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Monday.

Therapy day.

I show up and sign in. After a few minutes in the waiting area, a Physical Therapist shows up to drag me back to the torture table.

I get a lump in my throat.

It is Straight shooting Steve.

Straight shooting Steve is a former US Marine. According to him, he was a Special Forces Interrogator on various battlefields throughout the Middle East. According to him, his personal skills of physical and Psychological torture were such that he could have even the most hardened male enemy combatants willing to confess that they were actually women within mere minutes of the start of one of Steve’s “sessions”.

Steve looks like he eats bullets for breakfast.

After getting out of the service, Steve needed a new outlet for his skills, hence he became a Physical Therapist.

Steve gets his nickname due to the fact that he is brutally honest.

There is no beating around the bush with Steve.

Soon, I found myself sitting on the torture table with my newly-healing injured bare foot resting in his hands.

“OK Sir…..first I am going to start out by performing a dorsiflexion maxi-stretch and rotation maneuver. This exercise will pull at your newly attached tendons to a degree of which you have not experienced since your surgery. You are going to feel an intense, almost unbearable burning pain at the sites of tendon reattachment, followed by the distinct sensation that the tendons are indeed being ripped from the bone. This intense pain will travel up your leg, causing nerves and muscle to involuntarily convulse, with pain radiating up into your spinal cord, causing such severe neurological trauma that you may end up losing all control of your bowels and bladder, therefore sir, I’m gonna need you to use the restroom before I begin. Also, I’m going to need you to place this ball gag in your mouth during the exercise so that your uncontrolled screaming and hysterics do not disturb our other patients”

He motioned for me to head off to the restroom.

I hobbled across the room, cane in one hand, shoes in the other, looked back to see that he was not watching me, and the I hobbled faster than any human in recorded history, out the door, and down the street…..to freedom.

My Father, who had driven me to therapy, and whom I had blasted past as I bolted out the door, finally caught up to me about 3 blocks later.

As I stood next to his car window, huffing and puffing, I tried to explain the reasons for my hasty escape, but dear Dad was quick to point out that he could not understand a word I was saying, thanks to the ball gag still in my mouth.

This month of therapy is going to be real interesting to say the least.

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