Sometime last December (I think) I developed a pain in my left shoulder. At first I didn’t pay much attention to it since it isn’t unusual for me to find myself in pain for no apparent reason and then have said pain subside in a few days. People have told me that this happens because I am getting older but nothing could be further from the truth since I stopped getting older twenty years ago.
I became concerned when this shoulder pain persisted into February. It was severe enough to wake me up at night and I am a person who sleeps soundly all night long. But loss of sleep wasn’t my biggest concern. This year I became a member of one of the local golf courses and I was starting to think that if the pain didn’t go away, I would have spent all that money to not be able to play golf at all.
This was now bordering on a crisis situation.
I tried analyzing activity that might be aggravating my shoulder but I came up with no real reason for it to be hurting. I tried anti-inflammatories with limited results. I suppose I could have taken a larger dose but I try to avoid medication unless absolutely necessary.
As much as I would like to say that golf season was rapidly approaching I cannot, since this year any season involving a need for nice weather has been taking its sweet old time getting here. I remained optimistic that this delay in warmer weather was buying me time to heal. Eventually the golf course did open, but unfortunately for me I was in no better condition than I was in December—maybe worse.
I decided that I wasn’t going to let the pain stop me from playing. I had been waiting more than half a year to get out on the fairways and I wasn’t going to let any injury keep me from playing golf.
As always it was great to be outside. I was happy to make my untriumphant return to golf in spite of the pain in my shoulder. Thankfully the pain had no adverse effect on my game but then again death itself wouldn’t harm my game much.
That night when I went to bed I was fully prepared to have the pain hit in spades the next morning but to my complete astonishment, it didn’t. In fact it was the first morning in months that I awoke pain free.
Could it be that golf was the medicine that my shoulder needed?
That answer would have to wait since weather and family obligations kept me away from the course for a couple of weeks.
In the meantime the pain returned, so I consulted Dr. W. I. Kipedia over at Interwebs General Hospital and found out that I most likely had a torn rotator cuff and learned that physical therapy was one of the first courses of action to remedy the problem. The idea that golf made the pain go away didn’t seem so far-fetched.
I returned to the course after work one evening and played the front nine. I could have played more but it is early in the season and I didn’t want to overdo it. This was also a test to see if golf was helping or hurting my shoulder (which ached throughout the entire nine).
That night before bed I had little hope that golf would make the pain go away since I felt no different than I had earlier in the day.
The next morning I woke up and felt like something was wrong but I couldn’t figure out what it was. After a moment of lying in bed thinking about it I realized that my shoulder didn’t hurt at all. It hadn’t felt this good since before all this started.
It would seem that if I am to stay pain-free I will have to spend as much time as possible playing golf. How about that?
I wonder if my doctor wrote me a prescription for golf, would my insurance cover the cost of membership?
Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com
Visit the Braver Institute at www.braverinsitute.com
This piece first appeared in the May 22nd, 2014 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: www.pioneertribune.com
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