An antic tale of medical misadventure — in the sprit of yesterday’s posting “The knuckle nick” — from a while back on Facebook, but not chronicled here. Now I have a lot to say about the half-disaster of the time and the responses to my original report, but I’ll start with that report verbatim, because it was crafted as an account of unpleasant experiences in a maximally upbeat and entertaining fashion, to match my frame of mind at the time.
Facebook on 1/25. The text:
I am back after 24 hours without net or phone access and with a series of misfortunes that have left me with a bloody gash across the back of my left (nominally good) hand and a right hand that barely works at all. There’s more, lots more, mostly unpleasant and sometimes disgusting. Now the barometric pressure is way low and my body thrums with pain. I am irrevocably behind on everything.
But somehow my mind is clear and my spirit determined (and my morning vital signs were stunningly good). I am watching MSNBC, all day, throughout all the astoundingly appalling events going on around us, without curling up in despair or going up in flames of rage. I have no idea how I’m managing this, but there it is, so I just accept it as a gift.
Somewhere in there there’s the morning’s Bad Grocery story, the 16-oz box of blueberries that fell onto my kitchen floor and rolled around to cover a 15-foot territory. With firm support, I’m capable of bending down to almost reach the floor with the tips of my fingers, so my cleaning up was lengthy, very painful, exhausting, and also entirely ridiculous. Unavoidably, the feet of my walker smashed many of the berries and made a mess that I scrubbed up with paper towels, using my feet. So, ultimately, a physical comedy routine that actually made me laugh.
But I had another box, so it was only half a disaster.
I’m still deaf in one ear. But you can get along with one working ear. That, too, is only half a disaster.
Over two weeks, this posting accumulated a total of nearly one hundred likes of various sorts. To my great surprise; I have more readers than I had supposed, an encouraging sign in discouraging times.
Hearing problems. I was deaf in one ear because of accumulated earwax in that ear (it’s an old, recurring problem). I had that treated by lavage at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, then had a brief period of hearing in both ears, then lost my hearing in both ears and had to go back to PAMF for another lavage session, reported on at length in my 2/14 posting “Happy happy joy joy”, on (among other things) the restoration of brilliant hearing in both of my ears.
Mostly unpleasant and sometimes disgusting. On FB, Doug Wyman extracted the passage from my posting that reported on things unsaid in it:
— DW: “There’s more, lots more, mostly unpleasant and sometimes disgusting” Oh how I can relate to this line. The body can be really unpleasant and nasty at times.
— AZ > DW: I’m trying to decide how much to tell in a blog version of this, though there’s a bizarre chain of misfortunes [AZ on 2/24: the key concepts here are projectile defecation and toilet seats with sharp edges; I would rather not get into the details, or the hours of labor it took to recover from the misfortunes] that eventually results in The Adventure of the Bloodstained Pillow [to be exact, the pillow, the pillowcase, and several sheets]. And I should take a picture of the gash, now a dark 2-inch-long scab. (It’s amazingly tricky to use your disabled hand to one-handedly make a gauze dressing for your wounded good hand; eventually I managed this using my chin crucially. You learn to improvise.) [I never did get around to the picture — there was a lot going on — but I can report that, a month later, the big swoosh of a gash is almost fully healed: just barely visible.]
I note that I am fully prepared for such medical emergencies, having dealt with previous ones. I have a drawer housing a stock of antiseptics, sterile gauze dressings, elastic bandages (in a variety of colors, for my amusement), and adhesive bandages (in a variety of sizes). It’s the way I live now.
The medical misadventure as an art form. One more follow-up, from Michael Newman. This time I’m leaving our exchange, with all of its chatty back-and-forth, pretty much untouched:
— MN > AZ: Get well! I’m in a Catalan hospital. I got hit on my bike by a guy who focused on the semantics of a stop sign as just to stop briefly and keep going. The pragmatic entailment of also looking for traffic, people or bicycles was entirely missed. (Yes, I know it’s a misanalysis, but I like it). So my tibia plateau got totally smashed up. Two operations, one to stabilize done, and the other on Tuesday to do a bone graft and a placa, which I haven’t looked up the English for [AZ: ‘plate’]. But the result is that I’m dinging airport scanners for the foreseeable future. I hope to fly back on the 16th of February. I haven’t made a general announcement, but I figured since we’re on the topic of physical diminishment, I’d share it here. … The care is good and free. I’m in the Spanish health care system.
— AZ >MN: Michael, that’s not half a disaster, but a full alignment of the stars against you. Which you have chosen to meet with jaunty defiance and some moderately goofy pragmatic analysis. Another occasion for you to cope gracefully with whatever comes your way. (I tend to think of you as a kid, because you’re about a generation younger than me; but I’m a really old man, which makes you in fact a grizzled veteran.) Heal well, my friend.
— MN > AZ: Thanks and the same wishes to you. I was inspired by your occasional linguistic analyses of some of your half-to-full disasters, although the best I could do was moderately goofy. Of course, the normative effect of stop signs is laid out in the legal code and is likely to give rise to a substantial (for here) settlement with the dude’s insurance company.
And now today. After a challenging day yesterday, I slept 10 hours, ending with a long truly delightful relationship dream, so that I woke (at 6:05 am, very late for me) feeling refreshed and optimistic. My first morning vital signs (blood pressure and pulse rate) were so splendid that I had to wonder for a moment whether they were too low — but no, I didn’t feel light-headed or likely to faint, I felt fine.
The day unfolded. I coped with a lot of mail and expressed my anger at all manner of wicked things, but calmly, and I had my weekly shower (which is unavoidably lengthy and tedious, but today was especially refreshing). And I worked on this posting, which is no small enterprise.
The word for the day is sangfroid. All I need now is for a Pete Seeger to lead us in a sing-along. (Yes, I am that old. Respect my trip.)
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