… “I got a bad case of ….” well …. groin injury?

Robert Palmer’s original lyrics “…of lovin’ you” sound so much better. And it probably feels better too.

And “groin injury” really doesn’t describe the 20,000 volt shots of pain going through me every time I move.

It all started yesterday afternoon after work. I felt a wave of fatigue and a chill so I took to my bed for 20-minutes. That’s unusual for me and people wondered.

When I got up to take a call, there was a strange sensation in that ball-and-socket area connecting my left leg to my pelvis. Nothing too serious so I carried on.

An hour later I was stepping out of the car downtown.  The strange-sensation had progressed to hurting-quite-a-bit. I needed to take the “arm of another” to walk the three blocks to the restaurant.

Sitting and eating was fine, but when I stood up to leave some 90 minutes later, a white-hot bolt of lightning rocketed down my leg. I “yelped” out loud (YOL!). It was an involuntary yelp. People looked.

The walk to the door was long, perilous and punctuated by involuntary yelps. The pain was electric: nerve pain, coming in sudden shots, searing. Through the blur, I could see people in the window of the next restaurant gawking and pointing. What they were seeing was an old an old lady, hunched over and shuffling at a snail’s pace, face pinched in pain, yelping.

Next came the stairs. There were about ten, all of them going down. My “arm of another” was off retrieving the car. So I stood there alone at the top of those steps making my plan: Use the railing like a crutch. Good leg first. Ease down one step at a time. Remember to breathe. Like yoga.

I knew it would be hard but I had no idea how hard. It took second-by-second focus and a Herculean determination not unlike that of a climber ascenting (Sir Edmund) Hillary’s Step just before summiting Everest.

We’ll call those stairs “GT’s Step.”

When I reached the bottom of GT’s Step, my knight in shining armour awaited with the family chariot.  But getting me across the sidewalk and folding me into the chariot proved a challenge equally as grueling as GT’s Step.

When I arrived home, I was helped inside. I had to crawl up the stairs.

This morning it was better for the first ten minutes, but the 20,000 volt shots are back. I’m hitting the ibuprofen pretty hard to take down the inflammation.

Right now, I’m attributing the injury to an early morning workout in the pool on Friday. We were doing butterfly sets, focusing a fast, tight dolphin kick. You try to keep the undulation to a minumum and use core rigidity to max out on forward propulsion. It’s a Michael Phelps technique.

That could have put strain on my groin area. I’m hoping that’s it. I haven’t yet contemplated the alternatives (!)(!).

In this part of the world, going to hospital emergency is not an option, unless you’re willing to wait minimum six to twelve hours or more. Recently, the Emergency Docs at the biggest hospital in Eastern Canada enacted a “Code Orange” mass casuality alert just to clear the long line-up of ambulances full of bleeding and fractured people who couldn’t even get into the hospital, much less get treatment. (That state of affair is another story entirely.) I may as well sit in the comfort of my house all day.

I’m under no-move orders today. I’m so hoping this thing will go away. Soon.

All experience or ideas on this welcome. All sympathy and notes of I-feel-your-pain also welcome. I’m not one to suffer alone or in silence.

Yelp!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 1:08 pm and is filed under odd things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.