Laid Up

From a personal perspective (the perspective at which I'm best at providing), this has not been the best week ever. For the past month or so, I've had low-level back pain primarily on the lower left side of my back. The discomfort was actually most noticeable when driving in the car or sitting through a meeting. It was pretty bearable and didn't really have any bearing on my ability to do anything - just a little imperfect and uncomfortable. However, this changed on Monday night while I was sliding after a softball during our playoff loss to a team that was probably too good for our division. As soon as I started to slide to the ground, my back tweaked, I lost my breath, and I knew that I was going to be in trouble.

Typically after an injury like that, I have the next few hours to enjoy life, then after I lay down or sleep for the night, things go all down hill for awhile. True to form, I enjoyed the next few hours of happy life through celebrating another fun softball season with my team and team family members at Shield's in Troy, drove home, went to sleep, and since then, I've been just about the most pathetic person you'll see. The couch has been my home since Tuesday morning, and it has been hard to focus on very much. It takes me about 3 minutes to stand up and five minutes to put on my right sock. The only way I can put on the sock is to roll onto my back like a big naked turtle (as opposed to turtles who wear clothes - and you know they wear turtlenecks) on our bed and s----t----r----e----t---c----h out with my right hand until minutes later I make approximate contact with my foot. I've learned that it's not easy to put on a sock with one hand.

It's frustrating because I'm a pretty active person, so by the end of the day I've done absolutely nothing active or semi-active and I have barrels of energy to burn and no way to burn that energy. The two good things to come out of this injury are the following:

1) I finished watching The Shield yesterday. That show is crazy.
2) This story happened yesterday because I could be home for it - our new fridge has a super annoying click every time it is opened. Maureen and I were sure that we'd just need a new part, but we had to have a repair person come out to verify this requirement. After a couple weeks, we were finally able to schedule an appointment for yesterday because I definitely wasn't going anywhere else. The store called me in the morning to tell me the repair person would be arriving between 10-2. That's kind of a standard four hour window for things like repairs, deliveries, and installations, so while it sucks to have to be available for a full window, it didn't seem unreasonable. By about 2:30 no one had yet arrived so I called dispatch to say "hey, just wanted to see if someone is still on the way because we're now comfortably past the stated window." I understand that appointments and appointment windows are missed, and that doesn't bother me so much, but what did bother me was that instead of saying something like "sorry" or "let me find out what's going on", the woman on the phone said "well, these are estimated times." That was just about enough for me, so I definitely didn't let that one slide by. "Estimated times? I thought that's why you give people a FOUR HOUR ESTIMATED TIME WINDOW," I said to her. After a little more push back from me she eventually called her repair guy and got him on his way to our house. I couldn't imagine a better way to spend 5 hours.