The Babylon Bee cracked me up with a headline, “38-Year-Old Man Rushed To Hospital After Sleeping In A Slightly Weird Position.” I can totally relate.

Not very kind of us, but my husband and I have been known to have uncontrolled attacks of hysterical giggles as said young people are busy dying from having slept wrong. The other day my husband woke up and said, “I think my arm fell off.” I was like, “Well pick it up, I don’t want to trip over the darn thing!” He does have an old shoulder injury and cannot raise one arm and it often feels as if it has indeed, fallen out of its socket. On the bright side, all his aches and pains have now rendered his leg injury null and void.

Someone once dropped a piece of plywood off a roof and it landed on his leg, crushing a bunch of muscle and nerves that just refused to heal. Naturally the whole mess was made worse by his refusal to actually allow it to heal. The last thing a doctor said was this injury is going to be with you for life. Not true at all, after a good 15 years that one miraculously just disappeared. In fact, that is now his good leg!

Naturally being female, I have no idea what pain even is. I’m not complaining here, just stating a fact. I could give birth to four children, break both ankles, and have a fever of 105 and somebody would be in the kitchen lamenting about how they need some help finding the milk……in the fridge. One cannot even imagine the sheer misery of having eaten half a dozen cookies and being unable to wash it all down with some milk. Now that’s a special kind of pain…

I actually broke my finger and went in for an X ray and encountered the most unsympathetic medical staff ever. Seriously, all men who also seemed to believe women have no idea what pain even is. They claimed it wasn’t even broken…..until a week later when they called and admitted to having read the wrong x ray! They got their patients mixed up. My finger was indeed broken and now they’d like to try to fix it after all! I declined on account of being adverse to getting even more medically intimate with complete incompetence. I now have a crooked pinky, but nobody notices but me, usually when I reach for a bag of groceries and it sends electrical shocks through my whole body.

My son has some useful information about diet, exercise, and weight loss, and while he’s not wrong I happen to eat nothing but bird seed, Swiss chard, and some olive oil. He eats 9 Snickers ice cream bars and a can of pasta for breakfast. Today his wrist is bothering him. Please send positive thoughts and prayers during this difficult time…

I have had some mornings where I just laid there and wondered if perhaps I had gone out all night partying and got hit by a bus. The worst part is that the only way to make it go away is to actually get up and move when just laying there and dying seems like such a better option.

Anyway, I don’t mean to be unkind here, but one has to just walk it off. Pain is a sign of life. Thank you Lord for once again reminding me I am alive. This is definitely a weird concept, but greeting pain with gratitude and thankfulness rather than shock and awe, often makes things a whole lot better.