Well, I managed to injure myself even worse just getting ready to go see the doctor today. Can you believe a grown man can injure himself putting on a sock? Now that I think about it, though, the previous injury I was seeing the doctor ABOUT had happened in my sleep…
…and that’s no surprise, because years in therapy have taught me that my unconscious is full of land mines. Whatever -- a scream came out of me that would have made any horror film victim proud.
My right leg now seems to want to twist itself around backwards when I walk, and I’ve acquired a conspicuous limp. When I finally got to my doctor’s office – only three blocks away, but the whole distance is a sheet of ice – I was just one big hard pretzel of knotted muscles. It was obvious to her staff that I was in bad shape, so they hustled me into a room where I could collapse with some semblance of dignity. I just crawled onto the examining table and wept and shook quietly for awhile. The pain was just about driving me out of my mind, and any kind of meditative concentration was beyond my capacities in that situation (note to self: work on that). (One of them blinks and asks, “which self?” The one after that sniffs: “Buddhists don’t believe in the self, you know.”)
The doc had had me on some very powerful pain killers before today’s misadventure, and I was taking too much because the pain just kept coming back too soon and too strong. The new one she prescribed supposedly lasts for twelve hours. As an old hippie who remembers just enough to stay out of trouble, I gasped when I saw the label: morphine. I imagined a thunderclap lighting up the word. This is what Dr. Frankenstein would give the creature to shut him up when he got too rowdy.
Yet here I am, six hours later, blogging away.
Which brings me to my point: I don’t know how, or how much, these developments will affect my work here at Eons. On the one hand, the worst thing I can do is sit – elevating my bad leg helps, but its’ still a very bad idea to sit for any length of time. So long pieces are pushing it.
On the other, I’m going to be stuck at home. I’m going to get lonely and antsy. So if you see me here, no finger wagging please. I get enough of that from my dead mother. I really should have buried her head separately from the rest of her body. I did bury her clothes, though, so I won’t have anything to wear if she finally convinces me to go after the unsuspecting blonde in the shower. Not that I’d be caught dead in anything of hers, anyway!
This is the drugs talking, I hear my friends whispering this o each other, and it is, I assure you, it is. What I really did was to cremate my mother. Though she was never able to in life, in death she makes a great cup of coffee.
What was my third point, again? Oh, yeah, inspiration is much more likely to strike me when I’m in pain. For that matter, so is a truck – ask any driver who braved the wilds of my town today while I was trying to cross the street. – but I may be compelled to wring whatever insight I can out of this convalescence JUST BECAUSE. I’ll try to be amusing, anyway.
The news is this: the doctor told me what’s technically wrong, and in my state of delirium, I couldn’t understand her. She said something about one of my lower discs being gone, worn down to nothing. The possible treatments include surgery, physical therapy, or some sort of injections. I go for an MRI next Friday. More fun.
At least it’s not a colonoscopy.
Now, if Frankenstein’s monster, The Muse, my cat and my long-suffering partner will all just shove over, I have a bad day to sleep off.
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Ponytail is the manger of the Eons groups Midnight Movies and Buddhist Boomers.
Blog (c) 2009 by Jack Veasey.
