The shoulder that would not heal

Kris, Andy, Blue, Shadow, Annie, Bella and I went to a local school today for some exercise. Kris mostly walked around, arms stuck at his side, unable to lift them because of last Friday's workout. Andy and I ran around, played on the playground/jungle gym/obstacle course, trying to climb various poles, conquer different bars, shimmy up different structures. Kris, he watched.

As we were walking back to the cars, a process which always takes about ten times as long as you think it should, what with all the smells to smell and trees to claw, discs to chase and dogs to run over. Somehow, I was in front of Andy, and Kris, and Annie, and Shadow, and Blue. Bella was in front of me, keeping her distance from Blue, who, early in the walk, had run her over chasing a disc.

She's the smart one.

So, I turned back to say something to Kris, as Andy released a disc for Blue to catch. The throw was a beautiful low throw, a perfect throw for an easy catch, actually. As I noticed the throw, my thoughts were something like, "That's a nice throw." "Hey, I could catch that throw." "Oh, a dog."

Then bam! No, more like BAM!, only bigger.

Blue ran right through my knees on his way to the disc. Sure, he was still accelerating. Sure, he wasn't at top speed. Sure, my pivot point is about hip level.

We discovered this when I did, indeed, pivot at hip level to horizontal, then, as in a Road Runner cartoon, dropped straight down.

I landed on my shoulder, hip and knees, searing pain shooting up my shoulder, which has been semi-injured since late October of last year, and only started healing earlier this month when I started taking mega (MEGA) doses of ibubrofen at my doctor's orders.

I landed with a THUMP. I started crying.

Now, crying in pain is an okay response. It happens. When pain is sudden and severe, hey, crying is a natural response.

Except that from a distance, crying sounds a lot like laughing. Which is what Andy and Kris were doing.

Eventually, they wandered over to me and asked if I was okay. I said my shoulder hurt a lot. When Kris asked how much, I realized that I couldn't answer, because it didn't hurt much on Kris' pain scale (where he'll be moaning in pain at the top of his lungs, but when asked where it is on a scale from 1-10, he'll say 4), so I stopped moaning and got up.

Kris looked at me when I stood up and said, "You know, it's been a long time since you've had some bizarre accident," referring to the time a random dog ran out into an ultimate field and just clobbered me, or the time I caught a boomerang in the shoulder, or the time I caught a disc in the face and my braces broke through my lips (it was brillant cut!), or the time I broke my shoulder from some ultimate player crashing into me, or the time I had a concussion wrestling with Kris, or the time, yeah, well, it's been a while since I had one of those.

Although I'm annoyed my shoulder hurts again, I think the worst part was the fact I cried in front of Andy. I'm so mad at myself. Pain on a physical scale? 2. Pain on an embarrassment scale? 10. Argh.