See-Sawing.

Growing up, I did ballroom dancing for several years. As an adult I’ve always wanted to get back into the Latin side of it (give me a Paso Doble over a foxtrot any day). My partner was wanting to give it a go too, so we bought an online voucher for eight weeks of lessons last year in June, around the time of my back surgery. We knew we had plenty of time to use them after a couple of months for my recovery.

We’ve talked about it intermittently since then, but never made concrete plans, since my recovery didn’t go as expected and I’ve had several facet joint and nerve flares since the surgery rather than the smooth sailing I was expecting. I thought we had until this June, he thought March, so we checked the voucher recently to confirm. Turns out it expired at the start of January and we had missed our chance. I was so upset.

It’s not just the waste of money (it wasn’t that expensive), although I did feel awful since he had paid for it and it was my fault we hadn’t used it. I was disappointed because it was something we had both been looking forward to (we’ll probably still get around it to eventually). But mostly, I was upset because it drove home the fact that, in the last seven months, I haven’t had eight consecutive weeks in which I was pain-free enough to go dancing, despite having spent roughly $7000 out-of-pocket on painful back surgery that was essentially guaranteed to fix me.

I had vastly different expectations for how the last six months were going to go, and it didn’t pan out, and I am disappointed and grieving my loss. That’s life, particularly with chronic illness and pain. On the plus side, I did a shoulder stand for about 2 seconds yesterday, which at any earlier point in the last five years would have been impossible, and I was filled with a massive sense of excitement, pride and achievement. Here’s to the ups and downs!