06 April 2006

That first line of Dante's Inferno keeps coming back to haunt me.

I had a very scary thing happen to me last night.

I was sitting in the living room, playing my acoustic guitar, when my daughter put herself in a situation in which I had to stop playing and attend to her. As I uncurled my fingers from the fretboard, I felt a sharp pain in my index and middle fingers. I'm hoping like all hell it was a cramp.

I couldn't straighten my fingers out for a few minutes, and I took a couple tylenols just in case, because, well, that's what you do with arthritis. It put me in mind of the librarian in my elementary school, whose hands were so stricken by arthritis they were permanently curled. At the time, it was eerie and made her kind of creepy, but looking back on it years later I wondered how much pain she was in daily.

In the past few years, as my body keeps telling me that I'm closer to 40 than I am to 30, I've understood that one of our tragedies is the loss of our body as we remembered it: the energy, the recovery, the resiliency.

My hands are fine now, and I'm fairly certain it was a cramp, but in the medical mood I'm in, I was of course jumping to all sorts of degenerative diseases conclusions.

"Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost."

1 comment:

m.a. said...

That sounds like guitar related tendon issues. I've had that happen before. You're fine! Trust me.