Thursday.

Bridgeport, TX.

Earth.

It’s time to begin therapy on the new bionic foot.

I go to the Physical Therapy establishment for my initial evaluation.

The Therapy place is right next door to a new Chinese Buffet that my Dad and I will be assaulting once my evaluation is complete.

The two businesses share a common wall.

The reception area of the Therapy place must border the kitchen of the Chinese Buffet, as evidenced by the continuous muffled sounds of dogs barking and monkeys shrieking.

I check in at the front desk.

The gal hands me a mountain of paperwork to fill out.

The first 10 pages want me to detail my entire health history from the time I was born. I decide to get “creative” just to see if they actually read this stuff.

After 20 minutes of paperwork, the lead therapist comes to get me. She leads me back to an exam room and has me sit on a table as she pulls up a rolling chair and starts to pour through my paperwork.

“Mr. Packawack… What exactly led to the injury on your foot?…..it says VABFAB on here but I’m afraid that I don’t recognize that abbreviation…”

I tell her that this is the standard globally recognized abbreviation for “Violent Attack By Flightless Antarctic Bird”.

She looks up at me.

“Huh?”

I need to put it into layman’s terms for her.

“I was attacked by a Penguin“

“You were attacked by ….a penguin…..an actual penguin…..little cute guy in a tuxedo type of penguin?”

“Yes, though I wouldn’t say he was real cute….look at what he did to my foot!”

“And this happened where exactly?”

“San Antonio“

“You were attacked by a vicious penguin in San Antonio?”

“Yep…..at Sea World“

The girl rolled her eyes. Obviously she was dealing with a clearly deranged or severely psychotic idiot.

“Moving on Mr. Packawack….. Under your medical history, I notice a few more entries and abbreviations that I don’t recognize…. what is this “ATCOS” entry back in 2005?”

“That is ATROPHIED TESTICULAR CIRCULAR OBJECT SYNDROME“

“Huh?”

“In Layman’s terms it means shrunken Kahonies“

She rolls her eyes and moves on…

“And in 2007….you have marked down…SHC X2?”

“Yes Ma’am….. That is SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION…..TWO EPISODES“

“You spontaneously burst into flames….twice?”

“Yep“

“Alrighty…moving on…Under chronic conditions, you list CNPFUF…..what is that if I dare to ask?”

“Yes Ma’am….that’s CHRONIC NOCTURNAL POTENTIALLY FATAL UNCONTROLLED FLATULENCE“

“As in fatal to you?”

“No Ma’am….fatal to my wife….”

“Moving on…….under your medications, you list Coumadin, Neurontin, and FV (1W,1B,2BB Daily)… I don’t recognize the FV 1W 1B 2BB medication”

“Yes Maam…. that’s FLINTSTONES VITAMINS, 1 WILMA, 1 BARNEY, AND TWO BAM-BAM’S DAILY“

The gal sat motionless, mouth open.

Just then, another therapist, a guy who had treated me before, saw me and entered the room.

“Hey Mark! Wassssup!!! You’re not giving Michelle a hard time are ya? What has he told ya Michelle? Last year, he came in after supposedly being bitten by a rabid moth that he was sure was actually a vampire…. what goofy reason did he give you?

“Penguin Attack…”

The guy high-fived me.

“Penguin attack! Niiiiiicccccceeeee!”

Suddenly, the muffled dog barks from behind the wall stopped. That could only mean one thing, Fresh Kung Pao Shihtzu was soon to be carried to the buffet table. It was time for lunch! The therapist made me a schedule for therapy on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday for the next month, I retrieved my Dad, and off we shuffled to the Chinese place next door.

And yet another innocent therapist has been introduced to the warped world of the Idiot.

My wife and I’s lives as seen through the eyes of Hollywood.

May Hollywood have mercy on our souls…

“I don’t care how much you sweet talk me Idiot!….I am not putting on the Princess Leia costume again tonight!”

“Good grief Idiot!! Put the damn toilet seat down!! It’s like sharing a bathroom with with an epileptic gorilla!”

“Hurry Idiot!! They’re coming!!”

“Yes information, I need the number for 911 please…and hurry!!”

“Now look out there Idiot….there’s lots of people wearing that same goofy leotard you got on….no..it does not make you look like a girly man….”

“Idiot…”

“Yes Dear…”

“This usually works better without the Batman Underoos on….”

“Damnit Idiot!! I told you that you could get a Kitten!! not a damn monkey!!!”

“Really Idiot??? Did your mother not teach you how to brush your teeth? Good lord…did you eat a camel for lunch?”

“For the last time idiot!! Let go of my hand!! You are pulling me down into the water!!! let go!!”

(Wife screaming from out of frame) “Good grief Idiot!! I told you that I don’t like KC and the Sunshine Band!!! Quit blasting that crap!!”

“I’m leaving you Idiot!”

“Why my dear?”

“Pot scrubbies! You just can’t seem to learn to put the damn pot scrubbies back where they belong!”

“Ya know Mrs. Robinson, I know a good physical therapist that could improve that dorsiflexion for you..”

“Nope Idiot! You still missed it….that sucker is huge…how could you not see that? Do I need to get you new nosehair clippers for Christmas?”

The Idiot’s wife has to sneak home from work in order to retrieve some reports that had left sitting on her small table in the bedroom.

She comes in from the garage and finds the living room quiet and empty.

There is no sign of her idiot husband.

Obviously he is in the bedroom, lounging on the bed as usual, milking those pathetic Doctor’s orders for all their worth.

She quietly walks through the house and into the bedroom.

The idiot is face down on the bed, sobbing uncontrollably, with his face buried in his pillow.

He is unaware of her presence in the room.

The poor man seems to be having a major breakdown.

The wife feels guilty.

Obviously, the stress of her husband’s health issues have finally come crashing down on him. He can no longer shoulder the burden of trying to remain upbeat and happy through so much turmoil with his health and future.

The man has simply broke.

The wife walks around the side of the bed and approaches her sobbing husband. She puts a loving hand on the back of his shoulder.

“It’s OK Idiot… It will be OK….. what’s the matter? What’s bothering you so badly today?”

The Idiot is startled to find he is not alone.

He quickly sits up and hastily wipes the tears from his face.

“Uh…Nothing…I’m fine…sniffle sniffle….it’s just allergies…..I’m fine….”

The wife knows her idiot husband is lying through his teeth, but also knows that he never discusses his true feelings. Like everyone else on the planet, she will have to read his next blog post to find out what it truly bothering him.

“Alright then Mr. Stubborn….I just will get my papers and go back to work…. you can go back to bawling like toddler all by your lonesome…”

The idiot places his face back into his pillow and his low sniffles and sobs are quickly drowned out.

The wife gets her papers and heads back out into the house.

She freezes just feet outside the bedroom door.

As she was leaving, she noticed out of the corner of her eye that the bedroom TV was on…. yet she distinctly remembered hearing no sounds while she was in the room…

Her curiosity is peaked.

The Idiot had the TV muted!

She turns and heads back into the bedroom, stopping near the end of the bed.

Her idiot husband is blubbering something into the pillow….

It sounds like …

“I’ll never let go…I promise….I’ll never let go!!”

She glances back at the muted TV.

“Good Lord Idiot!!! Not again!!! For the love of God man!! Grow a spine and quit watching that damn movie every time they replay it on the satellite!!”

She throws up her hands and storms out of the room.

Yep, you guessed it, the idiot has fallen prey to watching a replay of “Titanic” for the umpteenth time…..and it still turns him into a spineless bowl of jelly whenever Rose lets go of Jack’s hand and lets his lifeless body slip into the icy water…

sniffle sniffle

Call me a romantic…

or do as she does, and just call me an Idiot.

————————————–

Today is the start of Physical Therapy. Happy Happy Joy Joy! Better yet, the therapy place I will be going to is right next door to a…..

Chinese buffet!

Thank you Lord!!

Five weeks with no Chinese Buffet…

Until today.

They can torture my foot all they want, cause I’m pigging out afterwards!

———————————————————————————–

I have been using Dr. Quack as the temporary fictional name of my Quack Surgeon in my book. I think I’ll just keep it at that name. A few of you have suggested a cartoon duck that could be illustrated and used in the book to portray the good Doc. This is a great idea! Anyone out there able to draw a good evil duck? Please let me know if you have any cartoon character drawing skills.

Time for yet the latest installment of

“As the Quack Turns“

Wednesday.

The Attorney Generals Office called me once again.

I have been searching all my files, but unfortunately, I do not have in my possession exactly what they are looking for.

No worry, my Lawyer will definitely have what they need, though he is deathly slow at responding to their requests for records.

As you know, the Quack is being investigated for massive Medicare Fraud. I was not a Medicare patient. So, what does this have to do with me?

I asked the Investigator what my case had to do with their investigation…

and I was told some interesting tidbits.

Apparently, this snake, who had been sued multiple times before and after my case, had always managed to drag things out to where he never actually had to give a sworn deposition. He would settle the cases or have them thrown out in court before he ever had to sit down and testify under oath.

That was his plan. Drag the cases out and hopefully never have to give a sworn deposition in which his lies would be exposed.

Apparently, my case was the first (and possibly ONLY) one in which he had actually been legally deposed on camera. To show you how he would drag things out, depositions in my case did not even start for over 6 YEARS after my surgery. 6 YEARS! Obviously, he was counting on my case being tossed out or settled before he would have to actually sit down and give a deposition.

Thanks to my Attorney, he could no longer stall, and he was ordered by the court to give a deposition in my case. By the time he finally sat in the hot seat, 7 years had passed since my injury.

It turns out, my case, in which we deposed him and caught him in lie after lie, while under oath, and on camera, could turn out to be very beneficial in proving the Government’s current case against him. If he was caught on camera testifying to illegal activity from a surgery in 1999, then the man has been a lying fraud ever since then.

The Investigator let me know that he would be in contact with me if I could be of any more service to them.

I told him that I was writing a book, much of which dealt with this nightmare, and he said he might be able to give me some “free” information for the book.

According to him, the affidavits for the search warrants served on the Quack are on file at the courthouse in Fort Worth and are a matter of public record. I just need to go down there, request them, and then can read all the intricate details of the allegations against him.

So, we know where I will be taking a field trip to sometime later this year!

Even if I never get called as a witness, I take great joy that there may indeed be a day, in his Federal Criminal Trial, where the Government Prosecutor stands up and then requests that the videotaped deposition in the case of Pakulak vs Quack be admitted into evidence!

I can just see him cringing in his seat as he hears MY name yet again. I have been like a virus that he has been unable to get rid of for nearly 13 years.

Who knows….

Maybe a few years from now, I’ll send him a complimentary AUTOGRAPHED copy of my book, for his reading enjoyment while he wastes away in his cell.

That would be totally awesome!

My Spinal Surgeon out for a walk with friends

Today’s regularly scheduled goofy post of utter and complete idiotic nonsense has been temporarily postponed so that I can briefly continue to bask in the joy of the misery of my beloved Spinal Surgeon.

I know that makes me sound like a petty and vengeful person, going directly against the way I was raised, and the way I have tried to live, but right now, it really lifts my spirits to know that this man is squirming like a worm on the end of a fish hook, and, as it turns out, I am one of the lucky souls who got to place his squirming butt on the hook!

As you know, the Attorney Generals office called me yesterday in regards to my fair spinal surgeon.

I hadn’t really thought about one aspect until I was talking to a friend later in the day.

The Authorities raided the offices of the Surgeon last spring based on allegations of massive Medicare and Medicaid Fraud against him.

Well, when I had my surgery in 1999, I had private insurance. I was not on Medicare or Medicaid.

The mystery deepens…

So, why are the authorities contacting me?

Maybe they did not actually find me through the records they had confiscated from the Doctor during their raid. Maybe they found me through a search of court records involving the Doctor.

Even though we settled, out of court, before ever going to trial, we still had to appear in front of a judge in District Court on multiple occasions, and while the evidence of my lawsuit might have been swept under the rug as far as the public is concerned, there are still court records to reflect my long battle with him.

I still don’t know what is entirely kosher to reveal at this point, but I can tell you that the Attorney General is looking for specific documents that I may have in my possession, documents that show the Doc to be the liar and fraud that he truly is. I am hastily digging through my mountain of records, looking for these documents, but have told the investigator that my lawyer will definitely have copies of what he needs.

There was a “smoking gun” type bombshell in his deposition for my lawsuit, a bombshell that we nailed him with that totally destroyed his credibility. But how did the Government find out? It is a great mystery.

I had to tell the Investigator that all my legal documents are kept in a huge bucket upstairs, and that lo and behold, I had just had a surgery last month directly related to the quack he is investigating, and that I am not yet able to climb any steps.

(The Daughter was able to drag the bucket down the stairs on Tuesday evening.)

So, it might take me a couple days, but I am now happily digging!!

The timing of this little adventure just has me blown away.

To be honest, I am in the midst of the absolute hardest chapters of the book at the moment. These are the chapters that deal with the nightmare of the lawsuit. I have just been writing about the Doctor’s depositions and all the lies and total incompetence that the depositions uncovered. It has been far from pleasant in dredging up all these bad memories up and then writing about them.

And then, like a gift from above, the phone rings and the Attorney General gives me this little boost, almost as if to remind me that, while I might be writing about a painful period at the moment, the authorities are still working hard to ensure that my book gets a great addendum to close out my story.

An addendum detailing the conviction and sentencing of my spinal surgeon.

What a great ending that will be.

So, while the quack had so much control over the misery of my life for so many years in the aftermath of my surgery, I feel now like I have a little control over HIS life. I obviously have information that may help, even in a small way, in locking him up in prison, hopefully for the rest of his life.

All us many victims that he crippled or defrauded are now getting a personal bit of justice over the quack.

What goes around, comes around.

He is now learning that. I’m sure the phones of all his other victims are also ringing, and the Government is slowly collecting more nails for the coffin of the case against him.

I already know what I am going to ask of Santa Claus this Christmas. He can keep all the gifts this year, because all I want is to be called as a witness at my Neurosurgeon’s Federal trial.

What a great gift that would be!

I’ll get a new suit for the occasion.

I only wear suits and ties at Weddings, Funerals, and Federal Criminal Trials….

That’s always been my rule of thumb…

My Spinal Surgeon waving Hello

What a great start to Tuesday.

I was awakened by the phone ringing.

It turned out to be the Texas Attorney General’s office.

It was an investigator, conducting an investigation into my quack spinal surgeon.

The FBI raided his offices last spring and hauled away all his files and computers.

Obviously, the authorities have now reached my file.

And boy am I ready to talk!

One thing I did NOT sign when I got my settlement, was a confidentiality agreement. I am free to sing like a bird!

I am elated to think I might be able to play a small part in the Government finally locking him away.

Great day!

**Although we have been experiencing balmy and warm here in North Texas this winter, I know that many of you are finally feeling the cold effects of the season. As such, I would like to flashback to a post from May of 2006 that will warm you up and help you to think of warmer, happier times to come this summer. No need to thank me, I’m just glad to help**

The Idiot’s day at the Pool

After deciding to come out of my depressive hibernation, and being that the thermometer is now nearing 100 degrees (F) on a daily basis, I decided to take the family and head to the City Swimming Pool for a cool afternoon dip.

When we arrived at the parking lot, the kids quickly made fast escapes from the still-moving car, quickly followed by the little wife yelling at the two children to “slow the Hell down…or else!”.

I parked the vehicle, followed the sound of the hysterical cursing, and entered the pool area.

Clad in a full-length, Terrycloth bathrobe that I had permanently “borrowed” from a national Hotel Chain, and wearing a cute little pair of “Bob the Builder” flip-flops that were broken, (they only go “flop..flop..flop”…the flip is broken), I made quite a site wandering amongst all the hundreds of fried-red teenagers, little children, and bewildered housewives who had their noses buried deep in their books, oblivious to their youngsters drowning a mere 10 feet away, right under the watchful, yet diverted, eyes of the adolescent lifeguards who were busily eyeing each other’s tanned bodies and not the bodies of the myriad of people in the pool. (Wow! What a sentence! I have a cramp in my hand now….)

So, I waddle and limp my way through the masses, drawing curious stares from most people, a look on their faces that say “Who let the obese polar bear in?” as I move towards an empty chair in the back of the pool area. (flop flop flop)

I scan the thousand or so young heads bobbing in the water amongst the bodies of those poor unfortunates that had drowned hours earlier, and I notice my two young offspring, expending a lot of energy in not looking my direction so that they can pretend they don’t know me.

The wife has already taken up residence on her favorite lounger and has her head buried deep into her current bit of non-fiction reading, “The Idiot Wife’s guide on How to kill your husband, keep the Life Insurance Money, and not go to prison”.

I reach my lounger, a broken down rusty old relic that only has three legs remaining, but I do not fret over this small annoyance, for I am not here to lay and grow more cancerous growths on my wrinkled, corpse-white skin…..I am here to swim!

And swim I shall do!

I casually kick off the Bob the Builders and begin reaching for the drawstring of the Terrycloth robe.

My wife rolls away to face the opposite direction, knowing the horrors that are about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting public.

I motion towards the snack bar, to the young man who operates the CD player that is providing the entire pool area with the blaring loud music we are all enjoying. I give the young man the familiar “thumbs up” signal and suddenly the “Eminem” rap music comes to a screeching halt and there is momentary silence in the pool area.

All activity and drownings come to a momentary halt and all eyes scan the pool area in confusion. Suddenly the pool area is again blasting to ear-poppingly loud music. The opening chords of the 80′s dance classic “Relax” by Frankie goes to Hollywood starts blasting across the pool.

I reach for the robe. My achy, breaky 41-yr old arthritic hips start rocking back and forth to the beat of the music.

All eyes begin to glance towards the obese Polar Bear wearing the borrowed Motel 6 robe. I grab each side of the robe and with the grace of a 260lb swan, I fling the robe open and it falls with a “thud” to the concrete beneath me.

“Relax….don’t do it…..Relax!….don’t do it…..” blares over the speakers.

Everyone within 100 feet instinctively raises their hands to shield their eyes from the blinding glare.

Kids start to cry.

Blocks away, dogs start to bark.

The “Michelin Tire Man” has been unleashed!

It is not a pretty sight.

This lubed and oiled whale of a body has been kept indoors and covered up for nearly 8 months. The skin that has now been unveiled for all to see, is whiter than white. An Albino corpse, dead for a month, floating in a vat of white paint, would seem downright dark compared the whiteness that I now proudly display.

