Well, I have once again messed up my
knee. This is not a new injury, this is a recurring one that won't
just go away. There is this goop (that is a proper medical term)
that gets all up under and around my kneecap and pushes it up and
around and all out of whack. My kneecap doesn't actually dislocate,
which is good because there is no pain comparable to that, even
childbirth, and I've had both happen. It just makes my muscles spasm
together tightly around my kneecap in response to an injury and I
can't get the goop to un-inflame long enough to push all the goop
back where it is supposed to go. The real bummer is, the ER doctor
can't push the goop back where it goes either when it gets this
messed up. I know, I went to see him last night. He confirmed that
it was in fact messed up, stuck a needle full of morphine in my butt
and sent me home where he has suggested I call an orthopedic surgeon.
I knew he was going to say that
nonsense about the surgeon. Every time I do this to my knee, a
doctor, with presumably very little education, tells me I have to
have surgery on it. Well, friends, that's not going to happen. I've
had knee surgery on this same knee before. Do you know how bad it
hurts? For weeks, it hurts! And
I can't put even the teensy tiniest bit of pressure on it for eight
weeks. Yeah, right. I have three teenagers at the house. Can you
imagine what they would do once they figure out that mom can't run
them down and beat them with a pepperoni stick? It would be chaos.
It would be chaos just out of my reach, is what it would be. Do you
know how messy three teenagers are. I have one with ADD, one who
isn't really into showering and hygiene and another who is a man-diva
and changes clothes no less than four times a day. These people
cannot be left unsupervised. I have to yell at one to do his laundry
while forcibly holding another under the shower head and making him
brush his teeth, all the while making sure the other one doesn't fall
into a daydream and wander off a cliff. These people could cause the
apocalypse at any given time, and I am just supposed to sit on the
couch and watch the end of days? No.
Then
there is Dan. Dan is a wonderful man who is sweet tempered and hard
working and I cannot leave him alone in the kitchen. He has
something wrong with sinuses and has had since he was about ten years
old and he can't smell. Your sense of smell directly effects your
sense of taste. Therefore he cannot taste anything either. But he
has the spirit! He really wants to smell and taste! This causes him
to put so many herbs and spices on food that they are inedible to the
rest of us. He cannot tell which spices go together either, so he
may put half of a ginger root in the Italian food or half a bottle of
Indian Curry in the tacos. And he can tell when something is spicy
hot, so he adores red pepper in all forms. Flakes, pastes, powdered,
bottled, he doesn't care, just throw it all in. As long as eating it
makes you instantly turn red and break into a sweat, he's a happy
guy. If your mouth isn't swollen at the end of dinner, he feels he
has personally failed you. And he's so nice, that failing you really
upsets him.
Then
there is the idea of surgery itself. Do any of you know what happens
during surgery? Anyone? They go inside of your body.
That's right! Despite the fact that you are all nice and sealed up,
they just break right in. They will cut you open and dig around in
your insides and play hide and seek with the surgery sponge in there.
If God had meant for people to go inside of my body to fix things,
he would have made a door. Somewhere on me there would be a little
door with an inset handle (you know, so it didn't look like I had a
wart) and all you'd have to do would be to open this door and fix
whatever the problem was. Like when the lights go out in the kitchen
because I have run the dishwasher and microwave at the same time (God
bless houses from the 1920's), I just go to the breaker box, open the
little door and flip the switch. Good as new! I have no little
door! Stay out of the inside of my body! I do not approve of being
viciously gashed open by God knows what kind of psychopath in a
doctor's coat (and you can buy those things online, I've seen them)
so he can go in and poke and prod and “take a look” and when I
wake up he tells me some cock-and-bull story about being fixed. He
probably didn't even do anything productive in there. He'll just
look around, make fun of my knobby kneecaps to the nurses, drink
coffee, play with my tendons to see what he can make my toes do,
listen to James Brown and then stitch me back up. “Oh, yeah, Ms.
Ledford, we fixed you up real good” and he snickers into his coat
sleeve as the orderly snorts coffee out his nose in a fit of
hysterical laughter. I am not to be fooled that easily. So, if they
don't mind, I will keep my body firmly sealed just like it was made
and I will leave the goop in my knee to settle down wherever it
pleases. Until it starts hurting again.
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