Shifting Gears

I am bored, and, thanks to the meds, dizzy. I'm in bed with a laptop on my elevated legs, a cold pack on my lower back, watching Big Bang Theory DVD (Season 9, Disc 2) on an endless loop.

My body hurts. The problem is complicated, chronic, confounding. I try not to complain. It has grown up with me. It's changed with me. I can't get rid of it. No matter what I do.

I've ingested the spectrum of pain meds from opiods to NSAIDS to steroids. I've dutifully followed the path of traditional Western medicine: physical therapy, TENS unit,  surgeries. Then, when that didn't work, I gave Eastern alternative medicine a chance and tried massage, needles, yoga. At one point, the agony was so severe that I considered returning to religion, any religion, really and praying it all away.  

I worship at the altar of science. Do you know how desperate I must have been to forgo reason and consider that?!

I'm pissed.

I think back about all those morning hikes up Stone Mountain. I would go right after a twelve hour night shift in the emergency room. I was a gym bunny with energy to burn. An hour in the treadmill was a warm-up before a workout. I thought nothing of it. I actually thought I could be doing more.

I want that back. I want my body back. I'm trying to accept what it's turned into, but when it hurts like this and I feel trapped in it, I just want to scream.

And the one thought that keeps worrying me? The one that scares the shit out of me?

What if  this pain only gets worse as I get older? 

My husband and my structural therapist have both advised me to stop fighting my body and forcing it to do what it once could.

"Slow down," they say. "You need to slow down. You have to stop pushing your body and work with your limitations. Things have changed, and your body is not the same anymore. There are consequences now when you try to push past what it can do. "

Slow down.

God, I have heard that advice all my life: doing math problems in second grade, cooking in the kitchen, driving, living my life. I have been chided to slow down, over and over again, and it makes my eyes roll up because I still don't know what internal knob to turn to make that happen.

My default mode is fast. I'm hyper even without coffee. Energy is always there, just right there, ready for me. Don't they understand? My energy could intimidate the Energizer Bunny, because unlike that pink percussive rabbit, I don't just keep going and going and going. No, I can fucking go and come back and ask for more without breaking into sweat.

Am I making it clear just how much energy I'm talking about?

I don't know what slow is. I talk fast, I read fast, I eat fast, I type fast, I drive fast, I learn fast. Fast. Fast. FAST. FASTER. FASTER. FASTER!!!!

I'm fucking fast.

How the hell do I become slow? And why does that word scare me?

Slow.

Slow to me is not a good thing. Only bad things come to mind when I think of the word slow. I attribute slow with laziness and ignorance. Slow like a dunce. Slow like someone who isn't carrying their weight. Slow is wasting time, and time is passing by so quickly so why not do it fast so you can have more of it?

But maybe I've been thinking about this all wrong. Maybe there's a lesson in all this.

Fuck, there better be a lesson in all this pain. But even as I write that, I realize that sorta reminds me of that thing religious people say, "Everything happens for a reason" and how much I hated hearing that as an answer to all my unanswerable questions.