I’m recovering from a period of lower back pain. I don’t know what brought it on. It seemed to come out of nowhere, like the big bang. And then it stuck around for way too long, like The Big Bang Theory.
To help relieve my suffering, I bought a strap-on ice pack from CVS. The item kind of looks like a cummerbund or a pro wrestling championship belt. A wide pouch of clear plastic contains a multitude of little gel balls and is attached to fabric backing with two long Velcro strips. You put the thing in the freezer and when the pack gets cold you place it against your back and join the Velcro strips together around your waist.
I have a similar but smaller plastic pouch that goes into a fabric eye patch for heating up in the microwave. I’ve been using that as a warm compress to treat a stye in my left lower eyelid.
Sometimes when I’m wearing my eye patch and backwards ice cummerbund at the same time, I’ll think to myself, Wasn’t there a time when I could plausibly claim to have some degree of sex appeal? Whatever happened to that?
I hope my back trouble doesn’t have to do with spinal discs. My youngest sister had a problem with those, and it got so bad she opted to undergo surgery. I assume the doctors took out the malfunctioning disc and blew on it, like I used to do with CDs when they started skipping.
If my sister’s issue was genetic, it stands to reason that I am also at risk. But, on the other hand, she plays a lot of tennis, and I figure she might have thrown out her back with all that stop-start running and twisty reaching to hit the ball.
I’m safe if tennis is the culprit. I haven’t played since my parents signed me up for a class when I was 12 or so.
My career on the court was short-lived. I could never do the serve right and I didn’t like the instructor, a barking, gym-teacher type who, to my disappointment, looked absolutely nothing like Pete Sampras.
The one bright spot was that another of the players was a puppyish redheaded boy who said everything with a playful, just-joshin’-ya smile that was like game-set-match for my quivering pubescent defenses. One time we were lining up to do some hateful drill or other, and I made a remark—I don’t remember exactly what I said—that brought the godlike grin to his face and prompted the reply, “You’re so philosophical.”
I am not and never have been, and, let’s face it, he probably hadn’t learned the word neurotic yet. But let me tell you, the feeling in my melted heart was the same as my final score in all the tennis games I ever played: LOVE.
Even so, there’s no flirty ginger who’s cute enough to keep me in tennis lessons. So if I have a slipped disc it has to be from something else.
OK, well, the guy from Outlander is a flirty ginger who’s cute enough to keep me in tennis lessons. I wonder how he feels about ice packs and eye patches.
Or tennis for that matter. Considering that the guy from Outlander is Scottish, I suppose we can assume he’s in favor of golf. But even I have my limits.
