This morning I was somewhat braced for whatever kind of misery one might expect from a body part in protest to some assault or another. The reason is my orthopedic doctor gave me a steroid shot in the area of my arthritic thumb yesterday. The needle was quite long and menacing-looking but for whatever reason, I never felt the stick nor did I ever feel the injection or the medicine’s sting.
Such occurrences are rare for me. Pretty much when I am stuck with anything it hurts to some degree or another. I have had tons of shots and IVs, have been cut open with scalpels and even had a chunk of hip bone lifted from that nether region and clamped together with a little titanium plate in my cervical spine. So when something sticks me or cuts me or produces some type of assault on my person I feel it and I know how it feels. But not the doc’s shot.
The doctor’s reaction when I told him it didn’t hurt a bit was that he had done this quite a lot of times so he has become good at doing it. But I was still waiting for a punchline — as in waking up this morning and feeling as my hand had been punched by Dwayne “The Man Formerly Known as The Rock” Johnson.
My precedent for this delayed pain syndrome emanates from my days in Navy boot camp. We bored little sailors-to-be all played this masochistic game in which a training company in front of us would give us the heads-up on some of the horrors which were on our horizon. We’d get even by scaring the hell out of the company junior to us. We were a little vague on the concept of karma back then. An instance of this sick little game surrounded an anticipated immunization.
Now we got shots, shots and more shots in boot camp. But this one particular shot, I can’t even remember what it was for, was said to be a doozy. The guys ahead of us in training said it was given with this big square needle right in the center of one’s butt. The toughest men in the companies were said to be reduced to whimpering, sniveling little babies from the pain it induced.
Much of the scare stories which we heard from our upper classmen were bulls**t. But there tended to be some truth into this story only it was a time-released truth.
When it came our time for the shot we all went in weary but trying not to be afraid. The first relief came when I noticed that, while very long, the needle wasn’t square. I was given the shot and beside feeling a little stick felt no unusual discomfort. Our senior students had gotten us again! Well, not quite.
The next morning came reveille and as I jumped up out of bed I immediately went down to the floor in agony. My ass felt like it had been impaled with a railroad spike. As we were able to finally move around, march to breakfast, march back and do some exercise, the pain finally eased. The old square-needle shot did hurt, it just didn’t hurt when it was administered.
So I was expecting something similar this morning in the area of my cortisone injection when I got out of bed. But no, it was just fine. The only thing which was extremely annoying was the fact I was awakened at 6 a.m., about two hours earlier than I had intended to awaken, by a neighbor whom I didn’t know. She explained her apartment was having plumbing problems and asked if she could use my bathroom. I finally just raised my hands, including the one which was clearly pain-free, and said: “First door on your right.”