The indignities of aging are many, and they cluster primarily around our body’s failures. Lately, visiting the chiropractor to help crunch my back into submission after the car accident, this all becomes painfully clear.

My doctor does mainly sports chiropractics — I started seeing him for a running-related recurring hip flexor problem about 12 years ago — and has helped me through all manner of sports injuries. Plantar fasciitis, bicep tendinitis, a strained something-or-other in my knee. The usual. He even worked out my round ligament pain when I was pregnant with the twins, and popped me back into place after a minor bike accident a couple of years ago.

They do the usual adjustments, physical therapy exercises, massage, and e-stim at the office. With my lower back issue right now, they’re doing a lot of percussion massage (you know, the kind with the massage gun) on my lower back and…glutes. My glutes. I’m getting, like, ten minutes of percussion massage done on my glutes.

I can’t see what’s going on back there from my position face down on the table, but I can only assume it’s something akin to the poetic jiggling of Santa’s belly, that shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.

And the person doing it is inevitably one of the fresh-faced assistants who look like they just graduated high school. Not the doctor, who is my age and would understand, no. A twenty-year-old baby who must be absolutely appalled to see the horrors that powerful, high-amplitude percussion can wreak on the glutes of a middle-aged lady.

I’m not sure how many more visits it’s going to take before my back is functional again, but let’s all hope it goes by quickly.