Paging Dr. Google

It happened while I was running.

Pain. The kind that makes you ask: is this live or pre-recorded?

It had been manageable in the beginning.

I thought I had even gotten past it after the first mile. The mental milestone of all long runs where will has to work against won’t.

Eventually, all the individual parts of you that have been begging to stop fall silent and align with the path ahead. You hope it’s the one with least resistance. Until you feel something more.

Maybe it taps you on second mile or the third?

It has a familiar tug. Like a child’s. You divert attention to it for a while and try to ascertain if its needs are urgent.

More often than not, I try to ignore this pain’s chirpy insistence and lumber onward.

I hope the tugging will go away or wait its turn if it’s not truly an emergency. As a last resort I will send my mind’s “healing energy” to the spot that calls. Sometimes it works. But not this time. This time the tugging promised to rage and break me into little bits if I didn’t stop. Perhaps it was already too late for fingerscrossed reasoning by that point, I couldn’t be sure.

So I walked -- or limped, as literal accuracy requires -– back home.

And then I rested. And rested. And rested. Until I couldn’t rest anymore. At which point, I again tried to run.

Now, it was not the unmitigated disaster you might have expected since

my ever-so-tentative performance was being enhanced by compression athletic-wear and a small, but mobile, dispensary of OTC anti-inflammatory medication.

But the next week?

It was, as you might imagine, a disaster.

And it never really got better.

But I persisted to believe it was something minor that time and rest would heal.

Still. Not. Better. How many weeks, now? I’ve pretended not to count.

Smeared the pencil marks on the calendar and made the dates illegible.

Eventually I start to worry enough to enroll in the Dr. Siobhan M. School of Medicine at Google University.

By noon I had contracted three-quarters of the illnesses that end in “-itis” and every known cancer imaginable.

“You need to see a real doctor,” said my daughter, who, at this point in the year, had already graduated from the Meredith Gray School of Medicine at the University at Netflix and was heading into her summer internship with Hank Med.

“But don’t panic. The chances of cancer are still very slim. It’s likely caused by inflammation from repetitive motion.”

Still, I remain unconvinced. She is, after all, 13.

“Seriously, try to remain calm.”

“How can you say be calm after that recommendation? EVERY Royal Pain on Gray’s Anatomy ALWAYS turns into the worstcase-scenario!”

And in that moment, she smiled and laughed, and channeled her grandmother, who would have already sent me down the straight (if not exactly narrow) path toward professional intervention if she were still with us: “That’s just the story arc on TV. You are not going to win the Hollywood lottery. Make yourself an appointment.”