Five things that hurt more than my back hurts right now.

Kind, concerned people have been asking me when I'm going to go to the doctor to get checked out and to be honest, I really don't think I will. Am I sore? Yes, I'm definitely not 100% but I also know that I'm not so bad that the doctor isn't going to suggest anything other than to take some over-the-counter drugs, refrain from strenuous activity and wait. Maybe some light stretching. Besides, I can think of things that have hurt more:

1) I stepped barefoot on a piece of glass the night before a dance recital and waited in Emerg for a doctor to pull it out. When I told him that it was from a mason jar he thought it would be easy but it wasn't because the piece was kind of corkscrew shaped and required a lot of twisting and jiggling to get it out. He told me he stuck some anaesthetic cream on it but I don't believe him, and he told me to stay off it for a few days. I danced on it the following night but by then it had subsided to a dull, persistent ache.

2) I always laugh at the cat runs fullspeed down the hallway and skids into the closet door as she's trying to turn. That's exactly what I did one morning when I heard the phone. I leapt out of bed, ran out the door, and while I was turning to run down the hall, my left foot slipped on the laminate and I skidded across the floor, catching my thumb on the frame of the bathroom door.

At first I thought it was broken but after a few days I started to regain mobility in my thumb and wrist, though it was a good three onths before I was able to squeeze the shampoo out of the bottle. There was one other thing though: the rug burn on my upper thigh, hip and left breast because I happened to be buck naked at the time. First the rugburn hurt and after a few days it started to itch and there are some things you just can't scratch in public.

3) At my rowing club we had a ramp to get down to the water, the angle of which changed with the tides. When carrying boats down this ramp, we had to put the boat over our heads and the order of people to carry goes from tallest to smallest down the ramp, which means I've always been the last person down. That also means that there's a point in time while we're all going down the ramp where only two of the eight people are actually holding the 4-500 lb boat up. Most of the time I was okay with that. You just lock your elbows and walk slow.

But one day in November of 2003 I just wasn't at my best. I don't know why, but I just felt kind of weak and tired. I had the boat held over my head, people began to drop off in the middle and then all of a sudden I felt something under my left shoulderblade snap. My left arm buckled and the boat came down in a controlled fall on top of my shoulder. I don't know what did more damage - that or the fact that I raced on it the next day but I was out for months and it never completely healed.

4) When I was really young I had a particularly nasty strep infection that turned my body overnight into one big angry red rash that was particularly bad around my face, armpits and genitals. I was prescribed penicillin and sent home, only to return to hospital, because the penicillin had caused my kidneys to fail and my skin was no longer one big angry rash, but one big angry open oozing, weeping sore.

Too bad I didn't know this at the time:



5) When I was seven they were busy replacing one of the bridges in a local park and had dug a big pit out for the footings. Beside the pit was the older, narrower bridge, scheduled to be replaced. I came down the hill towards the bridge only to find that it was full of people who would not move when I called at them so since I couldn't stop I missed the bridge, flew over the pit and landed underneath my bike at the bottom of the creek. I don't know where those people went but they certainly didn't come to help me. Twats.