I took a Restorative Yoga Class on my birthday and things have been fucked up ever since.

Don’t remember when exactly during the session when I felt a tiny minor “toing” near my right hip.

Or the first moment I took a step and felt a stabbing, all-consuming white-hot pain shoot down my leg.

Most of the time I feel fine. Then I’ll carelessly do one of the following:

• take a step up onto a curb or stair a certain way,
• turn my body to the right in a certain way, or
• turn over in bed in a certain way,

and then the world blots out for a few horrific seconds in a crazy pain apolocalypse. Then I’m sore a little for a while then it kind of goes away and I forget about it again.

I was forced to put this sign in my bathroom, since stepping out of the shower and drying myself are two activities that are extremely risky and pain-producing. Oh, my life.

I first thought it was all generated inside my hip and spent an evening frightened by what the internet funhouse of horrors was telling me it could be — labral tear? Bursitis? Arthritis? Lupus?

Now I’m not sure it’s my hip at all, it’s sort of near my hip. Whatever it is, it’s a tiny little thing that seems to be controlling a lot of other things that I use a lot — and this tiny little thing gets mad at the most subtle gestures. Sort of like when my grandmother was alive.

Like an abused partner, I’ve been going back to the site of violence and taking yoga classes this week, albeit with extreme care and modification so as not to awaken the Beast. The timing couldn’t make me feel more insecure — it sucks to derail my fitness regime during a week of drink and eat and cake and more drink and more eat and more cake.

I’m trying to be patient — ligament and muscle pulls take forever to feel better, I know that (flash back to Sacroiliac Adventures 2004 — five weeks of holy hell.) But I’m in that weird sad hazy frame of mine that one can get into, feeling like I’ll never be functioning again, that this is my reality.

Before you ask/tell: yes, I’m icing. Yes, I’m anti-inflammatory-ing. Yes, I’m going to bite the bullet and see a doctor next week.

Thanks, universe! It was a nice trick to lay this on my birthday. “Happy birthday! You’re old! Let’s limp!”