Anything can dominate the worry cycle at any time, irrespective of its immediacy or magnitude. Acceleratedly melting glaciers can be right there with running low on napkins, an inverted yield curve in the bond market heralding a U.S. recession might take a back seat to the paralyzing awareness of the cost of putting two kids through college and the unidentified rattle I keep hearing in my wife's car is probably nothing but might be something, keeping me from considering the newly discovered likelihood of a solar super-flare that fries all earthly telecommunication.
If there were competitive worrying of some kind, I'd represent our country at the Olympics, standing atop the gold medalist's pedestal as the anthem plays after a dominating performance in the 200-meter freestyle medley, staring at the rising flag and thinking only about how the tears streaming down my cheeks could be the first sign of a rare and incurable eye cancer.
Hendricks seems to sound like he thinks his shoulder inflammation that landed him on the 10-day injured list is no big deal, but that's coming from him. Hendricks would have the same tone were he in the middle of a stampede of water buffalo, calling from the inside of a barrel bobbing northward in the Niagara River or radioing from the cockpit of a nosediving 737 after the pilot was murdered by a mutinous crew. He's fine in his oddly placid way -- and therefore not to be trusted, as nobody can be that OK.
I'm certainly not. Not with a shoulder.
Shoulders are weird and inscrutable and tough to diagnose and manage, and that comes even from the orthopedists who do so professionally. The human body wasn't designed to hurl a baseball overhand in quite that way, and that's the one joint that can't be fixed with something as simple and routine as Tommy John surgery. When the shoulder starts to go, it can sometimes just be the start of something inexorable that can only be slowed and not stopped. Such a development would be bad for a pitcher already well behind his peers in regard to velocity.
And the universe is expanding, which means it's going to all break apart. The Great Coral Reef is pretty much dead, there's a massive super-volcano bubbling under Yellowstone Park, nothing is being done to protect our election machinery from outside hackers, the Ebola virus is spreading again in Congo and Uganda and now a new study says eggs might be bad for you. So there's that.