This is Not an Eyeball

November, 2011
If my IQ was based on understanding anatomical vocabulary, it would have only one digit but I presently need only one doctor and her name is...
Ginny Goombatz.

"Doctor Ginny, I have pain."
"Kindly be more specific, Paul."
I point to my lower back, the left side
"Here."
"Lie down, please."
"Where?"
"Either the ceiling or the floor, whichever works for you."
I chose the floor. She leaves the room for two minutes, returning with a smaller version of what you see above.
"What's that?"
"A medicine ball. Please place it on the exact point of pain, assuming there is only one."
"One is all there is."
"Start rolling but do it slowly."
The vinyl-covered medicine ball is about 90% filled with a fine sand-like substance. There is resistance to the rolling process.
"This is not easy."
"Pain is much easier, if you prefer that sort of thing."
"Lo siento, Dr. Ginny."
"Am I rolling slow enough?"
"NO! And lift your right leg to add pressure."
"Because the pain is on the left side, you want the diagonal effect..."
"Please spare me the math talk, Paul."
"Yes, Doctor."
...
"Slooooooooower."
...
"Can I stop now?"
"Noooooo."
Suffice it to say that all I could think about for five minutes was the satisfaction
of attending Ginny Goombatz's funeral, ASAP.

"You can stop now."
...
Something felt very strange as I followed her out of the room to the next torture chamber. Two things had disappeared and one of them was my lower back pain. The other was my death wish. It was replaced by a clone wish. Not more of me–God forbid–but I wished for a multiple human cloning of my doctor. The world would be a better place if there were fifty exact versions of Ginny Goombatz.

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1999 + 2010
Three days after my fiftieth birthday, I tore an achilles tendon playing one-on-one basketball at the Burbank Y.
A Kaiser orthopedic surgeon opted not to perform surgery on the damaged left foot. Instead, he performed a miracle. Three hard casts and one soft cast later, pain bit the dust. I spent countless hours doing laps in the Burbank Y pool. Eleven years later, I was ready for a competitive sport.
Tennis was anathema because of all the lateral movement. Golf seemed a natural solution but it required remembering which end of the club to hold.
I played all sports as a kid on Long Island but the only one in which I excelled was handball, twentieth century-style. That is, all you needed was a bare-hand, a single flat concrete wall, and a "Pensy-Pinky." I was a barefoot terror on the handball courts in the shadow of the Whitestone Bridge.
I hoped to inflict the same terror on a racquetball court. In my home-spun bravado-flavored vocabulary, I regarded the game as "handball with a fly swatter, locked inside a box with one solid glass wall." But the fly was actually a Pensy-Pinky with a designer label.
As mentioned in a previous post, I became a two-time D-league Racquetball Champion but that is equivalent to winning the Special Olympics and not qualifying for a handicapped parking sticker.
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January, 2012
Not only is there no backpain but this sixty-two year-old body is entirely pain-free. I am surprising a lot of racquetball players at my gym: I am no longer the best source for comic relief on the courts.
A-league is for experts; B-league is expert seventy percent of the time. I am a C-leaguer and, out of thirty players on our roster, I made it to the Final Four in the play-offs. There were a lot of stunned people in the gallery when I split the first two games against the top seed, who is half my age. Unlike his opponent, his body exuded athleticism.
I score the first point of the decisive third game. That was the good news. The bad news was that I did not score another point as a result of inexplicable & countless unforced errors. There was no physical pain but my body was smothered with embarrassment. I exited the court after the traditional handshake but eye contact and dialog with the victor–and anyone else–was an impossibility.

The morning after after the Final Four defeat, I awoke with my left foot on fire. Technically, I had "aggravated an injured tendon," despite a thirteen-year dormancy of the injury. After extensive heat-padding and ice-packing, I limped my way to the Big Five Sporting Goods store on the Long Beach promenade and bought the five-pound medicine ball pictured above. Dr. Ginny Goombatz, who has a graduate degree in kinesiology and prefers to be known as a personal trainer, had used a three-pound medicine ball.
I watched the medicine ball DVD and there were lots of great things to be done with it but "Cathe"–her name is readable upon enlarging the photo–never demonstrated it as a rolling device!

All I had to do was exactly what I learned from Ginny Goombatz but starting with a different "pain point." I did it hourly til sundown. It was the most boring exercise of my entire life but by nightfall, the limp disappeared and has not been seen since. But the same cannot be said about my new and improved racquetball game.