I Wake Up In Pain
I wake up every day in pain. My right hip often seizes up on me and I have to spend time stretching in bed before I can get up without feeling like a maniac is going to work on me with the pointy end of a rusty spoon. I knew that I wouldn’t be young forever but I’m too young to feel this old now.
I Live in Pain
I walk in pain. My wife says that she can hear me and our ten year old bully breed walking down the hall; both of our joints popping louder than old hardwood floors.
I drive in pain. Despite doing quad stretches before any drive that’s going to last over fifteen minutes duration, my knees start to throb after I’ve been in the car for too long. Makes my daily commute a lot of fun. Sometimes I shoot video for the brand while I drive just to distract me from the pain.
Don’t Talk to Me about Hypermobility if you Can’t Touch Your Toes with Your Feet on the Ground
People talk about the dangers of hypermobility all of the time. Meatheads use it as an excuse to not stretch even though they spend tons every year on NSAIDs, compression sleeves, liniments and other mass marketed coping mechanisms to help them hide the fact that their physiological train wreck is drifting towards the station slowly. But stretching is the only thing that puts pain in time out for a short blissful time.
I Stretch and I believe
So I stretch. Even though it probably reduces what I can lift in the gym, I’m willing to trade a few pounds on the bar now for the hope that one day pain won’t be what wakes me. That I might be able to drive cross-country with my wife and not have to stop every hour just to return the feeling to my legs. That I won’t always be in pain.
Read that again because I mean it literally. I am always in pain. Right now, both knees are throbbing a silent crescendo under the desk as I type this sentence. That is not normal. In Joel 2:25, God promises, “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer and the cutter, my great army which I sent among you” (ESV).
So I stretch. And I believe. And I hope.
That mobility now will return to me some of what an injury in boot camp and an unseen boot to the other knee in a bar fight stole from me.
Forever young? I’ll settle for just not needing so much aspirin.