29 April 2006 | Awareness
At the worst point, my arm would hurt from just hanging there. I’d notice this most while walking: the swinging motion caused it. It also hurt when I slept on my right side, so I stopped sleeping on my right side. Early on I stopped doing shoulder exercises, and then all upper body exercises, because they made it hurt more. I also stopped carrying my bag, which was the hardest adjustment of all. I’d been carrying that bag, or a bag like it, for more than twenty years, and so I felt naked without it, like in a dream where you realize too late you’ve forgotten to wear pants. But the weight of the bag made the pain worse, so I had no choice.
I should have seen a doctor, but I really believed it would heal itself. Every injury I’ve ever had—every scrape, every fracture—healed itself, so why should this have been any different? At the same time, I wondered if it was something truly terrible, perhaps even cancer. Is there a cancer of the shoulder? Probably not, but a friend’s lung cancer once metastasized to her shoulder, so anything is possible. Still, I didn’t let myself worry about this possibility, or even think about it much, because it seemed so unlikely. As a rule, I don’t worry about unlikely possibilities. You can spend your whole life doing that and still fail to worry about the thing that kills you. Or even if you worry about the right thing, you still gain nothing by it. Awareness is different. Awareness inspires action; worry, by contrast, is pointless and paralyzing.