Not only am I well oiled and lubed, since it is now blazing hot outside, I am already dripping with sweat and am quickly creating a dripping, waterfall of liquids pouring off of my shorts and body that to most observers, would appear that I am, in fact, wetting myself and have lost all control of my bladder region.

My greasy, blubbery body glistens in the hot sun. My breasts, which are bigger than most women’s of comparable age, bob gingerly in the wind.

More shrieks and screams are heard as people’s eyes adjust to the glare and their eyes began to cast downward on my body to the tiny little bit of blue elastic, barely bigger than a band-aid, that is encircling the “Twig and berries and buttockular region”………my trusty Speedo! Yes, my SPEEDO!

Ahhhh……The Speedo…..

A wonderful little invention of Nordic Genius that proudly allows us older, fatter, out-of-shape old guys the pleasure of subjecting total strangers to the disgusting sight of flabs, folds, bulges, and cracks, all where they shouldn’t be, on the human body.

The music now changes from “Relax” to the more upbeat dance classic “Macho Man” by the Village People.

I grab the tube of sunscreen laying on the broken lounger near me and squirt a huge, steaming glob of SPF30 into my hand. By now there is mass panic in the pool as people struggle and fight to get out of the water, a scene of utter chaos not seen since the shark in “Jaws” cleared the beach in a matter of seconds.

I begin to rub the gooey sunscreen deep into my whitened, jiggly, flabby skin. My stomach jiggles and bounces such that my belly button is distorted into looking like a giant, White “Mr. Potato Head” screaming for help…..

The tiny little blue Speedo, creaks and groans, as folds and bulges all struggle to break free. The sweat continues to pour out from beneath me and is now snaking it’s way across the pavement towards the edge of the pool, just a mere few feet away.

“MACHO MACHO MAN……I WANT TO BE..A MACHO MAN…..MACHO MACHO MAN……” the music continues to blare as I now jiggle and shake in rhythm with the beat. I now begin to waddle and drip towards the edge of the pool.

The last few stragglers are just pulling themselves clear of the water when I launch myself into the air and pull into a tight “Cannonball” tuck just before hitting the water with such force that half of the pools water is launched in the sky and drenches everyone and everything within a three block radius of the city pool.

I surface in the center of the pool in about 3 feet of water, which used to be 6 feet of water just seconds before, and I wipe the chlorinated water from my eyes. I scan the pool area. Not another soul is in the water. Those that have not fled for the parking lot are all wimpering and crying, just thanking the Heavens that they were still alive and had not drowned.

My kids cower in the corner of the pool area, trying to hide their embarassed little faces and pretending not to know me. I gently lay back and begin to float on my back, staring up at the beautiful blue sky above me, and I give thanks for being of such large stature and for the genius of the invention of the trusty Speedo.

For I now have the unique ability to go to any public pool, lake, or Ocean and can clear the place out and have the water all to myself within seconds! I don’t worry about crowds at the pool like you body-fat challenged, emaciated little twigs. When I go out to swim, there are no crowds!

**Update. If if any of you blog friends that I visit in person over the course of each summer would like me to empty your neighborhood pools so that YOU may swim in peace and quiet, just let me know. I still have the trust Speedo, and given the fact that I have since grown in size since this post was written, the Speedo should be that much more effective now ***

With my little health issue with the leg, I was unable to take D’Aun out anywhere for her Birthday on Sunday. Some of her friends did take her out to a movie Sunday afternoon, and then we had family come down Sunday Evening for cake, so she ended up having a pretty good day.

Sunday evening, we were waiting for my parents to arrive to that we would have cake and I was doing my usual routine of laying on the bed, doing absolutely nothing useful.

A few minutes later, I heard the sounds of the parents coming in through the front door.

It was time to unveil my little birthday surprise!

I was just getting up out of the bed when the first screams of “Hey Idiot!! It’s time for cake!!! Shuffle your butt out here!!” started bellowing throughout the house.

It took me a minute or two to get to the doorway of the Master Bedroom, which leads directly out into the living room.

“Come on Idiot!! We’re waiting!!! We want cake!!!”

I paused in the doorway of my bedroom and called out…

“OK Everyone….I want you to all freeze what you are doing and I want you to cast your attention into the living room!! I have a surprise for our birthday girl!!”

(D’Aun peered around the corner from the dining room, briefly hoping that she was going to catch a glimpse of a new car in the middle of the living room….)

Still standing in the bedroom doorway, I reached across a dresser and clicked on our CD Player, which had already been pre-loaded with just the right music for my surprise.

As “You should be Dancing” by the Bee Gees blasted through the house, I slowly shuffled out of the bedroom, and into the living room, using only a cane…

No walker, no crutches, and no boot…

For the first time in 5 weeks.

I was walking on my own two feet.

The family looked on in stunned silence with smiles of joy on their faces.

I got to the center of the living room, stopped, and then threw my hands up in the air. “Happy Birthday D’Aun!”

The family was now happily high-fiving each other and were laughing and talking amongst themselves. The Idiot was now walking!

And little did anyone notice that I had actually dropped my cane onto the floor in the process of throwing my hands up in the air.

There I stood, frozen in place.

Right on cue, “You should be Dancing” ended and the next song, “Tragedy” came on and started blaring through the house.

My Wife glanced my way.

“Come on Idiot….come over here so we can start in on the cake”

I just smiled back.

“Uh…that’s OK….I’m good….I’ll just stand here for a minute or two…”

The wife started cutting into her cake.

“I really appreciate this little surprise Idiot….but it really is too soon for you to totally ditch the walker and the crutches…..you just need to eat a piece of cake and then you need to get your butt back on the bed!”

Still frozen in place, unable to move, with my cane, my only means of balance and support laying on the floor, I just smiled back…

“Okey Dokey Honey! Will do!”

The wife was on her third bite of cake when the light bulb went off in her head.

She turned her attention back towards me.

She started laughing out loud.

The rest of the family asked her what was so funny.

She pointed towards me.

“I see it now! Look!! The idiot dropped his cane and now he can’t move! He doesn’t have the balance to be able to pick it up, can’t turn around, and can’t even move…..he’s stuck standing there!!”

My Mother yelled across the room.

“Marky Dear…..did you drop your stick? Do you need your Father to come carry you back to your bed?”

“NO MOTHER!!!! I’m fine!!!! Really!!!! This is all part of my plan!!! Stay where you are!! All of you!!!”

The wife passed around instructions for everyone to move into the living room so that everyone could be seated in comfort while they all watched the rest of my plan unfold.

Soon, I was standing in the center of the room with my whole family seated and happily eating cake all around me.

They all happily ate and chatted…

And I just stood there…..trying to process exactly how I was going to make a graceful exit out of this mess that I had gotten myself into.

And there I stood.

The football game on the TV ended.

The cake was devoured.

My wife opened a few presents.

Laughter and joy had filled the house for well over an hour.

The parents left.

The daughter retreated upstairs.

The kid went off to his room.

and the wife went off to soak in a hot bath.

As I stood in the middle of the living room floor, whispering instructions to one of our idiot cats…

“No Lulu!! Grab it with BOTH paws!!! Good girl!! Now lift it up!!! Quit your griping ya goofy cat..I know you don’t have thumbs and it’s hard to grab…but you’re doing a good job!! good kitty!”

And with that…

The wife ended her birthday, happily soaking in a hot tub, in peace and quiet, as her idiot husband stood in the other area of the house, trying to be the first idiot in history to successfully teach a cat how to pick a cane up off the floor, without the benefit of opposable thumbs.

As “Lonely Days” by the Bee Gees played on the CD Player.

Just a typical day in our household.

**And yes, I am just using a cane now**

**The blog has now passed the 1.9 Million mark…. Time to start the countdown to 2 Million views… You readers who guessed mid to late February can start nervously watching the viewcount grow. Good Luck! **

A little story that I like to revisit each time this year…

It was June of 1990. I was working in an office for Continental Airlines in Houston. I was sitting at my desk one night when a training class of new hires walked past. In that line of men and women, there was a young gal that immediately caught my eye.

The next night, the group again walked past my desk, and I saw her again. I saw them go off into the training room nearby. It just so happened that the trainer responsible for that class was one of my best friends. On my next break, I made a point to go visit my friend in the training room. I sat down next to my friend at the desk at the head of the room. The new hires were doing a test and were handing them in as they finished.

That girl who had caught my eye was seated not too far away. I had no clue what her name was, and knew nothing about her.

I asked my friend if I could help her grade papers. She happily agreed. I would grab a paper, start grading it, and then would read the students name aloud, asking my friend who that particular student was.

What an ingenious plan for an idiot!

I finally got to another paper, graded it, and then completely butchered the pronunciation of the girl’s name.

My friend smiled. “Oh…that’s D’Aun…she’s my best student…. you would just love her….she is just the cutest thing”

She pointed towards “D’Aun”.

Bingo! That was the girl! I now knew her name.

I sheepishly asked my friend if she knew if this girl was single.

The friend indicated that she was pretty sure she was.

My friend could sense that I was sitting all glassy-eyed, staring at this gal across the room, so my friend asked if I wanted to meet this girl…

I did what every idiot does in that situation, I froze up…

“Uh…uh…uh…uh…uh…uh…”

My break was over. I dashed out of the room and back to my desk.

About an hour went by. I was on the phone, when I noticed a large shadow beside my desk. I turned my head. There stood my friend……and the pretty gal I had spied in the training room.

I smiled and finished my call.

My friend grinned. “Bubba..(my nickname at the time)….this is D’Aun….D’Aun….this is Bubba…..enjoy!”

And with that, my dear friend walked away and left D’Aun standing beside my desk.

We had a nervous laugh about what an awkward moment this was, I let her know that my name was actually Mark, and then I nervously asked her out.

A few days later, we were flying down a Houston freeway on our way to a Theme Park for our first date. At 75mph in heavy traffic, I dropped the bombshell that I was recently divorced and had two children that lived in Indiana.

To my relief, she did not fling open the door and throw herself out of the moving vehicle, and, once we came to a stop in the parking lot of the theme park, she did not make a mad dash for freedom.

We made quite a pair. She will kill me for revealing this, but when we met, she was 5 feet even and weighed all of 87lbs. She was tiny. I was 6’2″ and weighed about 220lbs. We were quite the sight walking hand in hand in public.

Working for an airline had it’s benefits.

Within weeks after we started dating, we had flown off to New Orleans for the day on a date. The next week, we decided to take a quick trip to San Francisco. We flew to Reno, Atlanta, and back to New Orleans.

A little over 2 months after we first met, I asked her to marry me. She said yes.

Our families were shocked. We had barely been dating but a few months, and I was just coming off a failed marriage.

But I knew.

I would never find another woman like this on the planet.

She has been the best thing to ever happen in my life. Trust me, I am a handful to live with. Yes, I can be just as much of an idiot in real life, as the idiot I portray myself to be on this blog. Obviously, when we met, I was perfectly healthy. D’Aun would have no idea of the health nightmares that I would soon be facing after our marriage. She has stuck by my side all these years without wavering one bit.

Like I have hinted many times before on the blog, she is nothing like what I characterize her to be. She is not a yeller and a screamer, does not beat me, and is not secretly trying to kill me for my Life Insurance money. She is quiet, sweet, honest, has a great sense of humor, is very spiritual, and loves God and her family more than anything in the world.

Today is D’Aun’s birthday. She is one that does not handle birthdays well. To me, She is still the same cute and beautiful little gal I first spotted nearly 22 years ago.

Happy Birthday D’Aun!

I love you more than you will ever know.

Most of my family probably privately thought I was crazy for attempting to go to the Kid’s basketball game on Friday evening.

I know the Doctor would have probably frowned upon me venturing out only two days after he cleared me to gradually start walking by putting small amounts of weight on the foot.

It turned out to be a good news/bad news night out on the town.

First, the bad news..

The Kid had to be at the school one hour prior to the game. Factor in the drive to town, getting there an hour early, the hour-plus that it took to play the game, the half-hour wait for the kid to come out of the locker room, and then the drive home, I ended up being up for three and a half hours straight….about 2.5 hours longer than any previous stretch in the past month. Sitting up seems to be the worst on the foot, pain wise… After an hour, the foot gets real discolored and gets real uncomfortable.

The verdict: I was hurting pretty good by the time I finally got home and logic dictates that I should not have attempted this outing so early in my rehab.

But, in the spirit of “All things happen for a reason”….

I was MEANT to be at that game..

Tyler had the best basketball game of his life!

Just three days earlier, my family had been telling me that Tyler’s game this past Tuesday was the best game he had ever played, and I had missed it, just like I have missed all his games for the past month.

Earlier in the season, Tyler barely got to play in most games and went many games in a row without scoring.

And on Friday night, with me sitting in the first row of the bleachers, he went out and made the Tuesday game look like childs play.

He finished with 10 points for the game, not alot, but on the other hand, most of the freshmen games are pretty low scoring. Most impressive was the fact that our boys were down by 5 points in the final period, and then Tyler scored three baskets in a row to put his team up by 1 point.

The other team called a timeout, as all our fans and parents were yelling like crazy, and all Tyler’s teammates were slapping him on the back and high-fiving him.

It was one of the greatest sights I have seen in my life.

Given his lifelong physical issues, my son has always struggled with self-esteem problems. I would bet that Friday Night allowed Tyler to make the biggest jump in his self-esteem that he has had in his entire life.

After the game, multiple parents came up to us raving about how well Tyler had played.

In the locker room, his teammates voted him the MVP of the game, which we did hold on to win by 6 points over a Fort Worth High School.

It was one of the true feel good moments of his young life.

And I was there to see it.

Because I was meant to be there.

All the discomfort in my foot that I now have, was well worth it.

Way to go Tyler!

Words for every man to live by!

Kind of a down day today with not much new to report.

Last night, I was typing out the chapter of the book that deals with the legal deposition that my quack surgeon gave while I sat just feet away from him. This was the first time we learned all the intimate details of just how badly he screwed up my surgery and my care in the months after the surgery. Typing all that out really got my blood boiling and brought back a lot of bad memories.

So, today I am taking the day off and will just happily lounge on the bed and will watch Battlestar Galactica on DVD all day long…

Until this evening.

I have decided to try to attempt to venture back into the real world.

Tyler has a home basketball game tonight and I am going to try to watch the game. I’ll sit in the first row of bleachers so that I don’t have to do any climbing, but the fun part will be the 100 yard walk from the street to the actual gym.

With Tyler’s great game that he had on Tuesday, that I missed, I swore that I would try to make the rest of his home games if at all possible.

Wish me luck!

And, in other news…… We sold our rental house! The realtor just called and said that she is trying for a closing next Wednesday evening. The closing will be lightning fast because the buyer is paying 100% cash for the house and property. This was the home that we bought when we first moved to this area. It is a small 1,300sq ft home, but is on a heavily wooded acre of land about a mile outside of town. It is a beautiful piece of property, but I just cannot handle being a landlord with having to worry about the phone ringing every time a severe thunderstorm or ice storm rolls through the area. So, next week, it will be off our hands.

And finally, I got to use my amazingly limited and deprived intelligence this morning. I called the Physical Therapy place and they needed me to bring them some documents. With this not being an option, they asked if I had a fax. Like an idiot, I said yes. I do have a fax/copier/scanner/tanning bed/home MRI/light bright combo set-up sitting in my computer room, but I had never done anything with it above making photocopies of the cat’s butt that is always perched atop the machine.

It took me a full hour to figure out how to send the dang fax. I am pretty sure that I inadvertently sent them a scan of the cat’s butt at one point before I think I actually sent the correct papers through. I would call them to see if they got my papers but I am afraid that they may have already called the authorities and reported me for sending lewd hairy photos across the fax…

“It’s a cats butt officer!! honest!!!”

Alrighty then, time to get back to Battlestar Galactica…….

** I am usually not a Sci-Fi Geek……. actually, I watch “The Big Bang Theory” all the time and they are addicted to the show, so I figured I would check it out. It’s actually really good. *** If things don’t work out with my continued stalking of Jennifer Aniston, I may need to switch my attentions to BG star Tricia Helfer. (Above)

Post Surgery Update

Day 30

Having been told I could gradually start walking with ever-increasing weight on my bad foot, while wearing the bear trap sized boot, the idiot is awakened at 7am to find the wife “booting him up” before she leaves for work.

He dozes for awhile and then awakens to his usual deathly quiet house.

He realizes that he has been cleared to actually WALK for the first time in a month.

He climbs down off the bed, grabs the walker, and then places the boot on the floor, and starts slowly walking….making sure to place most of his weight on his good right side.

No problem.

Nothing snapped. Nothing broke. No crippling sharp pains. No sign of bone protruding from the side of the boot.

All systems GO.

He shuffles through the house, walking just a tad slower than DEATH itself, but eventually makes it into the kitchen…for the first time in 30 days!

He had made it to the dining room table on multiple occasions, but this was the first entry into the forbidden zone of the kitchen.

“Snack time!!”

He reaches for the fridge handle and starts to open the door…

The phone rings.

Crap!

He closes the door and shuffles the 5′ to the cordless phone perched on the nearby counter.

“Hello?”

“Idiot!! What the Hell are you doing?!!!”

(Uh oh….it’s the wife!)

“Huh?”

(Stall idiot..stall!)

“You heard me mister!! What the Hell are you doing?!!!”

“(Gulp) Nuttin….I’m just layin here watching TV….”

“(CENSORED)_____ Idiot!!! I know you are standing at the refrigerator!!!! The Doctor said you could gradually start walking…like to the bathroom….not all the way to the damn kitchen 12 hours after you see him!!!”

“How do you know I’m in the kitchen?”

“Good grief Idiot!! You’re the idiot and I’m the wife!! I have my ways!!”

(I glanced around the room and caught site of one of my idiot cats sitting on the counter, tail wagging slowly, as she grinned at me…… I would bet the farm that she was the one who ratted me out…. but who the heck taught her to dial the phone?……oh I see…maybe she used speed dial….yeah…that makes sense…. the idiot cat speed dialed the wife at work to rat on me sneaking into the kitchen….gosh…you know that sure sounds implausible when you type it out…..maybe she has a camera hidden in here somewhere…..but how would the cats work the camera?….oh well….anyway….)

“I’m not in the kitchen honest! I’m in bed…being a good idiot!….honest!!”

“Idiot!! I’m too busy to play idiot mind games with you!!! Get your butt back onto the bed or I will resort to getting real nasty!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about…I’m in my bed….you’re freaking out over nothing….”

