I love the word. It sounds so haughty, so blinded by confidence. I loved when it was used as the title for a book on the Iraq War (Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War). I never thought I would apply it to me. Well, now I can.
We are still moving stuff from our old rental house to the new rental house. Yes, we are taking forever. Yes, we’ve been in serious denial. Now it is go time. We have to be out by tomorrow. So this week we’ve been moving stuff and getting rid of stuff. I took 4 pick up truck loads of treasures to Goodwill on Monday. Lots of good stuff that we hope others will get as much use out of as we have. Among the things I gave away were several slings. I’ve accumulated these over the years as I’ve gone into the emergency room for a dislocated shoulder.
It all started when I was a junior in high school playing football. I had played since I was a freshman and started on the junior varsity squad the year before. Even though I went to a tiny school, I still didn’t start as a junior. My coach that year was famous for being a massive jerk—Al DeJulio. We called him the Italian Stallion. This was 1986 when the Rocky franchise was still culturally relevant. Coach didn’t treat me particularly well. I played on the practice squad against the first team the entire year. I played safety on defense. We were coached to stand legs apart, hands on the hips—ready to react as they play started. On one occasion, Coach yelled at me from the sidelines, “Hey King, you a male model or what?” On another occasion he unloaded this memorable beauty on me during a Thursday practice, “King, you’ve got two chances of starting on Saturday—slim and none and slim just left town.” I really didn’t cause trouble and I worked my ass off. I was just small, slow and lacked self-confidence. I was an easy and safe target in the manly world of small-town high school football. Maybe Coach thought he was trying to teach me self-confidence. I learned lessons from the experience, but I am not prepared to give him credit for consciously teaching me much.
When the first team practiced on defense I played the opposing team’s running back for that week. I was a tackling dummy for the first team offense running behind the blocking of the second team offensive ling. I got crushed constantly. The thing is I loved it. I got to play football with pads, live (meaning full speed with contact). Nothing was more fun. So I’d get creamed and come back the next play to do it again. The greatest thrill was beating the first team offense, which we did from time to time. Of course when that happened we’d have to run the same play over and over until the first team offense could consistently cream me instead of letting me get by.
One day I got smacked down and hurt my shoulder. This was the first time I dislocated my shoulder. In classic movie fashion, one of the assistant coaches grabbed my arm, twisted and shoved until the arm went back into place. It hurt, but I got back up and finished practice. I didn’t play much that year, so I don’t remember it coming out again until I was a senior. By then the Italian Stallion had moved on to a bigger small-town high school and I was a starter on offense and defense. That is when it started to dislocate on a regular basis—usually in games, involving great drama (ambulances, gurneys, etc). In one game it came out, and I was carted off the field on a stretcher and stuck in the ambulance. By the time I got to the ambulance, it had gone back in on its own so I stayed at the game. After half-time the coach let me back in the game to kick an extra point (the only point I scored in my long, illustrious football career). Someone from the other team complained and I was taken from the game and forbidden to play any more games because of the injury. A few weeks later someone bought me a strap-on contraption that kept my shoulder in place. I wore it under my pads and finished the season. It continued to come out, but not as often.
I didn’t know it at the time, but once a shoulder dislocates it is likely to happen again and the more it happens the more likely it is that it will keep happening. Fast forward 24 years and it has come out dozens of more times. At the beach in Thom’s River NJ, in bed while sleeping, while throwing a shot put in a decathlon, at the security gate of the Savannah River Site, and just hours before I was to chair my first session at a big archaeology conference. In that last instance, I was carted out of the hotel on a stretcher only to return a half hour before my session was to start.
The last time it came out was about 3 years ago while my dad was visiting. I ended up in the hospital and they had to put me under to get the sucker back in. My wife came in just as they were trying to revive me. Oh yeah and I hadn’t given the hospital permission to list me as being admitted, so my wife didn’t know where I was. Oh and when she finally found me they were trying to revive me from the anesthesia…and having some trouble.
In the movies is looks all fun, but in real life dislocating your shoulder is not fun. It hurts like hell when it comes out. Once it is out and stays out, the muscles of the shoulder start to spasm and that REALLY hurts. The longer it stays out the more it spasms and the more it hurts. And despite what Mel Gibson shows in the movies, you can’t just shove it back into place after it is out. Sometimes it can take hours. My shoulder introduce me to morphine.
At this point I pretty much know how it comes out and avoid those kinds of motions and positions. I’ve done a pretty good job of limiting the dislocations. My brother has had surgery to take care of one shoulder—turns out this is part of a genetic problem with my father, brother and I. Because it has been a few years since I’ve dislocated my shoulder, I had no hesitation in giving away the many slings I had accumulated over the years.
That was Monday. Yesterday (Wednesday) I moved a bunch of particularly heavy boxes of books. I was kind of pissed, so I was really jerking them up off the ground and slinging them around. When I got to the new house I was pretty beat, but my son wanted to play baseball. We played for a while without incident. While walking back to the house, I did something to the shoulder and it felt like it dislocated part of the way or came out and went back quickly. I’ve since decided that I’ve separated the shoulder. Whether this happened as it came out or not I am not sure. I assume all of this was the result of the amount of lifting and carrying I’ve done over the past week and the fact that I was particularly rough on myself yesterday.
It hurt all last night and I really can’t move it much today. This morning I went to Walgreens and bought a new sling. I won’t be so quick to give this one away.
That same overconfidence has slopped over into my weight loss regime. I weighed in at 187.7 today. That is up almost 2 lbs over yesterday and represents the first day I’ve really gained weight for weeks. I pigged out (pun intended) on BBQ yesterday and ate a lot of ice cream the day before. My overconfidence in the fact that I would continue to lose weight without the effort has put me on the wrong track.
I come to you a humble and focused but still fat archaeologist.
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