The women at the gym find most of my stories quite amusing, and today’s description of how I ended up with shoulder impingement from a mammogram was another one of them.  The great part of it was the look of horror on the twenty-something year old girl’s face as I described the incident.

It was basically the same story I told the chiropractor on Thursday when I arrived with an immobile arm and painful shoulder.  He asked what happened, and I replied, “Mammogram.”  He looked puzzled and quizzed me about what other things I might have done to cause it, but I assured him I’d done nothing else, and it was the mammogram that had done in my shoulder.

This morning at the gym I mimicked the movement of a person’s arm for the mammogram and said to the women, “You know when you grab the bar up here, and then wham!” and at this point I slapped my hands together vertically and horizontally to demonstrate the action of the plates.

This was when the twenty something year old winced, but the older women were laughing away merrily over the recollection.  I said I guess as I was holding my arm at an odd angle I caused a muscle strain and subsequent inflammation.

The chiropractor did the usual, he nearly killed me.  He had me lie on my back, and then massaged the horribly sore front of the shoulder area until I said, “If you keep doing that I’m gonna punch you in the face because this is so painful I can’t stand it.”  He just laughed, but one of these days, Pow!  Right to the moon, Alice.

But speaking of other-worldly behaviour, another story eliciting great mirth from the women at the gym was the sad tale of my blind date last Friday.  On Monday everyone asked how it had gone, and I replied, “Good, until he got the impaired driving charge.”

Isn’t that incredible?  Most people try hard to be on their best behaviour on a first date, but then everyone’s different, I guess.  When you’re slurring, it’s not that attractive.  I was stone cold sober, looking at this person and thinking there won’t be a date #2.

After he dropped me off (I was glad to make it home alive) I said to Nicky and Luke, who were both downstairs, “Interesting.  That man is totally impaired, yet driving off on a Friday night that also happens to be Halloween.”

I guess I was never so surprised by a message as the one I received when I got home from the gym on Saturday morning.  The man said he’d been charged with impaired driving and is car was impounded!  Oh my God, I laughed all weekend.

You know what I’m like around stuff like that.  Mom says I have the worst Schadenfreude of anyone she knows.  But really, when you’re 60 years old and still driving drunk I don’t know if you should expect anything but laughter and derision from people when caught.  I certainly wasn’t sorry to hear another drunk driver’s been removed from the roads.