Click!

(Whew! She hung up…… I wonder what the heck Plan B was?”

RING RING RING

(Crap…there she is again….)

“Hello?”

“Marky!!! Are you really out of your beddie poo?”

(Crap!!)

“Marky!! You really shouldn’t be up out of your bed dear….please go back and lay down…..how is your bottom doing? Are you still having the rash on your bottom? Do I need to come down and put some ointment on your bottom? How are your bowel movements? Have you been pooping regularly? Are your kidneys ok? Have you been peeing like a big boy?”

(Gah!!!!!)

“Dang Mom….I was hungry…. I just wanted a little snack….I can’t believe my wife called you to rat me out….”

“She didn’t call me dear….the pretty little black kitty called me….”

(Huh? What the…..I knew it!!!)

*******

And for your viewing pleasure, hopefully while you are not snacking….

Some photos of the foot…. before surgery…one week after surgery…and 30 days later….

I can actually see ALL my toes now!!

Day 29.

Third post-surgical visit.

The verdict: The Surgeon could not be more pleased with the progress of the foot. It looks “Great”. (His words) I am well ahead of schedule. This laying on the bed for a month has done wonders to speed up the healing process on the foot and ankle. Not being out of the bed, I have not had the opportunity to screw anything up.

Until now.

I can now start walking. (Though he nixed the idea of disco dancing for now…)

He just wants me to walk, with the boot on, and wants me to put ever-increasing weight on the foot as long as I do not have any high degree of pain. He says, if things go well, I should be able to be full weight-bearing, with the boot, by another week or so. He says that as soon as my balance has improved with the boot, I can ditch the crutches and walker and just use my cane to walk.

As long as I don’t feel a snapping sensation, followed by my ankle and foot collapsing into a useless bowl of jello, causing me to crash to the floor, I’ll be just fine….. (My words, not his…)

Needless to say, this foot and ankle, with virtually no circulation, that everyone was worried to death about it not healing after the surgery, has actually healed far faster than even the Doctor expected.

Can I get an Amen! from the congregation?

He is starting me on a month of Physical Therapy, which I will be doing 3X per week. I’ll call the PT place tomorrow to set up an initial appointment.

You know what that means!

Yep, I’ll get to wear a little temporary name tag every day at the PT place

I think I will be ” HI! My name is Hugh Jass” on the first visit….

He will see me back in his office on Feb 8th, three weeks from now.

Best news yet…… when I see him in three weeks, if things are going well with therapy, and the foot still looks good……. we will talk about my climbing back onto my stationary bike….and then I can start the Tour of Europe 2012!

So, you know what this means…..

My “vacation” is soon to be over…

Before you know it, the wife and kid will come busting through the door early in the evening and will once again be screaming “OK Idiot!! Where’s our dinner!!”

I’ll be back to doing all the cooking…

All the laundry….

The dishes…

Paying the bills….

and before you know it, the wife will be screaming…. “Hey Idiot! That yard ain’t gonna mow itself!!”

Who would have thought that going back to being a househusband would actually sound so good.

Later today, I’ll be heading back to see the Surgeon for my third follow-up since my surgery. I am praying that he finally lets me start to walk with some partial weight bearing on the leg. This being trapped on the bed for most of the day got real old weeks ago. Last night, my son played the High School Basketball game of his life, and I missed it as I was stuck home alone as usual. The little guy started the game, whereas he usually comes off the bench, he played about 90% of the whole game, and he ended up scoring about 25% of the teams points. It was his proudest athletic moment of his young life, and I missed it!! Arrrrggggg!!! I need to get back to being able to walk so that I can get back to his games!! I’ll blog about the meeting with the Doctor in the morning unless there is some earth-shattering news that I just can’t wait that long to post.

An update on my book.

What an exhilarating and maddening process this book has become!

I now have the rough version of an introduction and the first twelve chapters typed up and saved.

Initially, I just dove in and started writing my story, as I knew it to be true, using all real names, locations, dates, etc. In doing research on memoirs, I see I have to tread a very fine line when dealing with actual living people. There are all kinds of legal and privacy concerns that I had never considered, no matter how guilty I know the intended targets in my book to be.

Although I have yet to talk to them directly, I fully expect that all my family members will have no problems with my using their real names in the book. In the early stages of my book, the true hero of my story is my Family Practice Doctor who was the first to recognize that the diagnosis I had been given after my disabling back surgery was a total sham. This man sent me to a specialist who proved the diagnosis was a sham, and then this Family Practice Doc of mine actually called a high-powered attorney and got him to take my case.

I have already contacted that Doctor and got approval to use his real name. I then resigned myself to the fact that I would need to come up with fictional names for all the Doctor’s involved in the rest of my book. No problem. In my usual manner, I came up with goofy names like “Dr. Quack” and “Dr. Clueless” to use, at least on a temporary basis, until I get the book finished.

Now, in reading further about memoirs, I find that just using the real name of the hero Doctor, may be enough for people to piece the puzzle together and figure out what the real names for the bad guys are.

So, I read that it is suggested that I make up fictional names of not only the main players in my book, but also make up fictional locations for where these events happened, where I lived, where I worked, etc.

Now, I’m looking at my name being the only REAL name used in the majority of the book….

At least in the chapters I have written thus far.

The main thing is that I want to get my story out there….

I was kind of hoping to be able to put a mug shot of my Spinal Surgeon, smiling in his orange prison jumpsuit, on the back pages of the book, but it looks like that won’t legally be possible…

Sigh…

It looks like I will be facing similar hurdles when I get further along in the book and I end up in the chapters directly related to this blog.

I’ll probably be contacting many of you to inquire about using your real names or blog names in the book.

If you wish to protect your privacy, which is totally understandable, I’ll happily work with you to come up with a fictional name for you, or if you wish, I can just leave you out altogether.

I have found the book writing process to be real similar what I experienced back when I was a runner, and later in life, when I started really riding that stationary bike.

With the running and biking, I initially started out real slow and it was a chore to force myself to run or bike each day. At some point, something internally just clicked, and things really took off. Now, I was running every day, or biking every day, and was always looking to run or bike ever faster or further.

When I first started the book, it was maddeningly slow trying to get things typed out into words. I think the short 3 page introduction took me about 2 weeks to write.

Then, something just clicked.

Now, I have to force myself to stop at one chapter with each sitting. If I had a foley catheter and an unlimited supply of IV Skittles and Chocolate, I could probably type out the rough version of the whole darn book within a week.

I am going to continue to try for a chapter every day or two.

My software outline program is showing me that I will have about 30 chapters in the book once I am done converting my notes into actual chapters.

After the rough shell of a book is complete, I will go back and will start cleaning up and beefing up each chapter individually.

Then, I still need to figure out what to do about illustrations or photographs, and then there is that pesky little annoyance of an actual title for the book.

A great blog friend, familiar with the publishing industry, assures me that the title will magically appear to me at some point during the writing process.

I’m still waiting for that little light to click on in my head.

“The Idiot writes a Book” just doesn’t seem like it would fit in on the tables at Barnes and Noble….

*** This is a re-post of a posting I did way back in January of 2006 on my now-defunct original blog. I had only been blogging for about two weeks, but you can see that the “unique” (warped and damn weird) sense of humor has always been there. ***

A large commercial airliner is in trouble. It’s engines have both stalled and the aircraft is now gliding through the skies and losing precious altitude while flying 30,000 ft above the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

Inside, terrified passengers are scrambling to put on their life jackets, not being aware of the fact that there has never been a successful water landing of a commercial airliner in modern history. (Until Sully Sullenberger would render that point moot years later)

Inside the plane, a terrified four year old boy clenches his mother’s arm and asks ” will we drown in the water mommy?” Is this a reasonable fear for a four year old child to have? What if he asked “Mommy will the sharks eat us?” Again, is this a logical fear to have?

My Mother-in-Law would say they both are.

What if the situation is changed ever so slightly. Let’s say the plane is flying over the Sahara desert and the engines go out causing the plane to glide towards the barren sand hundreds of miles from civilization. In the falling plane is a 40 yr old man who grabs the arm of his mortified wife and asks “will the snakes eat us?”
Is this a logical fear?

I sure hope so, because this is me.

If I was on that plane, falling thousands of feet from the heavens towards what is sure to be a horrific and fiery collision with the desert below, the only thing on my mind would be “if I survive….will the snakes eat me?”

As you can see, I have a somewhat irrational fear of snakes.

I hate snakes.

Just typing the word makes me scan the floor underneath my computer desk…..just in case.

I see no useful purpose for their existence on earth other than to scare the living daylights out of me.

I am forty years old. To this day, I hate driving across a dead snake flattened on the highway. I know for sure that the twisted little thing is probably just playing dead and will wrap itself around my tires as I drive over it, only to uncoil itself and attack me when the car comes to a stop and I’m getting out of it.

Come on now, you all have that same fear don’t you?

I could be snowshoeing across the barren frozen arctic wastelands near the North Pole….and I would be nervously scanning the snow around me for any signs of snakes waiting to strike me.

You might think I’m a little crazy, that my dice are missing a few dots, that my elevator doesn’t quite go all the way to the top, and that my wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

I am not crazy.

I once went outside my front door in Chillicothe to check on the mail to discover a snake that had to be 50ft long stretched across most of my front yard.

I screamed like a girl, ran into the house, slammed the front door behind me, and did what every rational man in his mid-30′s would have done…..

I called my Mommy and Daddy!

Of course, when I called them, I whispered in a very low voice, because I wasn’t crazy….I didn’t want the snake to HEAR me!

My father has no fear of snakes but somehow Mother Nature did not see fit to pass that trait on to me.

After they quit laughing for a period of 10 minutes or so, the parents instructed me to get a garden hose and said to try squirting the monster with water to see if it would slither away. I’m not a total wimp when it comes to these matters so I got the hose from the backyard and prepared to blast the daylights out of the beast. It took me forever to get the end of the hose connected to the sink faucet in the master bathroom but I finally got it hooked up and then stretched the hose across the bathroom, out into the master bedroom, across the bed, and I strategically placed the nozzle right up against the screen of the now opened window and proceeded to blast away.

Yes, I was too much of a woos to go outside!

Water sprayed against the screen and proceeded to instantly soak everything in the bedroom but a little bit of water did make it outside and onto the intended serpentine target.

I dried off my face as best I could and peeked outside through the window. The beast still lay in the yard, unfazed, and had not moved an inch.

This was getting serious. If the snake did not move, surely I would have to somehow move everything and everyone out of the house quickly. There was no way we could share the property with this thing… Just then the loving, fearless little wife arrives home from school and sees this monstrous thing lying in her yard.

Much to my horror, she walks over, picks up the beast by the tail, notices me cowering in the nearby window, and says ” did you see this dead baby garter snake in the yard?”

I was relieved. Surely the dreaded garter snake had to be the most deadly of the species and much to my relief, this one was dead.

Curiously in it’s death (by drowning I’m sure) the beast had shrunk from it’s original 50 ft length to the amazing size of being only 13 inches long when my wife discovered it’s body. Isn’t mother nature a mystery?

I once ran over a snake with my riding lawn mower in my own back yard. I was puttering along minding my own business when I saw a large coiled snake disappear directly under the front of the mower. Within a split second I threw both feet up in the air and let out a loud scream as the mower inflicted a direct hit on the huge creature.

To my shock and horror, the dual spinning blades of the mower picked up the snake and ejected it straight out to the side of the mower without chopping so much as inch off the snakes body. It landed about 5 feet away and coiled back up and began to rattle loudly, obviously mad that I had just ran it over.

I can drive across a toy car buried in the grass and the mower will chop it into a thousand pieces. I drive across a huge coiled snake, the thing makes it through unscathed. Go figure.

Well anyway, here I am, both legs still sticking up in the air, again squealing like a girl as I frantically try to steer the mower as far away from the snake as possible. To give the snake ample time to calm down and exit the area, I didn’t finish mowing the yard for about 6 months.

Sure enough, he was gone. Good planning on my part. Now, to avoid this type of situation happening again I have come up with a unique solution. I hired a mechanic to attach the lawn mowing attachments to the bottom of my Ford Expedition SUV. Now, whenever I need to mow the lawn, I do so in air-conditioned, stereo equipped, totally enclosed, snake-proof comfort.

It pays to plan in advance. Now, I have no fears of mowing the lawn, until the crafty beasts discover a way to penetrate the Expeditions defenses and can get into the car and can drag me kicking and screaming from the vehicle.

In case that does ever happen, I keep a cyanide pill in the glove compartment so that the Snakes cannot take me alive.

It pays to be prepared.

It’s now been a month since the surgery and the loving dynamic here in the Idiot household has taken on some definite changes.

Just prior to the surgery, I reminded my loving wife that she was going to be tasked with doing and maintaining virtually EVERYTHING within the household while I was laid up. Cooking, cleaning, routine maintenance, shopping, running the kid back and forth to practice, etc……was all going to be piled onto my wife’s usual schedule of working 60 hours a week at her job.

Her reaction:

“No problem, I can do it…. do you not think I can do it? I’m a lot stronger than you give me credit for….. I’ll be just fine….. you just worry about healing that foot and leave everything else to me…”

Now, 1 month later:

“I Swear idiot!!! You sooooooooo owe me for this nightmare!!! big time!!! If you don’t get cleared to get back on that foot so that you can start pulling your fair share around here…. I WILL cut that foot off and will beat you and your Doctor to death with it!!!”

One month ago, the post-surgical idiot is laying on the bed with his bad leg elevated.

“Come on Idiot! Straighten that foot out!!… center it on that pillow! I don’t care how uncomfortable it is!! You want it to heal don’t you?!!! Lay still for goodness sakes!!! Quit trying to strain that foot!! Just leave it on the pillow and don’t move a muscle!!!”

Now, 1 month later:

“Good Grief Idiot!!! Are ya trying to block my view of the TV on purpose?!!!! Move that thing over!! Better yet, why don’t you go out and lay on the couch!! Go block the damn cats view of the living room TV!! Just move that thing out of the way so I can see Desperate Housewives!!”

One month ago, the Idiot is slowly hopping and shuffling along from the bed to the bathroom.

“Be careful Idiot! Take your time! Watch where you are going! Did I leave you a clear enough path? Quit trying to move so fast!! Watch your foot!! Be careful!!!”

Now, 1 month later:

“For the love of God why are you moving so slow????? I can’t see the TV!!!!! Get a move on!!!! (Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak)…..AAArrrgggg!!!! Slow down Idiot!!! All that squeaking is drowning out the TV!!!! Why do you always have to go to the bathroom during MY shows?????”

One month ago, it would be approaching dinnertime.

“OK Idiot, what would you like me to fix you for dinner today? Whatever you want, just tell me…..Do you want chicken? Steak? Pork Chops? I’m just here to take care of you and will fix you whatever your heart desires….”

Now, 1 month later:

“You heard me Idiot!! Grubs or sticks!! Take yer pick!! That’s all I’m in the mood to fix today!! Grubs or sticks!! And if you keep griping, I’m just gonna toss another bag of Saltine Crackers onto the bed and you can eat crackers YET AGAIN!!”

One month ago, just after surgery, it was found that the idiot had to bathe while seated on a stool in front of the bathroom sink.

“Oh you poor man…. Here…let’s try to get you as clean as possible….. I know this is rough…..it will be OK…. we can still get you clean……I sure wish we had one of those walk-in tubs that you see on TV…”

Now, 1 month later:

“Quit dripping on my bathroom floor!!! Good grief Idiot!!! ya would think that you would know how to bathe yourself a freaking month later!! And OH MY GOD!!! Did you get any water INTO the sink???!!!!!!! Look at this counter top!!! It’s flooded!!!! You are no better than trying to bathe a toddler in the damn sink!!!”

And finally, there was the issue of this blog…. Whereas a month ago…

“No Idiot, you cannot take time off from your blog! You need to keep writing! You will go crazy without writing. Things are going to be rough enough for you with your foot, so you need the blog and the support of all your little friends to take your mind off things…”

And now, 1 month later:

“Dear Idiot…I see you have been busy writing about ME again on your blog…… Just so you know, when you are cleared to start walking and have been fitted with your new brace….I’m still debating on whether or not I am going to cram it far up into your nether regions or if I will beat you to death with it….”

Idiot’s post-surgery log.

Day 26.

Addiction.

A very serious issue for those battling serious health issues.

Certain substances are wonderful for dulling the daily pains of a long recovery, but this sometimes comes at the very serious outcome of addiction.

After my surgery, my care providers made sure to provide me with the assistance I would need to get through the first few painful weeks of recovery.

Those weeks have passed. It has now been nearly 4 weeks since surgery. My supplies are all but gone, yet the intense cravings continue.

I am ashamed at how low I have sunk.

I asked my Daughter to stop on her way home from the city, begging her to “hook me up”, telling her that money was no option.

I found myself offering cash to my young son, a boy fighting his own health issues, but a boy that I found still had some of the “good stuff” in his possession.

Yes, as you have guessed, I have ran out of chocolate.

I can’t take it anymore! I need chocolate!!

The family stocked me up on all kinds of Christmas-related chocolate items right after my surgery, but my supplies have now ran dry…

The horror!

I have…gag….resorted to eating….a ….gag…granola bar…for a snack!

Gah!!

Someone shoot me!!

Then, my son walks in with a mint-condition, unopened, solid milk chocolate Christmas Tree that he got in his stocking at Christmas.

I offered him $3 cash for it.

He laughed.

A one-sided bidding war broke out.

By the time my wife entered the scene, I was up to offering $75.50 for the tiny chocolate tree.

The wife sent the boy and the tree from the room, yelling at me to calm down and eat another granola bar.

I called my daughter who is out shopping. I begged her to stop at the grocery store on the way home. Chocolate…I need chocolate…. I don’t care what it is…as long as it is made of chocolate.

Right now, I would eat a greasy pork sandwich, rolled in a dirty ashtray, eaten in front of a warm fan, as long as it had a tiny bit of chocolate deep inside it somewhere.

I have to go beat my son senseless with my walker now…

He is standing in the bedroom doorway….nibbling on his chocolate tree….

mocking me…

Saturday morning.

Idiot household.

The wife is off in distant parts of the house doing laundry and dishes.

The kid is still asleep.

Though he had been up for hours, and had just eaten breakfast, the wife noticed that the Idiot’s area of the house was TOO quiet for her liking….

She went off to investigate.

