things up a little. When I dove to my right for a throw that had gotten by our second baseman (I played 1st base) and landed on my right shoulder, it was over. Done. Finite. After getting the ball back in, I remember walking to the fence and hanging my arm over it. I was hurting like hell. I knew this wasn't good. Three guys on our team were physical therapists which came in handy a good bit. If we'd had a lawyer and a female masseuse, it woulda been the perfect team. Mark came running in from center field and when he got to me, he told another teammate, "He's through." I tried to bat the next inning, but I couldn't raise that arm at all. We went to the therapy center and tried electrical impulses, heat, cold, anything just to calm it down some. When the docs saw the MRIs, they said everything in there was 'shredded'. Completely torn away form whatever it was supposed to be attached to. A mess. Anyway, a fantastic doctor at the Hughston Clinic in Columbus, Georgia, Lyle Norwood, did a bangup job putting me back together. 7 weeks with my arm locked out in front of me in a brace...day and night...oh, boy was that a fun time! My girlfriend at the time was an angel. I could never repay her for all she did for me.

Had a tournament in Dothan after that. It rained the whole way down and the entire evening, so we assumed we weren't playing. Our bunch was sorta known as a hard-drinking team (aren't all softball teams?) and we didn't see any reason to do anything to soften our image. Hell, there was no way we could play in the wet conditions, right? So we went nuts at the hotel. Then we got the call from the ballpark...our game was on. Oh man. This ain't gonna be pretty. We hauled ass over there. I managed to lock all my gear up in the Bronco. Two of our guys were locksmiths (damn, we had a good crew) and Jimmy got me in a no time. We played and at some point I was heading for third, dove headfirst, and jammed my left shoulder as I got to the bag. In the mud, I got there a lot quicker than I had anticipated arriving. Of course, the beer had nothing to do with my impaired sense of speed/distance/slippery surface/etc. Found the hospital papers the other day where they injected dye and found that the left rotator cuff was torn. I've never had that fixed. There's a lot worse things in this world than a torn shoulder.

Whatever. I hate to stop 'cause, by god, I'm rollin' now, but the Home Run Derby comes on soon and I am gonna watch it. Maybe this little post will get me going. There are so many things that matter to no one at all but me...that I desperately need to write about. This is so freakin' weird. Typing this crap, as if anyone other than myself GARA.

Pictures all have to be resized, and I can't seem to make myself get around to that, but, soon I'm going to post some of my favorite shots from the last few years. Rather than write about rides, events, etc, I think I'll just throw a buncha the better photos in here and write a little about the event(s) they're connected to.

Any typos or misspelled words will have to get fixed later...I'm missing the damn All-Star stuff already.