Father Knows Best

Don’t you hate it when that happens? You’re in your 40’s & think you know what’s what & then you ignore advice from your Dad & learn the hard way – again.

This is the story of my Baby Arm & how I turned it into The Arm That Wouldn’t Move. It’s not really much of a story. I was helping someone out at church by carrying her baby. The baby was in a carrier (one of those car seat things you can tote kids around in). I’m pretty much a wimp and at the time I thought, “boy is this REALLY hard! I’ll bet she weighs 10 pounds!” Actually, I think she weighed more than a stapler, but just slightly less than a copy paper box - maybe 9 reams instead of 10 (I work in an office – we find our comparisons where we can). Her mom (a tiny little thing) had no trouble at all with this task, so I’m not sure why I felt compelled to help. ANYWAY, I carried the little girl to my car from her apartment, & then into church when got there. I let her mom get her back to the car after church, because by then I knew that I had no business lugging that child around – it wasn’t safe for either of us!

Couple of days later I started to feel really sore in that arm. I just powered through figuring the pain would pass. And then it didn’t. My Dad said I should start doing some gentle stretches with it. But it hurt, so I started favoring the arm instead. I moved both of my mice to the other side of the keyboard. I bought a sling to remind me to stop using the arm. Guess what happened? My unused shoulder muscles started freezing up so that I couldn’t lift the arm at all! And now I’m in physical therapy to unfreeze the sucker. Once we do that we’ll see whether there’s any actual damage in there.

So the moral of the story is to listen to your Dad. And maybe to let the mom who actually has upper body strength carry the baby.