Twenty seconds later, a loud scream filled the house.

“OH MY GOD!!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!!!! YOU CAN’T BE DOING THAT!!! STOP THAT!!!! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!!! NO!! I DON’T CARE HOW GOOD IT FEELS!!! STOP IT!!!!”

But there was no stopping the idiot. He had not been able to do it for weeks, and he now had decided to do it, and damnit, it felt damn good…… so he went on happily doing it…

Yes friends, for the first time in 25 long days, the idiot was able to get into the shower.

And damn it felt good!!

It was a logistical nightmare trying to get into my shower on one leg, with my walker, but with the aide of the walker and a shower seat that we have, I made it.

And I spent 20 glorious minutes happily drowning my self in hot, soapy water.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I have not bathed in 25 days, but sitting naked on a stool in the bathroom while you wash yourself with soapy washcloths does not come anywhere close to the pleasure of having a real shower.

I took off the bandage before trying to squirm and hop into the shower and I think the foot looks pretty darn good. It’s still noticeably swollen and has the visible shark attack scars in four different areas, but there is no sign whatsoever of any infection.

After my glorious shower, I hopped in here to my own computer, while happily telling the wife that I was now “going to work”…… It’s time to dive back into the next chapter of the book I am writing.

So, today is going to be a great day!

On another note, the two millionth view contest looks like it is going to come down to sometime in late February if my current pace holds up.

So…… that means that the following readers are sitting pretty good right now…

John Erickson
Taylor
Kathy McCullough
Trask Ave

If things slow down just a tad…

Jackie &
Christine M. Grote

Will come into the picture….. both with picks in early March.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Time for an update on my progress.

Day 24. Hard to believe that more than 3 weeks has already passed, though the wife will tell you that it feels like it has been 3 months.

I have started resting the foot on the floor if I am standing with the walker or am seated in a chair.

The Doc says just to put 10-20lbs of weight on the foot as long as there is no pain.

The foot itself is still bandaged, but the visible areas of the foot look great, as long as I am laying down. When I stand or sit up, the foot quickly turns a dark red and purple color. The circulation has always been bad in that foot, but the quickness with which the foot goes downhill has us a little concerned. I’ll bring it up again with the Doc on Wednesday though he was not real concerned about it on my last visit.

I spend most of the day without wearing the brace. Without the brace, the foot feels alright elevated on a pillow, but becomes real uncomfortable if I try to lay my legs on the bed without the support of the pillows. The foot has a near constant burning type sensation that drives me insane all day and all night long. I don’t know if it is just the healing tendons that are burning, or what, but I have privately began to worry that this may be some new joyful attribute of my pre-existing nerve damage in that foot. Whatever the reason, the burning sensation in the foot is truly driving me mad. I cannot get comfortable and am getting very little sleep. My constant flip-flopping all night long is driving the wife crazy. She is working 60 hours a week and is doing all of the home chores and the last thing she needs is sleepless nights because I cannot get comfortable.

My pain levels are way down. I pretty much use OTC pain meds now and very rarely have to tap into the “hard stuff”. The pain meds have no effect on the burning sensation, which really leads me to believe it is nerve pain versus pain from the tendons.

I see the Doc on Wednesday and am hoping he will set me up with Physical Therapy starting pretty soon. I am hoping he will let me start pedaling on the stationary bike sometime in the coming weeks. I really miss the bike.

On the book front, I am now typing out chapter five during the brief periods I can get to my computer. It is slow going, but at least it’s going.

Ya’ll have a great weekend.

The following story is true.

The details below can be found in various Police Records and through direct interviewing of numerous witnesses involved with the case.

The suspect in this case is a divorced 42yr old woman currently residing in Southern California. Records indicate her profession as “Idiophile”.

The victim in this case is a 46yr old disabled married man currently residing in rural North Texas.

Records show that he is legally disabled, though he claims his profession to be “writer”, though he has no published works to his credit to date.

On 9 Jan, 2012 the suspect traveled via private aircraft from Torrance, CA to Fort Worth, TX.

On 10 Jan, 2012 the victim in the case was home alone, convalescing from a recent surgery. At approx 10am local time, the victim said that his doorbell was repeatedly activated.

The Victim made his way through the home with the aid of a walker and answered the door.

It was the suspect standing outside the door.

The victim, who goes by the online alias “The Idiot”, opened the door clad only in a pair of Superhero-themed undergarments. He refuses to acknowledge which character he was wearing at the time, but forensics experts would later recover a tattered pair of “Scooby Doo” briefs during the subsequent investigation that followed this incident.

The victim says that he opened the door and that the sight of his pale crippled body clad only in a skintight patch of cartoon character fabric immediately sent the suspect into a lust-filled hormone-filled psychotic rage that quickly had the suspect chasing the victim throughout his home.

The victim claims he repeatedly yelled “NO!! NOT AGAIN!!!” as he ran for his life.

Moving quickly through his home with the aid of his walker, the victim tipped over numerous pieces of furniture in an attempt to slow down the pursuing lust-filled suspect.

The victim states that he successfully barricaded himself in his walk-in closet where he hunkered down in the darkness as the suspect stood outside the locked closet door, constantly professing her lifelong obsession and infatuations with the victim.

The suspect made it known that she had recently come to the conclusion that her sole purpose in life was to procreate with, and bear the children of the suspect.

Repeated loud screams by both the victim and the suspect were heard by neighbors who then contacted local Police via 911.

Officers responding to the disturbance reported finding the scantily-clad suspect, now clad in used “Toy Story” Underoos that she had taken from a dirty clothes hamper, in the act of trying to gain access to the locked closet with a large chainsaw that she had taken from the victim’s garage.

The female suspect was tasered and taken into custody.

Interviews with the victim would later show that the suspect had been infatuated with, and had been stalking the victim for the last 5 years. Although involved in a number of high-profile public relationships, the suspect had long indicated that her one true love in life, was in fact, the victim.

Records indicate the suspect has been apprehended on 6 separate occasions in recent years, all while trying to achieve physical contact with the victim.

In 2007, authorities in California searched the suspect’s residence and made a startling discovery in her basement. The room had photocopied sheets of approx. 1,000 blog posts authored by the victim taped to the walls of the small room. Seventy-seven photographs of the victim and his family were also adorning the walls. A Quasi-religious Altar had been constructed in one corner, surrounded by hundreds of candles, the skeletal remains of various small animals, with the centerpiece being what appeared to be a long-haired female voodoo doll with a striking resemblance to the victim’s wife. The voodoo wife doll had suffered obvious burning and stabbings, and when discovered, had a small rope around it’s neck.

The suspect was later released on bail and has since returned to California pending trial in this case.

This post was done in response to a recent commenter who indicated that she was tired of reading of posts related to bowel and bladder functions and then she indicated that I should do a post on something else…like say…what Jennifer Aniston has been up to lately….

Yes, as is indicated in this very true report, Jennifer Aniston is still stalking me, and has, in fact, tried to kidnap and carnally assault me in her continuing quest to bear my spawn.

It’s rough being the idiot.

Cowering in a dark locked closet as a scantily-clad Hollywood starlet tries to make me into her sensual boy toy.

Just as she has been doing for years….

I’m just glad I got the Police reports to prove it, cause otherwise the wife would never believe me.

D’aun and I met in June of 1990 in Houston, where we both were working for Continental Airlines at the time.

I was recently divorced with my two young children living with my ex-wife in Indiana.

D’aun and I got married in 1991. We immediately moved to Utah when Continental opened a new office in Salt Lake City.

Six months after we arrived in Utah, the ex-wife showed up on a bus with my two kids. She immediately turned around and went back to Indiana, leaving the kids with D’Aun and I.

Why?

Her new husband did not like kids and gave her a “them or me” ultimatum. She chose the husband.

D’Aun now became an instant Mother to two young kids she had only met once before that night in Utah.

We went to court and I was awarded custody of the kids.

Later, the ex-wife’s parental rights were terminated, and D’Aun immediately adopted both children. Their birth certificates have listed D’Aun as their mother ever since.

D’Aun had always dreamed of having children and now she was Mother to my two children. She still dreamed of giving birth to children that we would have together.

We tried to have a child for quite awhile but were not having success.

In 1996, D’Aun finally got pregnant.

A routine sonogram showed a major problem.

The Doctor told us that the baby had a serious case of Cleft Lip and Palate. There was also a chance that the baby had other serious birth defects that might result in it having no quality of life whatsoever.

We were offered the chance to terminate the pregnancy. It was not even discussed.

Midway through the pregnancy, D’Aun started leaking amniotic fluid. She was hospitalized. We almost lost the baby. She was sent home on strict bedrest.

In January of 1997, our baby was born. Of course, that was Tyler, known to you as “The kid”. He was born 15 years ago tonight.

His Cleft Lip and Palate was very severe. He spent the first week of his life in Intensive Care.

He had his first surgery at 3 months old.

The only way to feed him as a baby was with a syringe and rubber tubing.

He went through numerous surgeries as a baby.

Tyler was always a little trooper through all of his numerous hospital visits.

The staff always fell in love with him and his happy spirit, as the surgeries always seemed to be rougher on the rest of the family than on the little guy himself.

When he was still young, Tyler’s care was transferred to The International Craniofacial Institute in Dallas, the world’s leading Cleft Lip/Palate group. His new Doctor was a Pioneering Plastic Surgeon, Dr. Kenneth Salyer, who was world renowned for successfully separating a pair of Egyptian conjoined twins that were joined at the head.

Tyler has been with that group for most of his life.

Sadly, Tyler has endured a lifetime of taunts and name-calling at the hands of ignorant classmates that don’t have a clue of what he has endured his whole life.

(I don’t put his baby pics on here because he is still real sensitive about his appearance before he had his major surgeries. He had the worst type of bilateral cleft lip and palate you can have. The upper gum and lip tissue on his upper mouth were actually rolled outward and were attached to the tip of his nose when he was born. From each nostril down to his mouth was completely open. He had no palate whatsoever and had to have a small plate put in his mouth just to allow us to feed him through a syringe without him choking. He went in to his first surgery with all these visible issues and came out with the face of an angel. You can see the results of the surgeries in the photos and can see that they did a marvelous job on him over the years)

He still soldiers on with very little griping and complaining about his physical condition.

Today, you would only be able to see just subtle outward signs of the physical problems that Tyler has battled his whole life. His Medical team is working to have him 100% recovered by the time he graduates from High School.

He still needs a few more surgeries in the coming years, and he currently has a very expensive amount of hardware in his mouth working on expanding his jaws, but to all outward appearances, he is just a normal teenager.

And today, the little fart is now 15yrs old.

As much as kid and ridicule him on the blog, I wouldn’t trade the little guy for the world…

Though the little guy is now 5’8″ and gaining on me fast…

Happy Birthday son!

We love ya!

The Idiot’s Post-Surgery Log

Day 21

Three weeks!…..96% of which has been spent in bed.

Time for a serious post.

The wife has remarked I have wasted a golden opportunity in this three weeks, an opportunity to seriously write about the the very real physical and emotional aspects of undergoing such a potentially life-changing surgery and recovery.

Instead, in my usual idiotic fashion, I have taken the low road and have instead taken this time to blog about flatulence, Superhero Underoos. and worst of all, Poop.

So, in that light, I will switch gears today and will focus on a truly serious subject that has gone unacknowledged up until this point.

Peeing.

Yes, peeing.

Last night, it was dinner time. I was in my “Auxiliary Office” (Bathroom). The kid was dispatched to the bedroom to tell me it was time for dinner. Seeing the empty bed with the huge overweight Walrus indentation in the bedding, the kid went instead to the bathroom door and knocked.

I told him I would be out in a minute.

He asked what I was doing.

I told him that I was peeing.

He said it did not sound like I was peeing.

I asked him what the heck peeing was supposed to sound like.

He said peeing was supposed to sound like peeing……and that there were no active peeing noises coming through the door.

I told him that he could not hear anything because I was sitting down…… while peeing.

I heard his hysterical laughter as it left the door, went out through the bedroom, and then made its way across the house to the dining room.

A few minutes later, I had made my way out to the kitchen table and plopped myself down in my chair.

The kid went right to work on me…

“Dude! You pee like a girl!”

I told him that I do not pee like a girl….. but instead that I had to be seated….due to my current physical issues related to my surgery…

“But Dude! Yer still peeing like a girl!”

I put down my fork and calmly explained the situation to him. At this current time, with only having one leg to stand on, I cannot stand up and pee like a dude! With having my one good leg being completely numb (asleep), I need to have both hands on the walker when standing up in order to maintain my balance. This does not leave a free hand with which to pee like a dude until I can again put my weight on both feet.

The kid laughed.

He made great points to indicate that not only could he pee while standing on one leg, but that he could pee, while juggling three balls with his free hand, while hopping up and down, yodeling, while balancing a large stack of plates on his head.

I gave him a sarcastic laugh and told him that he had no earthly clue just how hard it was and that if was in my shoes, he would drown himself while trying to successfully pee while standing up like a dude.

The wife finished putting the last items of food on the table, sat down, and then asked what us boys were talking about.

“Dad pees like a girl…..”

The wife let out a long sigh. After three long weeks, her dinnertime conversation had evolved all the way from farting, underoos, and poop……up to the stimulating intellectual levels of Peeing…..

We all agreed to talk about other matters while eating.

Before I knew it, the kid was done and had gone into the living room.

The wife and I talked for a few minutes and then I glanced across the room where I caught sight of the kid sitting on the living room floor watching TV.

He was sitting cross-legged “Indian Style”.

Uh oh.

*** People have often asked me what having numb legs feels like. I tell them that the closest approximation I can give is this…. Sit on the floor with your legs crossed for as long as it takes until both your legs are asleep. Now, try to stand up. It’s not easy. Your legs will feel like huge sleeping logs. You could kick the wall as hard as you could and would feel little or no pain…..until your leg starts waking up….then it will hurt like Hell. Well, I have been at sleeping log stage since 1999, still waiting for the legs to wake up. ***

I ask the wife is she has plenty of cleaning supplies on hand.

She asks “Why?”

I tell her that she is gonna need them real quick.

I watch as the kid slowly struggles to his feet…….. his numb and sleeping feet…… and then…

he heads off into his bathroom.

The wife sees me staring down the hall and asks me what is going on.

“Wait for it……. Wait for it…….. Wait for it…….”

The house is filled with the sound of someone spraying a garden hose, inside, up against a wall, the inside of a door, carpeting,……..

“Gah!! Crash! Splat…pop pop pop…crunch…thump!!”

The wife looked at me.

“What the heck was that?”

Before putting another fork full of food into my mouth, I replied to her…

“That would be our idiot son…..trying to pee while standing up on one numb leg….peeing all over everything in eyesight in the process…losing his balance….falling through the shower curtain and into his tub….”

And with that, I am pretty confident of one thing.

The kid will never make fun of my temporary girlie peeing habits EVER again.

Dinner together at the dining room table.

An event that the family and I will NEVER look at the same way again.

An event that very well may send me back into therapy.

It all started out innocent enough….

“Idiot…do you wanna try eating at the table with the rest of the family?”

Was the harmless question first spoken by my wife.

Tired of eating in bed with the inevitable aftermath of my being forced to sleep in a salad-bar worthy collection of food particles and crumbs….

And tired of being perched on the end of the couch with my leg being elevated on an ottoman so high that my body is reclined on the couch to the extent that I look like a Space Shuttle Astronaut strapped in and awaiting blast-off….

I decide to shuffle and hop out into the dining room to attempt to actually eat an upright meal with my family.

Right now, the salad bar bed and space shuttle blast-off couch are looking pretty damn good after the nightmare that quickly unfolded.

I got to the the table easy enough.

I maneuvered into place and then used the table and walker to gently lower myself down into my chair at the head of the table. The wife was kind enough to place a large throw pillow on the floor at my feet so that my leg would not be resting on the floor.

Without my leg being fully elevated, the foot started to feel pretty uncomfortable rather quickly. I decided I would eat fast and then shuffle back to bed.

Three minutes into the meal, as Tyler was happily reliving all the highlights of his latest Basketball game that I had missed, I was just shoveling a fork full of Shrimp Alfredo into my mouth when I was hit with the most excruciating pain I had felt in years…

“AAAAAARRGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!! GAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

(I can’t print what I actually yelled, suffice it say it was a little harder edged than Arg! and Gah!)

I leaned down and peered under the table, fully expecting to see a Rabid hyena happily chewing away on my surgically repaired foot.

No hyena……. just my idiot spawn of a son happily KICKING my wounded foot as he recounted his basketball exploits…..

“Hey Junior!!! That’s my Freaking Foot your kicking!!!!”

The kid peered under the table.

“Sorry pops…I thought that was the table leg….. your foot is spilling over into my area ya know….”

I was in no mood to argue with the moronic child so I decided to cut my meal short….. this little trip to the table was turning out to be a very bad idea….

Next, we tried to get me up with just using the one good leg.

No easy feat when you consider how low my dining room chairs are and the fact that they have no armrests.

Before you knew it, I had the wife in front of me with her arms around my waist, the kid on my right pulling up my right armpit, the daughter on my left tugging at my left armpit, and had both parents yelling out verbal encouragement from across the kitchen…..as my dear parents had chosen that very moment to drop in for a surprise visit.

The wife took charge.

“OK Everybody….on three!!! ONE!! TWO!! THREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!”

The room was filled with loud groans, grunts, snorts, and colorful obscenities as the group used all their might to try to stand the Idiot Whale back up onto his one good flipper….

Then, to add a little color to the nightmare, it happened…….

“TTTTHHHHHHHHHFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!”

And NO, that sound did NOT come from my mouth……

One little side effect of using every ounce of your physical strength to try to pull yourself up, just using your upper body strength, is an apparent and total lack of sphincter control.

Within seconds, I was standing upright, surrounded by gasping and choking family attendants, innocent souls just trying to help their injured loved one, but now victims of a toxic cloud that had quickly engulfed half the room….

“IT WAS THE ALFREDO!!! IT WAS THE ALFREDO!!!!”

Was the best I could muster as an apology…..

I started shuffling and hopping away in shame, letting my walker lead me back to the safety of my bed.

This kitchen table experiment had turned into a total nightmare. A surgically repaired foot beaten to a pulp by a clueless teenager and then having the humiliation of a toxic flatulence episode in front of the entire family.

Someone please shoot me.

I got about 10 feet across the floor before my right walker leg became entangled in some object on the floor…

I looked down.

