tennis anyone

After being off of the tennis courts for nearly 2 months, I thought it would be time to see if I still have any talent left in the world of tennis. We have a tennis drill group on Sundays at 5:30 PM, so this was a good opportunity to see if I still got game. Well, after the first few minutes, I knew I was down a few notches, like from being a 4.0 player to maybe a 3.0 player. And those weren't the only notches that I was talking about. As I was thinking of the Pogo of the past with all that speed and acceleration, I decided to engage my warp engines to go after a shot and found out that my dilithium crystals were off-line. The legs turned to rubber and I did one of those patented slow motion tumbles. That was the other part of the few notches, as I took three notches out of my left knee, one notch out of my left wrist and one notch on the palm of my left hand. Since I didn't want to repaint the tennis lines with my blood the rest of the evening, I decided to rely on impulse power. Now if you really want an analogy of how fast I wasn't moving, I was playing with DJ, who is a super nice guy, but doesn't exactly cover a lot of court. When we played together, I nicknamed him,"The Flash". Being the fair person that I am on ripping on people, including myself, I proclaimed myself as" DJ Junior".

Now it wasn't all bad. The forehand wasn't too bad, and after a while I was able to use the two-handed backhand despite the limited use of my left hand. I still probably had a better service toss them Tom. And the fact that I was on the winning side of half the drills was encouraging.

More good news. When I checked with the doctor on Monday and told him about the rubbery legs, he said that it was caused by the steroids which we have been gradually decreasing. After my initial surgery in early February, they had me on 18 mg per day and now they got me down to 6 mg per day. So it is not caused by the chemo or the radiation therapy or the tumor. I'm certainly glad that I'm doing all that strength training and my thousand plus stairs a day, otherwise I'd probably feel like"Ironside".

If it works out into my schedule, I hope to keep drilling on Sundays, and with the extra time this summer to drill as often as I can, to see if I can get back to where I was before this all started.

It was a humbling experience, but at least I was able to laugh at myself. After all, once a fool, always a fool.

Pogo down but not out.