you know that old adage

(may or may not be the correct usage of this word) about boiling a frog slowly? as in, if you put a frog in lukewarm water and very slowly increase the heat he’ll just sort of hang there until he dies of boil-dom? many times i = frog.

like my sophomore year of high school. every morning I’d wake up and hop into the shower (not entirely true – I’ve always been an every-other-day type of gal, but you understand the use of hyperbole in narrative, don't you?) and soap up before beginning another day of algebra 2 and eating ice cream sandwiches from the vending machine.

at the beginning of the school year, the water pressure in said shower was fine. I didn’t really notice it one way or the other. hop in, hop out, put on my l.e.i. bell bottoms. as the year progressed, the water pressure very slowly, slowly, almost imperceptibly, became weaker. again – I just went with the flow. since my dad used the downstairs shower, and my mom takes baths (is this too much information on my family’s former bathing habits? apologies) and I have no idea what my little brother at age 11 was doing, there wasn’t much intra-family discussion on the water situation.

one morning I woke up, tho, and holy s*%t. one small drip of water was exiting from one of the shower head holes. one small drip. one hole. and it was cold. the scary thing is this seriously didn’t happen overnight, it had taken like six months to boil me.

eventually the plumber came in, checked out our situation, turned to my mom and said:

“you weren't living.” amen.

I bring this up, because I’ve had a slow simmer going in my lower back and right leg (simply put: b/c of the way I’m built and I move, my pelvis gets out of alignment, making one leg longer than the other, making everything along the way from knee to hip flexor to feet go into excrutiating spasms) for a long, long time. I was just starting to get it fixed 4.5 years ago before a trip to india. I thought the physical therapist would be able to fix it in a few visits, but after her assessment – come in once a week for lots of months, you’ve got lots of damage to reverse – I just got discouraged/bored. she’d made me feel better in the short term and in my just-graduated-from-college mindset, that was good enough.

but over the past 4.5 years, it’s gotten worse and worse, making me squirm on the couch and live with an electric heating pad down my pants. and since I almost popped a leftover-from-an-ear-infection vicodin before heading to work today and my name is not gregory house – it’s time to get some help. I’ve got an appointment lined up in two weeks and I’m looking forward to it more than christmas. (I kind of wanted to make a tiny tim joke there, but I couldn’t figure it out nor did it seem very nice.) the end.