There was a pair of my underwear entangled around the end of one leg of the walker.

“What the…..????”

I wondered to myself how a stray pair of my underwear could have found their way out into the dining room….

And then I noticed…

Certain body appendages that are not supposed to be visible when shuffling across the floor of your living room….

“Gahh!!!!!!!”

Yep, my trusty underoos…… stretched out of shape after weeks of being pulled on and off over braces and bandages….. had taken a nose dive and were now entwined around my ankle and walker….

I whipped my head around to look at the family….

All were frozen in horror/shock…..mouths hanging open….unable to speak…

All except the kid, who was busily trying to get his cell phone camera to work…..

I turned my head back around and lowered my chin….

This truly had to be the worst dinner ever.

And then, just when I thought it could not get any worse….

The Alfredo gasses made another noisy return…

An unmuffled return not lessened by the bounds and noise absorption qualities of a worthless pair of “Aquaman” Underoos….

I hate dinner!

I may very well never eat dinner again!!

Ever!!

Post surgery log: Day 19

I just can’t do it.

After weeks of trying and trying until I am blue in the face, I still can’t figure it out.

The wife is at the end of her rope as far as her limited patience is concerned.

She sits and watches me fumble and grumble, trying in vain to figure it out, but I always fail, leaving the wife to have to step in and show me how to do it correctly for the umpteenth time in recent weeks.

“Look Idiot! This is not rocket science! Stick your finger under here….pull this part up…. unwrap it slowly from this direction….and then when it is loose, you just gently twist and pull and it will come right off!…..Good grief….. I know you’ve been laid up and all for weeks now, but that means you have had plenty of time to figure this out on your own….. what would you do if I was not at home during any time of the day or night? You gotta be able to do this for yourself!”

I grit my teeth, wriggle myself into a little better position on the bed, and then try again….

I use every ounce of strength in my crippled body…..but cannot get it to budge in the slightest….

I glance over at the wife, do my patented lower lip quiver and bat my puppy dog eyes at her….

“Pleeeeeeeaaaassssseeeeeeee……”

Mortally wounded by the lip quiver and puppy dog eyes…..she grabs the contraption out of my hands and starts demonstrating the maneuver for about the 10th time in the past few weeks.

“Look Idiot! Peel….unwrap….twist…pull…..BINGO!!!….. that’s it! That’s all there is to it!! Good Grief…. a toddler could do this with their eyes closed!!”

And with that, the wife reached across the bed and handed me..

The plastic Christmas Candy Cane full of Hershey’s Kisses that I, for the life of me, can never gain access to.

The wife had hit the Dollar Store after Christmas and had stocked up on these candy-filled Candy Canes, yet weeks later, I still am too idiotic and uncoordinated to be able to successfully peel back the paper, twist the end of the cane, pull off the end of the cane, and then successfully dump the kisses out onto the bed.

But, if there’s one thing I have….it’s time.

I’ll master it.

Someday.

Now, if you will excuse me…

“HONEY!!!! Can you come open my Coke can for me?……Pleeeaaasssseeeeeeeeeeee”

Idiot’s post-surgery log.

Day 18.

The family has adjusted to their new daily routines with the bed-bound idiot.

All worries about the idiot’s foot not healing have seemingly vanished.

Empathy and Sympathy for the wounded idiot have been replaced by Sarcasm….

The family grins and takes great joy in asking the idiot what he has planned for the day, and what great adventures he has done in previous days.

The idiot has progressed to the point to where he now makes his way to the couch or the kitchen table where he joins the family for dinner.

The kid always starts out the meal with a sarcastic. “So pops…. what did you do today?…snicker snicker…”

He knows very well that 99% of the day up to that point has been spent laying on the bed with his leg elevated and that the highlight of his Father’s day is the short 20′ shuffle to the bathroom.

“Well son….. I got up this morning at 8am….ate my breakfast in bed…watched some TV….did some reading….watched some more TV…”

(Yawn) “Wow Dad…I don’t know you handled all that excitement…”

“Then I ate my lunch out of the lunchbox that your Mom prepared for me…..I did some more reading….and then I got up, used the walker to hop out of the bedroom, and then I headed down the hallway….”

“Wow Dad…. you actually tried to get back to your computer again? You must be so proud…. to actually make it all the way down the hall to your beloved computer……snicker snicker…. maybe next month you can work up to making your way to the refrigerator….snicker snicker…..”

“Oh, but I wasn’t going to the computer son…. I was going to your room….”

“What were you doing in my room? Why would you go in there?”

“Well son, do you notice one vital and important part of my new daily routine that I seem to have left out of the stimulating highlights of my exciting day that you are taking such sarcastic joy in making fun of?….”

“Uh…you ate…watched TV….read….went in to go to the bathroom….”

“Son, I never said I went in to go to the bathroom….”

“Wha? But you can’t go all day without going to the bathroom….”

“I know that son….. I went alright….. just not in the actual bathroom…..”

It took the kid about 3 minutes before it finally sunk in.

“Mom!! I think Dad pooped in my room!!”

The wife paused her eating and stared at her husband.

“Idiot…tell me you did not shuffle in and poop in your child’s bedroom….”

I paused without saying anything just long enough to leave lingering doubts as to the truthfulness of my answer hanging in the air.

“No…you goofy people! I did not poop in my son’s room! Good grief….I’m not an animal!! I might be stuck on the bed all day long and may be bored out of my skull…with the highlight of my day being the occasional visit to sitting on the throne in the bathroom…… laying in my bed all day long…waiting for my loving family to come home so that I can have some human interaction and so that I can get a little joy from hearing of your days at school and work….”

The kid hung his head silently in guilt-ridden shame. He felt overwhelming remorse for having thought such terrible thoughts about his disabled and bedridden Father.

The wife looked at her guilt-ridden son and then glanced over at her idiot husband who was now happily chewing away on his dinner.

A look of dread came across her face.

She and the idiot made brief eye contact.

She looked her idiot husband in the eye and whispered…

“Oh my God! You did poop in his room didn’t you!”

The Idiot just smirked, did a sarcastic blink of one eye, and then happily resumed eating.

Keep em guessing.

That’s the secret.

Keep em guessing.

The daughter and her fiance/boyfriend have hit a rough patch so they are going to be taking a little time off from living together.

The daughter will be returning here to her upstairs lair starting on Friday.

And in a huge bombshell that I never saw coming…

She is not coming home alone.

Yes, the idiot household will again be home to the pitter-patter of little toddler feet!

I know!!

I was shocked too!!

The daughter has secretly been hiding the fact that she has a …

k-i-t-t-e-n

(I have to spell it out because our two old house cats will hiss and spit if I was to mutter or even type the word)

The wife is gonna have a meltdown when she hears about this little nugget. It’s not that she does not like cats, but it’s just that we both grew up in dog households, and for various reasons, our entire marriage has turned our household into cat central. At one time, we had four. We always swore that we would never get another cat. Once our existing furballs had all lived long, happy lives, and after they had passed away, then maybe we would get a dog.

I have one major kryptonite weakness on this planet other than skittles, chocolate, Jennifer Aniston, Disco, and Soap Operas…

Kittens

When I was first learning how to walk again after my surgery in 1999, my Physical Therapists were helping me slowly walk around the block in our neighborhood. One day, a scrawny little kitten started following me as I shuffled along. The tiny kitten would trot along beside me as I tried to walk, and would plop down on the ground whenever I stopped to rest. It followed me all the way home.

My family went outside hours later and the kitten was still parked outside the door, waiting for me.

Although we already had two cats at the time, all I could hear was that little kitten outside the door, meowing “keep me idiot…. keep me….”

And, of course, I did.

We let two-year old Tyler name the tiny kitten. She was dubbed “Baby Kitty”.

About 5 years later, my Daughter went out and got herself a kitten, though the teenage girl could barely take care of herself, let alone a kitten. The daughter was in and out of the house all the time and the kitten ended up bonding with the one human that was home all day….. me.

The daughter eventually moved out of the house, but I would not let her take the kitten. That kitten was “Lulu”, the cat that still sleeps on the foot of our bed every night to this day.

“Baby Kitty” passed away last year after a brief illness. Another of the cats also passed away. Now, it is just me, LuLu, and Maddie, one of our older cats, that are here alone during the day. They are literally my shadows. As I type this on my bed, LuLu is sleeping on the bed, while Maddie is snoring on the floor underneath my walker. I can’t go anywhere without them following me, including the bathroom. I can’t remember the last time I have used the bathroom or showered without them camping out on the floor staring at me. If I dare go into a room without them and close the door behind me, I get to listen to endless meowing and scratching until I let them in. One thing they are not, is good conversationalists. I talk to them all day long and the best I can muster in response is the occasional yawn. I have tried to teach them to catch food in their mouths, yet I always end up lobbing bits of kibble which always strike them in the face and nose, resulting in their yawning, and then laying down on the floor…..ON the actual food I was tossing to them. (Secretly, I suspect they are both idiots) They are not really good safety animals in that I could keel over and fall flat on my face on the floor, yet rather than meowing or crying to get the attention of other family members, they would just plop down next to my lifeless body, yawn, and then would take a quick nap.

Just now, LuLu walked across the bed, peered at the pc screen, causing me to remark “Ya…I’m writing about you!”, which of course led to another yawn before she plopped down for yet another nap.

Hours of excitement from these furballs……

As such, I have been contemplating the idea of getting myself a puppy, some little hyperactive over-caffeinated little Tasmanian Devil of energy, that will tail me around, and who will occasionally bark at me, or if I’m lucky, even bite and maul me to death.

But now, the daughter is bringing a kitten into the house for a week!

My kryptonite!

I told her that she would have to keep the kitten locked upstairs in her room. I’m stuck downstairs so I will not even see it. But, the daughter will go off to work in the day, the wife and kid will be gone, and the house will be deathly silent…

Except I’ll lay here on the bed and I will hear it…..

muffled and faint little meows from high above…

calling out to me…

“Hey mister…..Hey mister….keep me mister….keep me…..”

And I’ll be powerless.

Again.

Nothing really much to blog today. Last night, with the Doc’s blessings, I actually got to sleep underneath my covers, without the brace, and without having my feet elevated. My bandaged foot was pretty uncomfortable for the most part, but it was so glorious to be able to lay and sleep on my side….and actually underneath actual bedding, for the first time in weeks. The cat was in heaven as well as she now had free reign over the throw blanket of hers that I had been hogging since the surgery.

We are all still just ecstatic that things seem to be going so well with my foot and ankle. This year is off to a great start!

My wife and kid are Saints.

The other day, D’Aun slaved away in the kitchen and made up a huge batch of sausage muffins and breakfast burritos. She then packaged them up, freezing many of them, and she has been using them to feed me breakfast each morning. She has Tyler bring me in breakfast and a glass of milk before they leave the house so that she knows I am eating breakfast. Then, come lunchtime, I have an actual lunch box situated next to the bed in which she packs me a lunch that I can eat from the bed. While he’s home, Tyler is real good about bringing me drinks and does all the switching out of DVD’s for me, so I really would not be able to survive without my great wife and kid.

Tyler is turning 15 next week…… FIFTEEN!! Gah!! The little fart is not so little any more!

I have quickly come to the conclusion that writing a book is a maddening experience that would surely drive me insane, if I was not already at that point in life anyway.

I have decided to write the book in the only style that I really feel comfortable using, the same style that I use while blogging..

I’m just gonna write the book as if I was doing a twenty chapter blog post. It will, just like my posts, pay no regard to proper sentence structure, punctuation, spelling, etc……. I’m just gonna type it out and will let the Editor clean it up after it’s done.

So, be prepared when you read the thing. It will not look like a traditional book with actual paragraphs and such, but will rather be just be endless pages of short bullet sentences like this.

I am looking for someone who might be interested in collaborating in a way on the book. Specifically, I plan on using original illustrations in the book in that I do not want to hassle with all the red tape of using other people’s photos like all the one’s I snag off the net for use in my posts.

I was thinking of having someone create a cartoon-like character of “The Idiot”, maybe with a comically disproportinate superhero body with a big “I” on his chest….or something along those lines…. (Along the lines of the character above… just goofier looking…but while maintaining my chiseled good looks and rugged features…..gag…..)

Do any of you have a talent for drawing such characters? If so, please let me know. If I can find a great “Idiot” cartoon character that could be used throughout the book, then I would be very interested in working with you.

The Two-Millionth View contest looks like it is lining up to crown a winner towards late February or early March. If you have a guess in that window, keep on your toes….. you may very well be the winner!

I won’t even try to exaggerate my Doctor’s appointment today into one of my usual idiotic adventures…

First of all, never underestimate the power of prayer, positive thoughts, well wishes, karma, etc!

As you know, our biggest fear with this surgery was that it would not heal. This 15 days of strict bedrest was to ensure that my circulation would stay as well as possible.

The foot looked pretty bad last week when it was unwrapped, which was not entirely unexpected. Today was going to be the real important test.

With my Dad looking on, the Nurse unwrapped the foot and called in the surgeon.

Bottom line…

The foot looks G-R-E-A-T!!

Those were the Doctor’s exact words!

The foot looks 100X better than last week. He actually manipulated the foot gently in each direction and was very pleased with the movement in the foot.

My Dad’s reaction….”Wow…it looks like a normal foot again!”

Believe it or not, I am actually a little AHEAD of schedule! He says I need to stay off the leg for another week and then I can slowly start resting the foot on the floor while putting 10-20lbs of weight on the foot.

I do this for another week and then will see him again, and if everything is still going great, then I will start physical therapy.

So, I got one more week on the bed, and then can start light weight next week, then I see the surgeon again on the 18th of this month.

Needless to say, I am ecstatic. Everything is going much better than we could have thought possible.

Thank you all again for your thoughts, prayers, well wishes, hexes and spells, and all the good vibes you have sent my way.

Lost Lake, New Mexico…… here I come!

I have slept the last two nights without the bear trap clamped to my leg. It’s still real uncomfortable, but at least I can move around and roll over without the brace.

Today I go back to the Surgeon so he can evaluate the progress on the foot to this point. Dad gets drafted into playing chauffeur for this appointment, a fact that has me scared to death due to what I did to him the last time I took him to the Doc. (I told his new Doc’s staff that he was in the midst of the sex-change process)

I lay here with a phone next to me, yet no one calls me while I am laying here. The phone only rings when I have taken it into the bathroom with me. For those of you that I have talked to in recent weeks, the reason it sounded like I was talking in a cave was the fact that I was in my bathroom. And those mysterious noises which you said sounded like someone strangling or drowning a duck in the background……well, that was NOT a duck….

So, be warned…. If u call me, be prepared to carry on a stimulating and comical conversation with the idiot….as he poops.

I about choked myself to death last night….due to uncontrolled laughter. Thank you Michele Bachmann, who in her “victory” speech after getting 5% of the vote in the Iowa Caucuses, said “I am not a Politician, nor would I ever be a Politician”.

Only a clueless Politician could deliver a line like that with a straight face.

I should run for President…

I’m an Idiot
I have a questionable grasp on reality
I am delusional
I’m so greedy that I could be bought with just minimal investment
Did I mention I was an Idiot?
“Washington needs yet another Idiot!” would look great on campaign signs and shirts.

Vote for the Idiot in 2012!

I really don’t discuss Politics on here much anymore, for purposes of holding onto what little sanity I have left. One thing I do believe is that our system is now irretrievably broken, and I don’t see how it will ever change. If Obama gets reelected, things will stay just as they are now….. gridlocked partisan bickering where the GOP will do nothing that might actually be best for the Country, because they do not want to be seen as working with the “enemy”. If a GOP candidate wins the election, the two parties will reverse roles and the Dems will not work with the new President, no matter how it might benefit the country. Bottom line… things are not going to change anytime soon, which is sad. We vote these clowns into office and then we all lose.

The wife took off the leg brace last night and I had managed to get cookie and breakfast burritos crumbs into the brace, just by laying in the bed……. It’s a talent. No wonder it sounds like I am laying on a Frito bag everytime I roll over.

I’ll blog again after I get back from the Doc.

Tuesday Morning.

North Texas.

A beautiful morning.

A sunny cloudless sky.

Calm winds creating a calm, glass-like surface on the lake just feet from our front door.

One cat is perched in a window seat, happily watching birds glide past the window.

Another cat dozes peacefully on the nearby couch.

Only the rhythmic ticking of the large clock adorning the living room wall just above the fireplace can be heard.

The home sits in peaceful silence.

Glorious silence interrupted only by the occasional loud screams which fill the home every 30-45 seconds or so…

“HELLO???!! HEEEELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?????? IS ANYONE OUT THERE????????? I’M READY FOR MY BREAKFAST!!!!…..HEEELLLOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”

The screams will not fall on human ears for about 8 more hours.

Yes, as the idiot conveniently forgot, today is Tuesday…. the day that the wife goes back to work, the kid goes back to school, and the two weeks of family care and assistance…..goes out the window.

The Idiot is again…..home alone….. all day long.

Sigh…

The Idiot lays and stares up at the ceiling.

The silence is deafening.

Sigh…

He knew this day would come, he just did not plan on it coming so quickly.

Time to initiate the “Home Survival while Bedbound and Alone” protocol that he had planned out before his surgery.

He stares up at the ceiling, carefully reaches behind his head, and fumbles for the small switch hidden on the underside of his headboard.

“Click”

Instantaneously, a huge sparkling Disco Ball lowers from beneath the ceiling fan as “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer blares at mind-numbing decibels from a dozen speakers scattered throughout the house.

“It’s Party Tiiiiimmmeeeee!!!!”

The idiot leans down off the side of the bed and pulls out a plastic tub that had been secretly tucked beneath the bed for weeks.

In the tub is a better stocked bar than most actual bars in the area, in addition to the fully stocked bar, the tub is crammed full of every kind of snack and junk food legally sold in the US and Canada.

The idiot rips back his blanket to reveal his idiot body clad in an exact replica white “Saturday Night Fever” disco suit that he recently purchased on EBAY after telling his unsuspecting family that he had instead ordered ancient Religious Chanting and Meditation robes to be used during quiet times of contemplation.

The party lasts for an hour.

Before he knows it, the little clandestine red light that he had previously installed is now flashing indicating an incoming phone call into the home.

With a quick flip of the switch, the Disco party halts and the house is again silent..

The idiot answers the phone.

It is the wife, calling from work to check on his welfare as he is home all alone.

