Tennis, Anyone?

My doctor informed me yesterday that I have tennis elbow. This is not sad. This is stupid and funny. This is my tennis story. 

Love-Love. 

This one time, at band camp.......In college, a boyfriend offered to teach me how to play tennis. He then proceeded to SHOW me he could play tennis rather than TEACH me to play tennis, and after a ball to the face we were done. (Thankfully, we were REALLY done soon after - turns out he wasn't so nice.) 

The end. 

15-Love. 

Tennis reappeared in my life again some 20 years later, back in the summer of 2013. Jay and I, feeling equally lazy and sluggish, decided we should find an exercise that we would both enjoy and, therefore, would motivate us to become more active. So, like most middle-aged lazy people, we chose tennis. We bought racquets. We bought balls. We didn't go so far as to pick out chic and matching tennis skirts and shorts and visors, but we were darn close. Within a week of being "almost ready!" to be that Trident or Viagra commercial couple, Jay played tennis with a friend for the first time in 20 years and ripped his Achilles tendon. 

The end. 

30-Love. 

So you see, how ridiculous is it that I could have tennis elbow. I don't PLAY tennis. I don't PLAY anything. I'm LAZY. Other than for grabbing my coffee cup and carrying my purse, my right elbow gets no regular workout. I'm obviously not a horny teenage boy repetitively moving my elbow in a somewhat jerking and overusing manner five times a day. I type, yes, but I've done that for over a decade and in fact took the entire summer off. There were only three occurrences that could've caused this:
1. We ripped up flooring around here, and one super insomniac night I spent several hours ripping up carpet and pulling out nails and staples off the stairs. 
2. I started eating Red Vines a couple weeks ago and can't make myself stop.
3. I picked up a handful of word search books at the dollar store a few weeks ago and found myself in a letters and phrases frenzy. I would work them page by page, over and over, repeatedly stabbing the page with my right hand with each found word.

If you think #1 caused my elbow pain, you're wrong. It caused whole-body, hit-by-a-train pain, but it all subsided within a couple days. Except the elbow. No, I'm convinced it was the Red Vines and/or the word searches. I've been seeing my chiropractor for months because of my back and neck, so he started working on my elbow as well. After two weeks and four visits with no improvement, he suggested I talk to my regular doc. Hence, her diagnosis that I have tennis elbow. She gave me a stupid arm brace that looks less like a brace and more like a mail-order, DIY, heroin-shooting, tourniquet kit. It's ridiculous and it doesn't help. I saw my chiro after my doc, and when I told him about the tennis elbow quackery and my new vein popper toy, he asked if I told her about the Red Vines. I said no, but I told her about the word searches, which I swear I've stopped doing now. He said, "The same word searches like the book sticking out of your purse?" "Mmmm......yeah. But I swear those aren't mine. I'm holding them for a friend."

The end. 

40-Love. 

As you can see, no matter how minute of a role tennis actually plays in our lives, it just keeps coming back to haunt us over and over again. How can Jay and I both be injured from a sport that we don't play?????? It shouldn't matter, except that Jay now has a torn Achilles and I'm just anxiously waiting for the other tennis ball to drop. Will he be ordered to play Wii tennis to recover after surgery? Will he end up shuffling around the house behind a walker with tennis balls on the bottoms for easier movement? Is he going to start wearing tennis visors in public or short little white shorts? I'm so afraid of how the tennis is gonna come back to haunt us again. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and go ahead and order the rest of the shooting heroin starter kit and see if that helps. I'm clearly already losing this game anyway. 

p.s. I think the tennis scores should actually have been flipped around since I never scored a point, but when you've already lost a game you never even played, who the fuck really cares?