Something that I'm coming to understand as I get older is that there is a level of body pain which could not be described as "incapacitating," but is nonetheless somewhere beyond "annoying."

Until recent years -- and I mean recent recent years -- my philosophy was that pain was either "OK, cancel the day and get this attended to" or "OK, ignore it and move on." Two levels, no in-between. Serious or dismissable. As far as I can tell from anecdotal evidence -- and there is no medical evidence more anecdotal than pain-scale stuff, it's utterly subjective all the way down -- I appear to have a fairly high pain threshold, so it's possible I'm late to this because I've just been able to ignore things other people wouldn't consider ignorable.

But my right knee, which has been giving me intermittent problems for nearly two years now, has recently shifted into a mode where it's getting somewhere beyond "just gonna ignore that." Again, not incapacitating. In fact, my long walks loosen up the knee and after about twenty minutes of warmup, the pain goes away ... for the rest of the walk. The problem is, as soon as I stop walking, it now instantly goes back to being a bitch again.

And by recently, again, I mean recently. Though I had a long-standing Note To Myself to "talk to the doctor about the knee" when my delayed yearly physical finally came around, in April, at that point the knee was in a period of mostly behaving -- a little stiff and painful walking down the stairs first thing in the morning (the beds are upstairs, the coffee's downstairs, so a flight of stairs is the second thing I face every day, after the vital Emptying of the Bladder), but otherwise not bad. It had been much worse in January and February, so I was inclined to think, "OK, some of it's temperature, the weather is warming now and the ol' knee likes that better."

So we discussed it, and she ordered an x-ray of the knee just in case (it showed nothing wrong), and it went back to "watch and report." And then, sometime in early May, my knee decided it had just had enough of everything and everybody and began making my life obnoxious.

Again, not debilitating. That's actually kind of the most annoying part. If it were debilitating, the courses of action would be clearer. It's not. But it makes it difficult for me to sit in any position for long -- it stiffens up in one position, I shift, a few minutes later it gets painful in that position, lather, rinse, repeat -- and it's interfering with my sleep because it's hard to find a position to get comfortable in.

Last night I did something to my left shoulder. This happens periodically. My left shoulder is kind of a mess, and I'm not sure there's anything much that can be done about it. Most days it's absolutely fine but every so often it just says "OK, I'm going to act as if you've sprained something now," and the only cure is to wait it out and be sore, which takes the better part of a day. So I slept with my shoulder and back and knee complaining, and woke up with a splitting headache from the night of muscle pain, in addition to the muscle pains themselves.

Upshot: Today we are somewhere, again, in the space beyond "annoying" but not yet to "debilitating," in that I feel shitty enough that it's hard to focus on the things I need to do, but not shitty enough that I want to cancel the day and go lie in a dark place for the rest of my life and just hurt.

The good news is you can tell that the knee is really getting to me because I have actually gone so far as to follow up with my medical practitioners. This has been me my entire life. My mother says she could always tell when I was Actually Sick because that was the point at which I didn't throw a fit about seeing the doctor. On Friday I sent them a secure message saying "OK, the knee's getting where it interferes with my life, what can we do next?" On Monday I had a response with a referral to orthopedics. I called -- yes, another sign I am really fried about this, I got on the telephone to speak to another human with my actual voice, like a savage, one of the things I hate doing most in the world ...

... and got an ortho appointment for tomorrow. Mirabile dictu. I think this is a slow period there.

So, we shall see. I have no idea what is next on the knee horizon. We'll determine that based on what the orthopedist thinks.

In conclusion, bodies were a mistake.