The Idiot sighs…

“I’m OK….I’m just laying here…all alone…staring at the ceiling…….I’ll be OK….don’t worry about me…..”

The wife feels guilty.

Her injured loved one is home alone and helpless.

The guilt is overwhelming.

But just for a second….

She again tries to console her wounded husband.

“Ya know Idiot…if you look across the room on top of the dresser…you might notice my PC is open…… I turned on Skype this morning before I left so that I could watch over you while you were home alone…. I wanted to be able to rush home if something happened to you and you could not call for help…”

The idiot looks across the room and sees the PC spying on him from the dresser…

Gulp..

“Idiot…I sure hope you’re gonna get those stupid little Disco outfits off of the cats and get all that booze and chips off the bed before I get home right?”

Sigh…

“Yes Maam..”

And with that, the idiot again went back to staring silently at the ceiling…

Right on cue…

“Last Dance” by Donna Summer started softly playing in the house…

How prophetic.

Being trapped on the bed for the past two weeks has tended to bring out the inner little boy in me…..

Much more so than my usual level of daily childlike behavior.

Some of you may have had surgeries in the past where you had to stay non-weight bearing off of a limb for an extended period of time.

I myself had a similar episode years ago when I smacked my skull real hard, thereby bruising my medula oblongata, while horsing around in a fast food restaurant play area ball pit. The Doctor gave me “Non Brain-bearing” orders and I was sent home to lay in bed without engaging my brain for a couple weeks. Of course, I was 34 yrs old at the time, and my wife says I never actually resumed using my brain in the subsequent years, but anyway…..I digress….. That’s another story altogether…

Normally, with the surgery I had, you would just have to stay off your bad leg, for weeks or months, as the delicate surgery slowly healed. You could still sit up in chairs, recliners, motorized scooters, ATV’s, battery-powered little pink Barbie cars, wheeled baby-walkers, etc……as long as you do not put any weight on the affected limb.

If you are like my sarcastic teenage son, you could just vault and hop around on your one good leg like a retarded Kangaroo, doing every daily chore or routine without difficulty, just to prove to your whiny Father just how easy such actions really are.

With my lovely neurological issues and horrid circulation as a result of my disability, I have to stay laying down as much as possible so that the circulation to my foot remains sufficient enough that everything will heal.

So, there’s no kangaroo hopping or driving little toys cars for me.

As such, I spend an easy 22-23 hours a day on this bed.

So, you make the best of the situation and try to make life as interesting as possible, as interesting as life can possibly be when you are trapped on the bed all FREAKING DAY AND NIGHT….DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY….ARGGGGG!! Sorry bout that…… anyway…..

I need fresh air from time to time. I have worked where I can lean halfway off the bed, twist and contort my body, and just can just barely open the window next to my side of the bed. With the window ajar, I can hear birds chirping, cars driving past, planes flying overhead, and can get much needs whiffs of clean air that does not smell like bedridden goat. Occasionally, people will walk down the street in front of our home. I use this opportunity to lean down off the bed, place my face as close to the window screen as possible, and then yell out “HELP ME!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SOMEONE HELP ME!!! SHE’S HOLDING ME PRISONER IN HERE!!! HEY YOU!!! HELP!!!!”

Of course, to date, not one person has stopped to help me. What a statement on the world we live in.

Family members and friends will come by to visit me. Of course, I have to stay on the bed as they file in and try to make small talk while acting like they are not staring at my leg the whole time they are in the room. I have recently taken to removing my boot for short periods during the day. The other day, I heard yet another visitor come into the house and I knew that this person would soon be standing beside my bed…staring at my foot and leg.

A well-used handful of ketchup packets, in conjunction with a used chicken bone conveniently taped to the side of the ankle, can be a real conversation starter when the person first comes into the room. I will inevitably try to sit up in the bed, at which point the visitor will tell me to lay still, at which point I will make even greater effort to sit-up, will then let out a blood curdling scream, will rip back the blanket to expose the red-stained bandaged foot…with protruding bone….. which will immediately cause the visitors to bolt in terror from my room….and will give me many subsequent minutes of uncontrolled laughter…

Ahhh… good times….

Then, a few days ago, the wife and kid had to go off and leave me alone for a few hours. Before they left, I had the kid do me a small favor. About an hour later, my parents came into the house, unannounced, in order to check on me. They walked into a smoke filled house where, as is quite common in our house, all the smoke alarms were again blaring. My parents bolted through the smoke choked house and made their way to the Master Bedroom where they fully expected to find some charred remains of their idiot son, still clad in his fireproof boot, smoldering on the bed where he undoubtedly succumbed to a rare instance of Spontaneous Human Combustion. Instead, they dash into the room, only to discover their idiot middle-aged spawn, hanging half off the bed, grilling steaks on his propane cooker.

“What the Hell are ya doing son?” they will yell in unison, hurriedly trying to clear the choking smoke away from their faces…

I am dumbfounded by the question. To me, it is a no-brainer…

“Hey… a guy’s gotta eat doesn’t he?”

My loving son had done as instructed and had dragged my cooker in from the back patio, and here I now was, doing as instructed, staying on the bed like a good boy, grilling my lunch…

What was so weird about that?

The parents, as you would expect, wanted to know why in the heck I had not at least opened the window so that I did not die of smoke inhalation in the smoke-filled house.

I quickly pointed out that my loving wife had recently nailed my window shut because of my alleged love of screaming at and heckling strangers as they walked past on the street.

I’m not an idiot…. I would have opened the window if I had been able to…

Duh.

Sometimes people treat me like I’m not using all of my Medula Oblongata properly….

Steak anyone?

Jan. 1st, 2012

Idiot bedroom.

The Idiot survived another memorable New Year’s Eve celebration. He is laying sprawled on the bed. The injured leg is perched on it’s tower of pillows. Empty Mountain Dew cans and piles of Skittles bags litter the bed. Beneath his buttocks area, a Pizza Hut delivery box lies smashed to a pulp. A semi-crushed plastic party hat lies crumpled behind his head. His custom-ordered rhinestone encrusted Happy New Year Underoos are clinging to a blade of the still-spinning ceiling fan high above the room. A few feet away, in the master bathroom, a still-live 67lb adult male Catfish is wallowing in the small amount of water still left on the floor of the walk0in shower. A few feet away, a goat stands in place, slowly pulling up pieces of flooring material as the animal is tethered to the doorknob of the idiot’s walk-in closet. On the other side of the room, slumped over the toilet, face-down, is the lifeless body of an unknown person still clad in full Bozo the Clown costuming.

How all these things are linked is a mystery.

As always, it was a Hell of a party.

Oh, who am I kidding…

As is usual, I never even made it to Midnight.

My New Year was welcomed by the sound of the kid kicking in the bedroom door in order to wish his slumbering parents a Happy New Year. I grunted Happy New Year back at him….vaguely remembering asking him who the goat belonged to….and then I rolled back over in an attempt to sleep.

The last evening of 2011 was real exciting as well.

Yep, I spent the evening watching a DVD of Season One of the hit sitcom “Modern Family”. The wife watched a number of episodes with me. Periodically she would just reach across the bed and punch me in the arm while yelling out “Oh! My! God!”…

“Oh! My! God!” (Punch)

“That’s you!”

“Oh! My! God!” (Punch)

“You do that all the time!”

After just a few episodes, the wife had come to a stunning revelation..

I AM Phil Dunphy!

If you watch the show, you know Phil is a fun-loving, childlike, free-spirited, immature, intellectually-challenged…. IDIOT.

My wife is now realizing…. I AM and HAVE BEEN Phil Dunphy for the 21 years of our marriage.

2012 is off to a typically idiotic start for me.

I got cold in the middle of the night and decided to rearrange my throw blankets. Due to the foot and boot, I have yet to be able to sleep under my actual bedding and have had to lay on the bed with just two throw blankets. Last night, I took the term “throw blanket” much too literally. I grabbed the blanket, wadded it up, launched it towards my feet, and conveniently forgot to hold on to any part of the blanket. My bellowing of “Well that’s just freaking wonderful!!” immediately woke up the wife who asked me what the problem was. I then had to ask her to retrieve the blanket I had just thrown across to the opposite side of the room. This would normally not be an issue, but the night before, I had indeed dropped my remote on the floor, yet again, causing the wife to have to scour the floor on her hands and knees, at about 2am, at which point she told me that things were going to get real uncomfortable for me if I dropped ANYTHING off the bed EVER again.

This morning, I awoke to find myself mummified thanks to being wrapped tightly in my throw blanket…with two rolls of duct tape circling my body…..and while I can’t actually see my remote control anywhere at the moment…. the awkward position of my body…and the large lump I seem to be “laying” on…lead me to believe that the remote has been temporarily stuffed somewhere that I would prefer not to think about.

She’s right..

I am Phil Dunphy.

(If you’ve never watched Modern Family, get online and check Phil out. Phil IS me.)

To those of you in Australia and New Zealand, Happy Jan 2nd!

Yes, I am posting this before actual New Years.

I’m old
I’m tired
I’m bored
and most importantly..

I’m medicated.

Chances are, I will not be conscious at Midnight.

A sincere Happy 2012 to all of you and your families! May you all have a safe, happy, prosperous, and healthy new year!

I will now recount what would have happened had I been awake at the stroke of midnight….

3…
2…
1…

Happy New Year!!!!

Idiot lets out girly scream and happily tosses his satellite remote skyward…

where it contacts the whirling ceiling fan blades….

hurtling remote across the room to where it impacts the flat-screen TV…

Causing the screen to explode in a mini-fireball…

Causing all the smoke detectors in the house to shriek

Just before the sprinkler system kicks in..

Soaking everything and everyone….and completely ruining all our remaining electronic devices…

At which point my wife will make fun of the fact that it took me all of 2 seconds into the new year before I once again found myself new and creative ways to get into trouble.

———-

This is post #2,000 of the blog.

Prior to starting blogging, I had probably never written more than 2,000 WORDS in my life. I HATED writing, with a passion. I was a Talker. Writing involved too much work and I am extremely lazy and unmotivated. Now, I’ve come full circle…. I’m constantly writing, and I barely talk.

————-

A few new years resolutions that I am going to honestly try my best to make happen in 2012.

1. Finish writing my book by years end. Hopefully have a title for the book before it actually goes to print.

2. Find a new local volunteering opportunity. I would love to work in Dolphin or Penguin rescue, but it’s not real practical in rural Texas.

3. Try to wear long pants more than 25 total days this year. My legs are getting far too white to keep subjecting the family and innocent bystanders to the sight of my bare legs for about 99% of the year.

4. I will not allow myself to get injured, sick, diseased, maimed, or mauled at any time in the year after I have recovered from this little setback with my leg. Personally, I don’t think the Blogging God’s will let this one happen. Physical problems and misery is a blogging gold mine.

5. I will NOT utter the words “I Can’t because I’m disabled”….for any reason..during the entire year. Unless it’s some activity I really don’t want to do, then I’m whipping out that excuse so fast your head would spin.

6. I will do what I need to do in order to make myself happy. As long as it does not involve blackmail, petty larceny, or Murder. That’s just a given.

7. I will visit as many blog friends, in person, as possible over the course of the year.

8. If this surgery is successful, I will get back to exercising each day and will try to drop as much weight as possible over the course of the year, as long as I can still devour Skittles, Chocolate, Cakes, and Cookies on a fairly regular basis.

9. Try to read a few actual books this year, realizing that reading articles in Entertainment Weekly while sitting on the throne does not really count as reading. I just started “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and I hope to be done with it by Summer.

10. Complete the solo 8-mile hike to Lost Lake, NM…. at an elevation of 11,500 ft….on a trail rated “Difficult to Expert”… because no one thinks I can do it. Take pic of self, at lake, holding up sign which says “I did it! Now eat that!!”

———

A very special thank you to all of YOU for making this such a spectacular year on the blog. Welcome to all my new friends that have recently come into my blog family. The one main thing that I take great pride in is the amazing group of talented writers and awesome human beings that make up my blog family. You can do no wrong by visiting the folks on my blogroll and becoming active followers of their blogs. They are the nicest, warmest, and most generous friends on the planet. The best thing about my blog is that has led me to all those wonderful people. Ya’ll have a great 2012!!

2011 The year in Review

January 1st 2011 found me cursing the heavens as I tried to assemble my new stationary Bike that I had gotten for Christmas. My only goal at that point was to get the bugger assembled, by myself, with every piece and part in it’s proper position. This is no easy task for the most mechanically inept male on the planet.

I was in the midst of therapy sessions, doing regular visits to a Psychologist in order to rid myself of years of Depression and Anger Demons that had haunted me since getting hurt in 1999. It was the first time I had ever sought professional help for those issues.

I read a Facebook update from a blog friend in Boston. She and her family had done an annual Polar Bear Swim in the icy water along with thousands of other lunatics.

Within 10 minutes, my wife had driven me down the street to the public beach on the lake our town is situated next to. I jumped out of the car, at sunset, in 37 degree air, and went for a solo swim in the lake. It was the GREATEST thing I had ever done on New Years! Yes, it was freezing cold….but I never felt so alive!!

I put that bike together, all by myself. I made an initial crazy goal of riding that stationary bike from coast to coast, over 4,000 miles, hopefully by this next New Year’s Eve.

By Feb. 25th, 2011….. this blog was averaging over 1,300 views per day and I hit the 1 MILLION VIEWS milestone.

I started riding the bike every day and would virtually track my progress across the country using a couple different cycling websites. I started doing daily updates on the blog to let readers know where I was on any particular day.

Ever since the last few months of 2010, I had been having a great deal of nerve pain in my right leg. I was sent to numerous Doctors and given numerous diagnosis. It was thought I was having new spinal cord issues just above the level of my current damage, while another Doc thought it was issues related to the original injury of 1999. No matter the cause, I could barely lift my leg high enough to get on the bike, but I continued to ride as much as I could.

It was finally found that I had a rare condition called Piriformis Syndrome, directly caused by my spinal issues. I had been putting a disproportionate amount of weight on my right side for over a decade in order to make up for all the problems in my left leg and foot. Over years, the Piriformis muscle, deep in my right thigh, had grown to such a point that it was now constricting the sciatic nerve in my right leg. I had months of Physical Therapy to stretch that muscle out in order to get it off the nerve.

And I continued to ride the bike as much as possible.

One day, I made 112 miles in one day.

I lost over 40lbs in the early months on the bike.

I had originally planned on hopefully completing the 4,121 miles from the Pacific Coast of La Push, Wa to New York City….by the end of the year.

I made it to New York on May the 8th.

Blog Friend Sandi was kind enough to make the photoshop pic of me posing with my bike outside the Empire State Building.

I kept riding onward.

Summer came and the kid and I headed out on our annual Baseball Road Trip. We drove for 8 days and ended up seeing baseball games in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Colorado. I also got to meet blog friends, in person, for the very first time. Chlost aka “Queen of the Courtroom” will forever be the first blog friend I have had the pleasure to actually meet. I also met with Brea, Sparrow, SeaSweetie, and Sank. It is a great Father/Son trip with good baseball, and the chance to meet some truly great people.

July would find us enjoying our annual family vacation in Red River, New Mexico….my favorite place on the planet. It would be the worst trip I have ever had there. I battled an infected wisdom tooth and the realization that my leg and foot problems were now making it difficult just to walk any distances, let alone hiking, which I truly love to do. I got to the point where I seriously considered having my bad foot and ankle amputated, with a prosthetic foot put in, so that I could continue my hikes in the mountains.

I came home, got the tooth extracted, and continued on the bike, with my virtual ride now taking me well up into Canada.

At one point, I did a fundraiser for Minot ND Flood Victims and rode 251 miles in one 24hr period.
I did another fundraiser for the Global Mission Readiness Charity and rode nearly 1,500 miles in one month.

Then, one day, I climbed down off the bike, and felt a sharp pain in my right foot. My GOOD foot.

Xrays would show that it was broken. I had not twisted it, or stepped on something wrong, this was apparently just another side effect from putting so much strain on that right side since my 1999 injury.

My foot had finally just given out, and broke. While riding a stationary bike. Welcome to my world.

My Family Doc sent me to an Ortho Specialist for treatment of the broken foot.

During his initial exam, he saw my crippled left foot and ankle.

He said a fairly new surgical procedure MIGHT be able to help the issues in that foot.

He has to do a circulation test in the foot to make sure it will heal. The circulation is so bad in that leg and foot that other Doctors have always expressed a fear about any type of surgery because of the high risk that the site would not heal after surgery.

This Surgeon says that the test shows I should heal.

I rehab the broken right foot and schedule the surgery for the crippled left foot.

I have the surgery on the 20th of December, purposely scheduling it for just before Christmas so that I will have my wife and son home to care for me for the first 2 weeks after surgery.

And here I lay…

11 days since the surgery. I have to stay completely off the foot for at least a month after surgery. My rehab will take many months. As soon as I get the clearance, I’m gonna climb back on the bike.

All told, I logged over 8,000 miles on that bike during the course of 2011.

When I am cleared to ride, I will start a virtual bike trip across Europe for 2012.

I should be fully able to resume my hiking in the mountains come July of 2012.

This New Years Day will be spent laying on the bed, versus splashing into a freezing cold lake, but I will be just as happy this year. If things work out, I’ll be RUNNING into the lake on New Year’s Day 2013.

Whereas I hit 1,000,000 views on Feb. 25th, 30 months after first starting the blog, I now sit at over 1.8 Million views, and the blog has grown to now averaging about 4,000 views a day.

So, healthwise for me, it was a crappy year, but healthwise for the blog, it was a banner year.

In other family news, my oldest son got promoted to a job paying more per year than I ever made while working, and he is just 24. My Daughter brought her fiance all the way down from Indiana so that we could meet him for the first time, and then dumped him within an hour of returning back to Indiana. She moved back to Texas, got a new BF, and then we were informed of their engagement…via Facebook. The kid, our youngest, is now a High Schooler. Depressing when I think back to when I first got hurt in 1999 and realize he was just 2 yrs old at the time. He has only known me this way for his entire life.

And thus ends an interesting year.

See ya 2011!

Hello 2012!

Life should not be a journey to the grave

with the intention of arriving safely

in a well preserved body……….

but rather to skid in sideways,

chocolate in one hand, wine in the other,

body thoroughly worn out and screaming

“WOO HOO, WHAT A RIDE”

(author unknown)

**From the Archives Nov 2010 ***

It has happened.

A maddening new setback in my recovery…

Something that I had NOT considered when I envisioned every possible nightmare scenario which may befall me while I am home alone during the day.

