Not Nurse Ratched

Yes, -gate is a productive morpheme, so I can totally make my shoulder injury sound deeply important by calling it shouldergate. Don’t judge me. I already blogged about the original injury, but now there’s more, so it’s a -gate now. You see, I am uncoordinated by nature and also horribly out of shape, the combination of which basically guaranteed an embarrassing injury at some point. It happened during a biceps curl—nothing fancy, but a crack and a pop later and I was dancing around like a spider on hot coals to avoid also having my dumbbell land on my toes (that part was successful).

I eventually had to go to the doctor because I couldn’t move my left arm, and the 50% decrease in upper-extremity activities available to me bothered me. He prescribed Norco and Skelaxin and told me to rest. Right. Also, the pharmacy was OUT of Skelaxin. What the fuck is up with all these drug shortages? Anyway, I had to work the next three nights, so I took a medically unadvised amount of Motrin and prayed that I would not develop an ulcer before my shoulder got better. I drank a lot of coffee to dilute my stomach acid.

Which was an OK plan until I was asleep and reached over with the hurt arm to pull the blankets over myself, because, did I mention, I was ASLEEP, and my shoulder made that snap/pop sound again, and I sat up in bed and said “MOTHERFUCKER!” It hurt like that.

So I had to wear an immobilizer sling at work that night to avoid walking around looking tearful, which meant every 5 minutes someone said, “What did you do to your arm?” and then was bored immediately by what I really did, so I started making shit up. The shrewder members of our staff detected bullshit when rampaging rhinos entered the stories, but I made up some pretty good tales that went undetected as total fabrications.

After those shifts ended, I collected my real prescriptions and took them, and I discovered the secret of narcotic pain medications. They don’t actually take away the pain; they just make you not care as much about it. They also give me horrible diarrhea, which I figure makes me a freak of nature because they should cause constipation. The Skelaxin and a heating pad have worked great, though, or maybe that’s the Valium.

Anyway, speaking of Valium, during this relaxing time of immobility and muscle relaxers, I have been reading the overpriced but hilarious Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir), by Jenny Lawson, otherwise known as The Bloggess. I normally refuse to pay more than $9.99 for a Kindle book, but since I was suffering from the inability to use 25% of my limbs and also from narcotic-induced diarrhea, I decided I deserved a damn treat. In this book I have discovered many things about marriage, child-rearing, and a career in HR, but also I’ve learned that bloggers are ALL weird:

Most bloggers are emotionally unstable and are often awkward in social situations, which is why so many of us turned to blogging in the first place. Also, they are always looking for something to write about, so if you fuck something up it will be blogged, Facebooked, and retweeted until your death. It would be lot like Lindsay Lohan spending a weekend with TMZ and the National Enquirer, and I suspect that one day my gravestone will simply read: JENNY LAWSON: SHE WAS MISQUOTED ON TWITTER.

Which is awesome.