Pain.

When I was a kid I never had to wonder about what it would be like to be old because I was a pretty active fellow. Even when my weight would balloon and I would become as fat as an October hog I was still always active. I'd have to carry the lard up the mountains I liked to climb, but carry it I would.

And every time I'd use muscles I had either never used, or hadn't put to the test in a while, I'd get sore. For a day or two those sore muscles would have me limping around or aching with every exertion. And I'd tell myself: "When I get really old, this is what it will be like all of the time."

I reckon I was a kid with a fatalist's take on the world.

Earlier this year my left hip finally gave up on me. My job entails walking and walking and walking. Many miles per day. With a heavy sack of mail and parcels on my shoulder. I reckon it was bound to happen sooner or later. The strain and the arthritic build-up in my left hip finally made the old joint effectively fail on me. I didn't quite see it coming, but I knew that the day would come, eventually.

And it did.

My first idea was to see if I could tough it out a couple of more years until retirement. But for the last two weeks the pain has become so intense and overwhelming that I can't even sleep. I close my eyes, drift off, and the first time I so much as budge my hip begins to scream at the rest of me and I come fully awake.

Thank Jove for pain-killers. They don't take the pain completely away, but they dull it.

So. I suppose I'm going to have to resign myself to hip replacement surgery sooner rather than later. This year,  rather than in two years.

Alas.

Before the hip failed.