Late this morning, the kid had a basketball game, the first game of his season that I will have to miss. As such, he and the wife are out of the house for hours, leaving me alone with the throw-rug pooping felines.

No Problem.

I’ll stay here on the bed like a good boy and nothing could go wrong.

Or so I thought….

I was laying here, watching Season 2 of “The Big Bang Theory” on DVD, minding my own business, when it happened…

The new nightmare I had not envisioned….

yep, I glanced down at my boot towering above the foot of the bed and saw “IT” perched atop the boot…

Yep, you guessed it.

A fly.

On my boot.

Buzzing at me with a mocking buzz of contempt.

By the looks of it, I was dealing with an adolescent Bolivian Free-Range Fruit Fly…

Which, as we all know, are crafty little bastards…

Time for another OCD reveal…

I cannot stand being in the same room, house, or even planet, as a fly. I will corner a fly into a room and will then lock myself and said fly into the room, where we will remain for hours if needed, until I have rendered said fly DEAD. I have been known to shatter furniture, windows, pictures, collectibles, and anything else that gets in my way as I use all my might and any weapons at hand, to squash the HELL out of the pesky fly. Two creatures may enter the room, but only one ever leaves, unsquashed, and that victor is always ME!

And now, here I got a crafty Bolivian FR Fruit Bastard buzzing from atop my boot!!

Gah!!!

I do the first logical step and scream hysterically. The fly, who obviously knows little or no English, just mocks me and stays perched atop the boot.

I go to Plan B and yell at the little bugger in Spanish. Again, I get no response. This is obviously a mentally-challenged fly that I am dealing with.

I use every ounce of my strength to try to get those newly-attached tendons to stretch just enough, without tearing loose from their frail attachments to bone, so that I move the boot slightly.

With a great deal of pain, the boot slowly starts rocking back and forth….with the happy little fly still clinging to it’s perch.

Gah!!!

I grab one of my throw blankets. I hold part of it in one hand while I wad the remainder of the blanket in the other hand. I then toss the wadded blanket through the air towards the boot, keeping hold of the one end in my other hand. The blanket soars through the air and unfurls perfectly, neatly covering my entire lower body, including the boot. If there is one thing I have mastered during my prison sentence on the bed, it’s how to properly cover myself.

I wait a few minutes. The fly is nowhere to be seen. Maybe I killed the little bastard when the blanket hit him….

I should be so lucky.

I slowly pull the blanket off of my feet….only to reveal the fly still perched on my boot!

Gah!!!!

Out of frustration, I grab my satellite remote and launch it at my boot, missing it by a mile, causing the remote to disappear off into the endless abyss that makes up “Stuff the Idiot can’t reach with his grabber”-land at the end of the bed.

Gah!!!!!!!!!

I hurriedly look around the room. My only weapons are what I can reach with my trusty grabber. Convinced that I would most likely render myself dead or unconscious when left alone, has caused the wife to sterilize the room of most useful weapons.

Would it kill these people to leave the poor bedbound idiot with a common fly swatter before they leave me alone?

Nooooo…… they can’t seem to forget the little fly swatter incident of 2004 in which our home’s heating system got shorted out, causing us thousands of dollars in repairs, all because of an ingenious plan I had devised while battling a fly in our previous home.

I glance over at my wife’s nearby dressing table. How come women get dressing tables? See that little patch of bare floor in amidst all the dirty clothes? That’s my dressing table…… Just sayin….. anyway…… I spy a can of hair spray. Maybe I can spray the bugger to death.
Ooohhhhhh Looooooookkk……

Matches!

She left matches that she uses to light the candles surrounding her bathtub.

Matches AND hairspray!!

I have the ingredients for an awesome fly-killing homemade FLAME THROWER!!!

Sometimes the endless bounds of my brilliant genius amazes even me……

It took me about 5 minutes to carefully manipulate the grabber into position to grab the hair spray and the matches. Of course, even with all the squirming around and grunting, the little sadistic fly still stayed perched on my boot, buzzingly mocking me.

It was GO TIME!!

I carefully lit a match…

Lifted the hairspray can up….aimed the nozzle directly towards my towering boot…

Let out my patented war cry… “CRY HAVOC AND LET LOOSE THE DOGS OF WAR!!!”

And then launched a flaming stream of fiery hair spray….at my recently surgically-repaired foot.

Which, as the flame was hurtling through the air towards my foot, I quickly realized might NOT have been the smartest idea I have had this week…

This one is gonna be hard to explain to the wife…

and the Fire Department…

and the Paramedics…

and the Surgeon…

Sigh

I hate flies.

Sleep.

I am still in pursuit of the ever-elusive sleep.

Thanks to this surgically-repaired ankle and foot, the bulky brace protecting that ankle and foot, my normally numb lower extremeties, and my fused lower spine, coupled with my being a whiny spineless idiot, sleeping comfortably has become a total nightmare.

Not that I don’t spend every hour of the day and night trying to overcome that nightmare.

(Most everything is curable….. while my Idiocy is terminal)

Sleeping under these conditions involves one main factor…

Positioning.

I have tried a number to date.

#1. Reclining Centerfold Incontinent Monkey

#2. The Greatus Praying Mantis of Flatus

This position is for the idiots who, like me, cannot tolerate sleeping on their back and who MUST, at all costs, at least try to sleep on their side. I start out laying on my back in the previous Porno Monkey position. The Left knee is bent greatly and brought up towards the hip area. I then reach beneath the left leg and adjust the pillow tower to a position much closer to my hips and with the pillows now angled more from side-to-side versus lengthwise. With the booted foot now lying at a grotesque angle to where the boot is just below the groin area of the underoos, great physical effort is then made to start rolling my body over onto it’s left side, while keeping the bent boot anchored onto the pillow tower. During the roll process, the right leg is then swung up and over the left leg so that once I am on my side, all that will be protruding from my newly aligned body…will be the boot…which is seemingly being painfully ejected from my buttocks area. Once on the left side, the body will look like a spindly praying mantis when viewed from above, and the resulting failure to properly control certain vital abdominal muscles and sphincters, will result in frequent uncontrolled bouts of flatus. Do NOT attempt this position after eating Thai or Mexican food, and if under the influence of diarrhea-inducing antibiotics, you really should consider sleeping on plastic sheeting if you attempt this position.

#3. The “For the Love of God” position.

This is the position I am always found in when actually dozing or napping. My body looks like I have landed on a pile of cardboard boxes after being tossed from the roof of a skyscraper. Legs are going in opposite directions, arms are contorted around my head and shoulders, boot is towering atop a pile of pillows, underoos are hanging halfway down to my ankles, one throw blanket is partially covering my legs, another is partially covering one shoulder and one arm, another throw is being pooped on by a cat down on the floor, and although I have 8 pillows at the head of my side of the bed, none of them are actually under my head, the head which is lying flat on the mattress, the same head that is about to drown me as I drool like a toddler as I doze. How did I get into this position? I have no earthly clue. All I know is that I usually spend a good hour, at least, each time that I try to go to sleep. I spend this hour constantly flip-flopping, moaning, groaning, farting, whining, and crying about how I cannot get comfortable and how I will NEVER sleep again. At this point, my loving wife, tired of listening to me whine for yet another hour, yells out “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!”, and then everything in my world suddenly goes dark and silent. I don’t know for sure what she does, but the massive knots and bruises on my skull lend me to believe that she wallops me across the head with some type of blunt instrument. I found a new bruise on the back of my left buttock this morning, and the bruise clearly had the letters… “ING” welted into my skin. I might be wrong, but I think that this is proof that she is indeed beating me senseless with my own PING brand golf clubs.

The quest for the ever-elusive sleep will continue until I die…

Which may be a lot sooner than I had planned…

One of the gifts I got for Christmas was a software program that helps you lay out the structure for writing your first book.

In case you are new to the party, yes, I am in the process of writing a book, a mostly non-fictional book about The Idiot and this blog.

One feature on this program that I am using at the moment is that I am able to type out note cards with reminders of things I want to cover in the book. I can save these note cards and can place them in any area of the book that I so desire, moving them around at will.

While the book will be a real accounting of how I became disabled, fell into a nightmare world for a decade, and then found new purpose in life through writing this blog, the book will also contain a large number of my goofiest humor blogs.

I want the book to bounce back and forth from serious to comic themes, always trying to keep you on your toes. If I make you break down and bawl like a baby one page, I want you rolling on the floor laughing by the end of the next page. That’s just how I roll, I love to toil with your emotions….. ha ha It’s what I do…

I’m a toiler….

Anyway…

I may not even have to use any of my goofy fictional humor posts at all….. it is quickly becoming apparent that my actual nightmare story has enough humorous subplots that are 100% true, that having to add some goofy posts to lighten the mood may not be necessary at all.

Back to those note cards…

You may remember from a short while back that my Spinal Surgeon, the quack who crippled me, was raided by the Federal Authorities. It turns out he is a huge Medicare Billing Criminal and he also stands accused of doing surgical procedures that require hospitalization, in his exam room, without anesthesia, in an any assembly-line fashion, so that he could bilk Medicare out of as much money as possible. You may remember that in 2007, Medicare paid my Surgeon 11.7 MILLION dollars….whereas the next closest Spinal Surgeon in a 4-state area, was paid nearly 10 MILLION LESS than my quack Doctor. Well, anyway, I do up a note card with this information and decide that I want to put it somewhere near the front part of the book. Who knows, by the time I am done writing, the Quack may have gone to trial and may be sitting in Prison. It would make a nice wrap-up to the book….. don’t you think?

Well anyway, of course I will type up the pages about how my Quack got raided by the FBI, will go into all the details of the crimes of which he is accused, and will make some kind of reference as to how only an Idiot like myself would be so fortunate to find this guy to perform my first and only Spinal Surgery on me. Out of the thousands of Spinal Surgeons in Texas, I end up on this guys doorstep!

That self-deprecating humor might bring a slight grin to some readers lips, but wait until I add in the subject of the next note card that I typed up….

The also 100% true little tidbit about how one of the Doctor’s I would cross paths with in the years after getting disabled…..would actually be accused of M-U-R-D-E-R.

Yep, leave it the Idiot.

Crippled by a Medicare Fraud Quack and then treated by an accused Murderer.

And it’s all true.

You’ll have to read the book to get the full details.

I tell ya, I can’t make this stuff up.

————————–

Still rolling along here. By rolling along, I mean laying on the bed for about 22 hours out of the day. The foot looked the worst since surgery yesterday with it being real swollen, purple, and red. We will keep a close eye on it. I’m not really worried. I figure the poor circulation in that leg will probably double the healing time needed to get the foot back to normal. My Dad will be taking me into my next appt on Tuesday and we will get some more pics at that time.

———————————

It finally happened. Poop ended up on the floor in front of our toilet. 9 Days since surgery…and we now have poop on the floor! Only….this wasn’t my poop. Honest. I got up this morning, got myself out of the bed, used the walker to hop across the room, got into the bathroom, turned to shuffle over in front of the toilet, and there it was on the throw rug right in front of the toilet. Poop. The Vicodin temporarily clouded my thought processes that it was from one of our throw-rug loving cats, so I instead yelled out at the top of my lungs “WHO POOPED ON THE FLOOR??? D’AUN…DID YOU POOP ON THE FLOOR???? SOMEONE POOPED ON THE FLOOR AND I CAN’T GET TO THE TOILET!! WHOEVER POOPED ON THE FLOOR NEEDS TO COME CLEAN IT UP LIKE QUICK OR I AM GONNA POOP ON THE FLOOR MYSELF!!!”

Which, of course, caused the guilty cat to wander into the room, start sniffing and scratching at the floor right next to the poop, and then she glanced up and shot me one of those “Yeah..it’s my poop fat boy…whatya gonna do about it!” looks…….

As soon as my mobility has improved enough….

I’m gonna wander over and poop in her favorite kitty bed…. and we’ll see if that changes her attitude….

You gotta love the world of Vicodin.

Everything always comes back to poop.

“Just kill me now…. please….. just take a 2×4 and bludgeon me to death….right now….please!!..I’m begging you!”

Yep, that was me this morning, answering the wife when she asked if there was anything she could do for me.

After 8 days, I am have yet to regain one vital function as a result of my surgery…..and it is starting to drive me insane…. (Which, according to the wife, is one REAL short drive)

Sleep.

I cannot sleep!

I have always had some minor OCD issues when it comes to sleeping. I have to have all my pillows in just the right position and in correct relation to each other, I always have to have my feet sticking out from under the covers due to crippling claustrophobia, I always have to start out going to sleep by laying on my left side, with my arms and and legs contorted into just the right position, I always have to have the ceiling fan on, the air temp in the room has to be sufficiently cold to where you can see your breath, and my head always has to be facing towards Toledo.

Like I said, just a few minor issues.

This lovely 1970′s Family Truckster Station Wagon that I got clamped on my leg has totally screwed everything up! It’s like trying to sleep with a bear trap clamped on to your leg all night long. I’m supposed to sleep on my back and with the lovely station wagon-encrusted leg elevated on two pillows…. which has just thrown a huge wrench of chaos into my normal sleeping routine.

I can’t see the damn TV with my Star Wars Boot blocking most of the view, so I have to prop up my head with hastily rearranged pillows. Now, instead of my idiot head resting comfortably on pillows 2,4, and 6…in that order….as is my usual custom….. I am forced to swap out pillow 4 with pillow 1…which is usually a side pillow…. but pillow 1 offers more firm support than pillow 4…for watching TV…..except these barbaric savages expect me to actually SLEEP in this position also!! Gah!! I can’t sleep on pillows 2, 1, and 6!! THat’s a TV Configuration!! Not a sleeping configuration!! We don’t subject the Al-Quaeda Terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to these kinds of abuses!

So, my meticulously and precisely planned pillow routine is totally thrown out the window. On top of that, I can’t sleep on my side. And I can’t fall asleep unless I am laying on my side! I have tried rolling my upper body onto it’s side, while keeping my hips and legs straight, but the wife says that terrifying “popping, crackling, and crunching” noises are heard from deep within my fused spine….. so she automatically lets out loud blood curdling screams whenever I even LOOK like I want to try to roll over onto my side.

The need to have the Refrigerator sized bear trap on my leg, and it’s desire to be on two pillows, makes it that I cannot use my sheets or blankets at all. My precious Buzz Lightyear and Batman sheets and comforter are tossed aside so that I can lay on top of the bed…..covered up instead by two small throw blankets….

which..

Belong to the cats!!

I might as well be sleeping on a pet groomers brush! CAT HAIR CITY!! And LuLu, the only of our two cats still svelte enough to still be able to jump onto the bed, does NOT like me using her prized soft kitty blanket! Many times, I have watched as Lulu slowly walks across the bed towards me, purring like crazy, where she will then actually climb atop my chest or stomach, will do the little dance where she happily alternated lifting her little clawless paws up and down into the soft blanket, while still purring like mad, and then I watch as the cat will plop down and actually try to sleep while perched on me.

Not only does this contribute to my TV screen viewing being blocked even further….but the crafty little fart ALWAYS plops down so that she is FACING the TV!! Yes, I lay there, struggling to see “Keeping up with the Kardashian’s” on the TV, as a furry little kitty Tailpipe and tail are perched just inches from my face!

And then there is the temperature. I love sleeping in a cold room. I love being forced to snuggle under a warm pile of bedding, with the toes sticking out of course, in a deliciously chilly bedroom. My wife is one that is automatically freezing to death if the temp drops below 75. We are constantly at battle over the temp. Now, since I am laying on top of the bed, with just two small cat hair blankets, and a cat butt perched inches from my nose, I really need that cool air so that I can at least be comfortable in my misery.

The wife bundles up in three pairs of clothing and turns the air down for my benefit. Soon, frost is forming on the TV screen as the wife huddles under her bedding, teeth chattering like crazy. Then, of course, my Antibiotic kicks in. This sucker not only gives you massive diarrhea, but it apparently also gives you MANOPAUSE!! With the air temp in our bedroom now sinking below freezing….. I am quickly laying on the bed screaming at the top of my lungs that “I AM BURNING UP IN HERE!!!! TURN DOWN THE AIR!!! TURN DOWN THE AIR!!!”

The wife turns on the A/C, dumps a bucket of ice on me, and then skates back over to her side of the frozen bed. Two minutes later, the MANOPAUSE kicks back in and I am screaming “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WOMAN!!! YOU’RE TRYING TO FREEZE ME TO DEATH!!! TURN ON SOME HEAT!! I’M FREEZING TO DEATH OVER HERE!! GO GET MY WINTER FUR-LINED CAPTAIN KANGAROO UNDEROOS OUT OF MY DRAWER!!”

Seven minutes later……”GAH!!! I’M ON FIRE!!!! I’M BURNING UP!!! ICE!!! I NEED ICE!!!!”

At this point, the wife reached behind her nightstand and held out a small box in my direction. She shook the box. It rattled like my favorite candy.

“Idiot…would you like some nice Skittles to help you sleep?” (shake shake shake)

“Sure!”

I held out my hand and smiled as she shook a handful of the little treasures into my paw.

I threw the handful of Skittles into my mouth and immediately was struck by how bitter and nasty they were. I reached up for my overhead lamp and clicked on the light. There was my grinning wife, holding a box of rat poison pellets.

“Sleep tight Idiot…. Sleeeeeep tight”

Gah!

Gee Whiz….. It’s not like I am hard to take care of or anything!!

—————-

In reality, sleeping is the biggest problem right now. I truly cannot get comfortable with that contraption on my leg, with my legs always elevated, and with having to sleep on my back. I slept for two solid months on my back after my back surgery nightmare and it was one of the worst parts of the whole ordeal. The Nurse said that we could start taking off the boot at night if my leg could tolerate it, so last night, we did just that. My wife took off the boot at about 10pm and we rested my bandaged leg on the pillows, with my looking forward to the first good night’s sleep in a week. No such luck. I could not get the foot comfortable no matter what position I layed in and if anything, I was real paranoid about my good foot, or even the wifes feet, accidentally smacking the bandaged foot during the middle of the night. So, for the time being, I’m going to continue to keep the boot on 24 hrs a day until the foot heals up better.

————————————–

Finally, as far as the photos of the glorious new foot….. I think I have finally figured out how I will explain away all the lovely new scars on that foot and ankle…..

Monday evening

Idiot household

Christmas a day late.

