I’m not a doom-and-gloom guy.
Hell, I’m not even a skeptic.
I’m a run-of-the-mill drummer. That comes with a certain amount of common sense. A little realism. You learn things. You watch things happen. You figure out eventually that some things are going to work and some things aren’t.
And when something’s over, it’s over.
That’s not philosophy. That’s inventory.
My body quit cooperating.
Cycling: over.
Golf: over.
Playing professionally: over.
The body keeps the score. Mine has been keeping score for a long time.
Now there’s the left arm.
Another medical fuckup. Number three.
Not catastrophic. Just another piece of the machine that got bent.
Doctor sends me for blood work. Lab tech does the draw. Experienced tech. Been there a long time. Not some rookie wandering around with a needle looking for something to stab.
She hits the vein.
She hits the nerve.
May 2026.
Doctor: “Yeah. That happens all the time.”
Lab: “Yep. That happens all the time.”
Fine.
It happened.
The pain was spectacular. The kind of pain that makes you reconsider your relationship with furniture, gravity and the concept of having an arm.
Most of that is gone now.
Good.
What remains is numbness. Left hand. Six months and counting.
They say six months to a year.
Maybe.
I’ve tried the pad.
I’ve tried the kit.
Not yet.
That’s the word.
Not yet.
Maybe the arm comes back. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe one morning I pick up the sticks and everything works. Maybe I pick them up and the left hand says fuck you.
There are worse things.
Because here’s the part nobody likes.
Sometimes you just have to say:
Yep.
It was good.
I did that shit a lot.
I did it for years.
I rode the bikes. I played the golf. I played the drums. I did the thing.
And now I can’t.
That doesn’t make it tragic.
It makes it over.
There’s a difference.
You don’t get extra points for pretending otherwise.