I don't want to be

One of the hardest things to deal with when your abilities are suddenly taken from you – even if that is just your perception of what has happened – is that you want to be ‘normal’ again. And there’s a tendency to want to act as if it all hasn’t happened. That’s denial.

At one of the last family functions I attended, Ob’s brother had set up a ping pong table off the back porch under a canopy. His sons were playing.
I used to be a pretty good ping pong player. When I was in the Army, a friend taught me. So I wrangled down the steps and took one end of the table.
Most of ping pong is in the arms and wrists, and I’m a big man. I could cover most of one end of the table with just a few short, quick steps. I did OK against these quick kids.
The effort got to me after about a half hour though. I had to stop. The kids wanted to go on for a while. They were having a good time trying to get one past me or handling the snapping shots that spun off my paddle.
I just had to quit.
I smiled, and just went up onto the porch to rest. The pain must have been showing on my face, but no one in the group commented on it. All the better.
After a little while, I realized that I had to go home. We lived just a little ways from there. I made my apologies and said I may be back, then left.
The next two days were a lesson in what I should and should not do with a twisted hip.
My back was stiff and hurting from the lower back up along it to my head. I had a constant headache. That, and the twinges of pain in my knee were nothing compared to the throbbing dull pain in my hip though. Referral pain from my back defined the muscles over my thigh.
I couldn’t sleep. All I could do was squirm into a new position, day or night, and hurt.
Ob let me know that she resented my leaving the family meeting before the food was served. She felt it was rude of me. And she told me over and over how lazy I was for not doing more around the house.
I tried to tell her about the pain, but as usual, she wasn’t interested.
You watch others doing normal things in a day, and you don’t want to admit to yourself that you can’t do that. You put such things out of your mind. You find something, anything, to focus on.
I just made excuses for Ob’s cruel words. She was under a lot of stress, I told myself. And besides, I didn’t have the energy to try to get her to understand.
I had my pain to keep me warm, I teased myself….

In the back of my mind, I never accepted my disability. I just didn’t like the idea of it. I hated to think of myself as an 80-year old at only 48.
What’s confusing is that my arms and legs still had much of their strength. Or at least I told myself that. The idea of being 80 already was there, viscerally, in my body and gut.
But if someone asked how I was going, it wasn’t just social pressure or privacy that made me tell them I was alright. It was that I refused to admit that I wasn’t alright!