Healed

About fourteen months ago I seriously injured my right shoulder doing body weight chin-ups at the gym.  My personal physician and a sports med doc (minus x-rays) determined that I had a torn rotator cuff that would, in all likelihood, require surgery to repair the damage.  Not one to accept such terms, I continued to train around this injury . . . though a torn cuff most certainly can be felt while doing bench presses, back movements, or any arm exercises.  For the past year I could even feel the shoulder injury while writing, and for most of this time I could scarcely lift my right arm past parallel without pain.

Naturally, this injury affected nearly every aspect of my life . . . including shaving, showering, and even my fumbling attempts to put my arms around my wife (which I rarely do, but I don't like pain when I attempt it).  Last summer, while driving on Washington St. in Indianapolis near Circle Center Mall, I made the mistake of reaching for the glove compartment and immediately had a streak of pain so intense, I had to pull to the side of the road so I could catch my breath and restore balance to my senses. (I also cursed a blue streak . . . but hey, kids, you stay off drugs!)

And yet, God is good!  

Last week, when I returned to see my doctor for my annual checkup (at which time we again became intimately acquainted with each other and I was formally introduced to the doctor's long finger), the doc asked me about my rotator cuff.  "I have some minor residual pain," I said, "but the pain is more of a deep tightness now.  It's dull, not sharp and piercing like a knife."

"When did you start lifting on that shoulder again?" he asked.

"Actually," I confessed, "I never quit.  I've been in the gym 4-5 times a week for the past year and just kept lifting around the injury."

"Didn't you have pain?" 

"Excruciating," I admitted.  "Sometimes it would take my breath, but I kept going."

After some additional poking and prodding from the doc (and me fearing that our new-found intimacy would result in his asking me out to dinner and drinks following the exam) he said,"I'm amazed.  I've never heard of anyone doing what you've done with that shoulder.  But it would appear that you are healed."

Good old doc.  Good old God.  

But it just goes to show . . . God also helps those who help themselves.  I guess that's true of shoulders anyway.  But at my age, I'm also learning not to put God to the test.  You won't see me doing body weight chin-ups anymore.

I'm grateful for the doc's diagnosis and clean bill of shoulder health . . . but I don't really know how to thank him without giving the wrong impression.  I'd hate for him to show up at Starbucks wearing a rubber glove on one hand.