Tag Archives: arthritis

This is an art exercise, making a drawing imitating the manga style of Rumiko Takahashi, the greatest female comics artist of all time.

Yes, I need to exercise.  I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983.  But exercise may soon kill me deader than the proverbial door nail.  Does that make sense?  Can you be any more dead than a thing that was never alive?  I think you can.  It comes when death is achieved through extreme pain and suffering.

If you hadn’t figured it out already, my family joined a gym on a trial-membership basis.  But, of course, we can’t afford a personal trainer, so the only way was to get me in and exercising without consulting the professionals about my health challenges.  Diabetes and arthritis and COPD?  They would instantly be worrying about sudden death on the gym floor and the lovely attendant lawsuits that would probably go with that.  And my wife probably will try to sue them when the exercise machines kill me.  She is a smart woman when it comes to making money out of the cracks in the system.

The gym has personal trainers and professionals to deal with problems like mine, and they were around and visible while I was there exercising for the first time.  Signs on all the machines admonish the user to take a break if they become light-headed or feel faint.  They are at least aware that I might be killing myself.  But while I did the twenty-five-minute trudge on the treadmill all tomato-faced and gasping for breath, no one bothered to even check on me to make sure I wasn’t idiot enough to torture myself to death on the cruel march-to-oblivion machines that are all lined up there in neat little rows facing television sets blaring Fox News Channel.  You might know that the last voice I will ever hear is Bill O’Reilly declaring what an idiot-communist-threat-to-democracy Bernie Sanders is.  What a way to die!

But my wife is determined to exercise me enough to make me healthy and more like Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson than it is possible for me to be.  Or kill me.  I think she might be looking forward to that too.  She told me when we went in that we only had to stay as long as I wanted to.  But that was a lie.  The gym has a pool.  She and the Princess made a bee-line there and I didn’t see them again until closing time.  To be fair, they had a free class to attend with pool exercises led by a trainer.  But still, as I suffered and dried myself out on the walkways of death, they were splashing happily.  In a pool!  In winter!  …But it was indoors.

So, I didn’t die.  And I have done this sort of thing before enough to know how far I can push myself on arthritic knees with impaired lungs.  I didn’t really come out of there with any more aches and pains than I went in with.  And, though I really hate to admit it, the day after leaves me feeling somewhat… better.