Ooops, bam! Surprise!

I've taken martial arts for quite some time now. Nothing spectacular. We don't flip around or where funny costumes. We do stand around in circles and attack the guy in the middle one-by-one like ninjas in movies, but that's a different story.

Over the course of my 'career' I've had occasion to be hurt. Hurt is a relative word. It ranges from "Hey, you're on my hair!" to "Is my foot is supposed to point backwards?" I've had the former type of injury many times, only had the latter once. OK, it was my toe that pointed the wrong way but it still hurt...

The other night a guy was testing and he threw me and as a defense I attempted to break his knee with my eye. This is a move which has a high degree of difficulty. You might think it's easy to hit someone's knee with your eye but, actually, it is not. The knee is quite low and the eye is quite a small target.

Suffice it to say, this hurt. I actually heard some squishing. I like to believe that it was his kneecap but I believe it was my eye. I have a nice shiner as a trophy and, most likely, macular degeneration when I'm 60.

This brings me to the point of the story. Once I got hurt, I started getting anxious. Immediately I started wondering if I had broken something. Once I was past that I started wondering if I had burst a sinus and was already well on my way to dying of septic shock. Or, maybe, a slow-growing aneurysm had been jarred just enough to start slowly leaking.

Regardless of what I thought it was, it freaked me out a bit. All night long I was worried. This goes along with my theory that when I feel that a dent has been made in my 'armor' it causes a flood of fears that I've been holding back. Any time I get a cold or the flu, a headache, or any sort of random pain, I start to think about my health and what might be wrong with me in the future.

Normally, when we walk around, we are oblivious to the millions of things that could go wrong. It's times that I'm reminded of my mortality. Not mortality in the existential sense, but in the "being sick sucks, dying sucks more" sense.