The idiot is given a temporary parole from the bedtop prison and actually ventures outside the bedroom for the first time in 6 days.

He shuffles out of the room and is blinded by the bright lights now washing over him. The house seems so much larger than he remembered. The air smells so clean…. His frail and trembling arms struggle to support his weight on the walker as the idiot pauses to fully take in this glorious taste of freedom. Out of nowhere, a beautiful bird glides down and lands on the idiot’s shoulder. A bunny hops across the room and plops itself in front of the trembling idiot. The idiot is overwhelmed. A tear streams down his cheek.

He is like a prisoner being released from years in solitary confinement at Alcatraz.

The wife is standing just inches away, watching this heart-wrenching scene play out in front of her….

“Good Lord Idiot! Man up! You’re only 6 freakin inches past the bedroom door!”

My glorious walk to freedom takes me all of 3’8″ from the bedroom doorway, where I am quickly directed to sit down on the end of the couch.

And then, minutes later, the idiot, who has been home alone for the past 50+ hours, finally gets to enjoy a belated Christmas Dinner with his family.

Well, he actually got to enjoy Christmas Dinner ALONE sitting on the couch, while the rest of the gathered family all ate at the kitchen table. (Start sad sympathetic sigh now….)

The Idiot can only hear bits and pieces of the lively and disturbing conversation taking place from across the house. With only being able hear the most random intelligible words, the idiot quickly comes to the conclusion that the family is talking about “rusted aardvark piano-playing incontinent cheese-makers”…

Seeing that typed out, the idiot is thankful he dined alone. The family is obviously completely insane.

After Dinner, it was time to open presents. Thankfully, the family did choose to actually join me in the living room for this part of the family tradition. After opening gifts of clothing, gift cards, and a Novel Writing software program, the idiot was now tired after having been up for nearly 2 hours.

So, it was back to bed for the idiot, while the family (Wife, Son, Daughter, Daughter’s Boyfriend/Fiance, Daughter’s BF/F’s son, and my Parents) all sat out in the dining room enjoying dessert, laughing, joking, and actual human contact.

Tuesday.

D-Day.

Back to the Doc’s office for dressing change.

Time for the first peek at the foot.

*Warning*

Do not view if squeamish or if eating Italian food.

The Surgeon was in surgery, so I saw his Nurse. D’Aun was standing by with her cell phone camera as the new and improved foot was unveiled for the first time.

The first thing I noticed was that I could now see my little toe for the first time in many years. The first thing the Nurse noticed was the redness and swelling was much greater than would be expected after a week. Before you knew it, I was laying there with D’Aun snapping pics on her phone, as the Nurse snapped pics on her own phone, so that she could send the pics across the street to the Doc. Ya gotta love modern technology. Bottom line, the Doc contacted the Nurse back and said everything was OK. I was bandaged back up and given an appt to see the Doc himself next Tuesday, the 4th of January. Provided I do not need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I can remove the boot while I sleep. (yay!) I will also start getting up more during the day and will even make trips to my computer desk to get back to work on my book. Still no weight-bearing at all on that leg, which totally sucks, but I was told to expect a full month before being able to put any weight on that foot.

So, one week after surgery….things are progressing well.

Here in Texas, it’s “Take everything back to Wal-Mart Day”.

For those of you that do have to return an item to Wally World today, please remember to have your vaccinations up to date and don’t get within biting range of any of the other customers.

The most memorable Christmas of my life has now passed.

As a Wise Man I know, Don Davis, likes to say…… “It’s all part of the experience”.

It’s safe to say that I will never forget my solitary Christmas trapped here on Goat Island.

I have enjoyed looking at friends Facebook photos of their children and themselves displaying the treasured gifts that Santa brought them.

Here in Texas, most of the adult’s pics include smiling people holding up huge bottles of alcohol, as the recipient also models his/her’s newest piece of camouflage apparel.

The wife and kid are due back today around lunchtime.

We are scheduled to have our Christmas this evening, with my parents also coming down, and supposedly, the daughter and her newest “fiance” (who we have never met) also coming here to the house. We are going to get me out of the Master Bedroom/Bathroom for the first time in 6 days. I am still figuring out which pair of Underoos to wear for the occasion, “Casual” or “Formal”?

My Dad has been coming down this past weekend in order to feed and water me. He has been bringing his new puppy, “ODIE”, who has to be the friendliest and happiest little creature on the face of the planet. Thanks to Odie, I am now completely crumb-free, and my skin is now sparkly clean….though I now smell of dog slobber.

I am seriously thinking of getting myself a puppy once I have recuperated enough to where I can safely take care of it. I tell people that I want a “Newfie” (Newfoundland) puppy so that I can have a Monstrous 300lb mutt to carry me everywhere I need to go after any future surgeries. I don’t think the wife will go with the newfie idea. What breeds would you recommend? I need something that is going to remain fairly small, something that will follow me everywhere I go, a breed that is not known as a biter, something that will not chew on my satellite remote, and preferably, a breed that barks in a cute foreign accent. I am eager to hear your suggestions.

Tomorrow, I will go back to the Doctor in order to get the bandages changed on the foot and ankle. I cannot tell you how nervous/excited I am to see that foot in the brief moment that it is unwrapped. I can see portions of the bandages through the brace and there is no sign of drainage or any visible blood stains, though they told me that such drainage was normal. So, I think things must be healing real well in there, which is great. I have not had any fever in the past 6 days, and my toes are still the normal color, so I think the circulation is cooperating beyond expectations. I might be jinxing the Heck out of myself, but I think that everything has been going great with my recuperation so far. I have scaled back to needing pain medication only about every 8 hours or so, and so far, knock on wood, there have been no major bathroom issues. Bottom line: Red River, here I come!

Ya’ll have a great day!

I just wanted to take a brief break from my over-medicated lunacy in order to wish you all a very happy and safe holiday season.

Thank you for all the kind comments, emails, FB messages, and phone calls. An idiot could not ask for a better family of friends.

For those of you that celebrate Christmas, I hope that you have a truly blessed day and that Santa was extra good to you this year.

While there are many better ways to spend a Christmas than being home alone and stuck in bed for a week, I am hopeful that the bandaged and braced foot and ankle, now propped in front of me, turns out to be the best Christmas present I could possibly be blessed with.

Have a great day Friends.

PS…. U might appreciate the fact that I have unknowingly decorated myself for Christmas. I shuffled into the bathroom this morning to wash up at the sink and noticed in the mirror….that my entire upper body is encrusted with red, green, and blue glittery sprinkles from all the Xmas cookies I have eaten while lying in bed. No wonder the cat always wants to lay on my chest……

Christmas has been my favorite time of year
for as long as I can remember
though it really gets hard
when stores now decorate in fricking September

I used to enjoy shopping
and for a guy I did it quite well
now I just want to grab the ringers by the collar
and beat them to death with their bell

The Black Friday sales at Wal-Mart
used to have me being a believer
but more than two hours in that god-awful store
and I need vaccinations against tetanus, rabies, and yellow fever

Christmas Specials on the TV when I was a kid
Were some of the very best
What is the world coming to today..
When CBS’s Santa Claus is freakin Ryan Seacrest!

I myself am a big burly guy
cursed with snow white hair atop my idiot head
if one more snot-nosed kid calles me Santa
I’m gonna scream some obscenities that would make truckers blush beet red

Christmas might be a little late this year
as Santa is off at a tropical wedding soaking up the sun and the golf
as Untalented Hollywood Bimbo Kim Kardashian
Is having a lavish Island wedding as she marries Santa’s trusty Rudolph

Christmas Eve will soon arrive
With my youngest son tucked snugly in his bed
with visions of scantily-clad cheerleaders holding X-BOX’s
dancing in his adolescent little head

Blog friend Cheryl had a great idea
for when your children have caused your Christmas spirit to be diluted
just give them presents of batteries
with a note saying “Toy not Included”

Our cats are having some serious digestive issues
which is digustingly easy to see
as little tootsie rolls are left scattered around the house
bristling with little pieces of undigested branches from our tree

I secretly bought a little puppy
with which to surprise my lovely bride
but the box under the tree is totally quiet
leading me to think the doggie might have died
She had always figured the box
was a diversion to hide a small gift card from Kohl’s
Now with the box silently laying there
I guess I should have thought about putting in air holes

I ask the wife what she wants for Christmas
causing her to ramble on about peace, love, and happiness being her only Mission
But if I happen to pass the local dealership while shopping
she really wants a new 2012 Ford Expedition

I try to remind her that there are many people not so fortunate
poor souls who are in no way inferior
She says she knows this, so don’t splurge with the leather,
just go with the upholstery interior

I know this Holiday for many beliefs
is not a real fun day
so to my Brother and all his Jehovah’s Witness friends I say
Have a very merry Sunday!

And when the wonderous day has arrived for the family
as I add to the fire with a fresh log
I can already here my wife screaming…
“Really Idiot??? You bought me a dead dog?”

I know this poem has probably sickened most of you
and may have added to your holiday woes and ills
I blame the effects of the Skittles, Cakes, Cookies, and Mountain Dew
And a truckload of the really good pain pills

In all sincerety, a heartfelt Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all
for you friends are all part of a very special group
Now, if you will excuse me
I really need to poop.

Fa-la-la-laaaaa la-la-laaaaaaaaaaa

First of all, a very Merry Christmas Eve and Happy Festivus to all of you out in Blogville.

I was honored by blog friend H.E. ELLIS with a request that I provide her blog with a guest post Christmas Poem. You can read the result at www.heellisgoa.com . Thanks for the fun H.E.! Please check out the post and her wonderful blog when u get a chance.

http://heellisgoa.com/2011/12/24/the-idiots-christmas-poem/

10:06am – The wife and kid depart for the long drive to the in-laws.

It’s now the idiot and his two cats for the weekend.

10:13am – Uh oh

While reaching across the bed to reach a nearby bag of skittles (breakfast)…. the idiot accidentally knocks his satellite remote onto the floor beside the bed.

Oh crap!

I made it 7 freaking minutes!

The idiot cat camped out by my feet, (LuLu), looks down at the remote, looks back at me, and then yawns widely before laying her head back down on the bed.

She is obviously going to be of no help to me.

I remember that the wife was supposed to leave my elongated plastic grabber thingy somewhere on the bed, for use in emergencies just like this…

I sit partially upright and scan the bed…

Sure enough, just beyond the dozing cat, is the familiar blue handled grip of the grabber!

I yell out…

“YESSSSS!!!!!!”

Which, of course, startles the cat awake, causing her to flinch…..and she then promptly knocks the grabber thingy onto the floor.

Gah!!!

Good Grief….. where are my pain pills? I’m gonna need to take a handful just to survive the first half hour at home alone!

I take some pain pills and then glance around the bed nest to survey my options.

I need something to toss over the side of the bed that I can use to snag the remote. To heck with the grabber thingy…it can stay on the floor all weekend…. I can’t survive without my satellite remote!! I’m not a savage!!

At the foot of the bed is a Hope Chest. Atop the chest is a laundry basket, full of the wife’s clean “delicates” that she did not have a chance to get put away before she left.

“Delicates” can be fashioned to make a makeshift rope or snare to use to snag the remote and pull it close enough to the bed to where I can reach down and pick it up!

I roll off of my pillow mountain and start dragging my idiot body, on my belly and chest, across the huge expanse of the bed. Of course, I do not notice that with each inch I pull my body forward, I am quickly removing about an inch worth of shorts from my idiot groin area. The wife was kind enough to outfit me with new underoos before she left and apparently “SpongBob” was now stuck on a sheet or something and the underoos were now being pulled down towards my knees as I struggled across the bed.

I reached the foot of the bed and rolled over onto my back in exhaustion. I reached into the basket and grabbed a handful of panties and bra’s with which to make my remote snagging device….

The pain killers, coupled with the physical exhaustion of squirming across the bed, caused me to get real drowsy.

It is not easy to knot together female delicates into a satellite remote retrieval tool….while under the influence of some powerful pain killers….. just sayin….

Uh Oh

I Start to hear “All along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix blaring in my drugged up brain.

Unconsciousness is soon to follow…..usually seconds after the musical auditory hallucinations begin….

And that was it…

I was out like a light.

Lying on my back at the foot of my bed.

Where I would remain until 12:10pm when my Father would arrive at the house to feed me lunch.

And, of course, Dear Dad had arranged to bring by the Pastor, his wife, and his three small children, in order to pay me a visit, and soon the whole gaggle of people were standing at the foot of my bed…

Where I lay unconscious, on my back, underwear hanging down to my knees, mouth hanging open, drool pouring out onto my chin, as I clutched a handful of women’s panties and bra’s……

Sigh….

This recuperation totally sucks!

The Great Underoo Nightmare of 2011 continues….

Yes, I am STILL trying to figure out how to actually dress myself….with the bulky boot and the crippled leg not making things easy for me.

This afternoon, I shuffled off to the toilet….yet again.

I was sitting on the throne, minding my own business, when I looked down and noticed my underoos bunched up around my ankles and the brace. They were like RIGHT THERE!! Just inches away from my grasp. I got to thinking that sitting on the toilet puts me into a position that is probably the best I will find when it comes to trying to dress myself. I looked at the walker perched right in front of me. My mind busily tried to picture scenarios in which I could pull my own pants on and off, over the boot, while sitting on the toilet, while using the walker for its added benefit.

Hmmmmmm……

I got a mental picture in my idiot brain of a way that MIGHT work…

I wriggled, moaned, and groaned…and finally managed to wrangle my underoos off of my body and free and clear of the brace. Yay!

I then grabbed the underoos and set them on my lap.

I leaned over and gently lifted the walker up off the floor.

I positioned the walker so that is was standing upright, straddling my knees….

I then took the underoos and spread the left leg hole as wide as I could get it….

I then took the spread underoo leg and spread it between two legs of the walker so that the walker legs were now holding my spread underoo leg in place…

Damn this is a smart idea!

Now, all I have to do…is lower the walker so that the spread underoos are down at floor level…gently lift my crippled leg and boot through the hole…reach down and release the underoos from the walker’s grip….and then.. TA DAAA!!!! My Underoos will be on my body…..all by myself!!!

I lowered the walker, with the Buzz Lightyear underoos spread far and wide, towards the floor and watched in horror as the walker barely grazed my leg….

TWANG!!!!!

The Underoos were launched like a taut rubber band and were sent flying across the room…

I let out a few loud choice obscenities which soon sent the wife and kid bolting into the bathroom to check on me.

With only the most recent issue of People Magazine protecting my dignity as I sat naked on the toilet, I politely asked the wife to get me some clean clothes so that she could help me dress.

She, of course, wanted to know where my current underwear were now residing…

But, before I could reply, the kid broke out into loud laughter and started screaming at his Mom to look across the room…..at the Buzz Lightyear Undies now hanging from the shower head……

The wife looked down at my shamed face…

“Idiot? How in the heck did you….over there?…how?…..”

I just sighed.

“Don’t ask…. just don’t ask….”

Here is the last photo taken of the foot….as it was. The Surgeon came in before I was wheeled into the OR and he actually wrote “YES!” on my bad foot in sharpie.

We have no idea what the foot looks like now, and won’t until I get the dressings changed next Tuesday. Even with the boot, the foot still wants to lay on it’s left side, but we are hoping that this is just muscle memory from the last 13 years and not a sign that the surgery did not work.

We are extremely anxious to see the foot next week to see if it looks straighter.

So far, things are going fine. No signs at all of fever or any indications of infection, which is a great relief. I am back on the blood thinners and have been keeping the leg elevated 23.5 hours a day….so hopefully the risk of another blood clot is greatly reduced.

….

No, our local Wal-Mart does NOT sell KKK robes……. (though I would not be shocked if they did…)
That was just my warped mind under the influence of pain medications. I was talking to my Dad on the phone and were discussing robes…..and then “click”….the idiot lightbulb in my head clicked on….. and the next thing ya know, the idiot is ordering Klansmen robes online from Wal-Mart….

——

Our daughter came by to see me last night for the first time since the surgery. Her first words for her poor wounded Daddy when she walked into the bedroom?

“Ewwwww…What died? It smells like wet goat in here!”

See… I told ya so!

I’m gonna need to splash on some more of that “Sex Monkey for Men” cologne next time I get up. It should mask the wet goat smell.

…….

The wife and kid are going home to her parents house for Christmas. They will be gone Sat-Mon. This is a family tradition that we have done every year and I did not want them to miss it. There is not much for them to do here but watch me lying on the bed, so I insisted that they go. My parents will check in on me periodically and will bring me Dinner on Christmas. You know me, as soon as the wife and kid leave, I will be on the phone within about 20 seconds and will be calling my Dad….. “Daddy…..will you come wipe my butt please?”

Actually, I have other ulterior motives for wanting the wife and kid out of the house at Christmas.

They are due to leave by about 9am on Saturday morning.

Which means….

10am – Margarita Festival and Pool Party begins.

11am – Wet T-shirt and Wet Underoo Contest poolside.

12pm – Conga Line commences….. crippled idiot with walker will lead procession…..

1pm – Disco Karoake and Jell-o shots

2pm – Nap Time

4pm – Endless Chalupa and Sushi Buffet opens

5pm – Mechanical Bull riding competition

6pm – Seductive Underoo Fashion Show presented by Victoria’s Secret

7pm – Idiot loses consciousness

Some of you dear readers had some wonderful suggestions such as wearing a kilt, a nightgown, or that I should just lay around in the buff all day.

This got me to thinking…

uh-oh

I figured I needed a plain white pullover body-length lightweight robe like all the Muslim Gentlemen in the Middle East wear.

Due to being trapped in bed, I got online and started searching for such a robe.

Of course, I found one at Wal-Mart.com.

As it turned out, they have them in stock at our local store.

I sent the wife out to buy me three such robes.

She brought home the boxes and I told her to put one box in the bathroom with instructions that I would go in, change myself into the robe, all by myself, thereby proving to her and the family that I can indeed now dress myself.

I got into the bathroom, sat on a stool that we have placed in there for me, and pulled on the comfortable white garment over my head.

It was easy!

Underneath the robe, things were still roaming wild and free….but at least I was now covered up!

I shuffled out using my walker and modeled my new outfit for the wife.

She was speechless.

I shuffled the walker around in a full circle so that she could admire my new outfit from all angles.

She just stood there….mouth hanging open….eyes as wide as saucers….

I grinned like a happy camper…

“And look Honey! It comes with a built-in hood!! An “All-Weather” hood that has two eye holes but keeps your whole head dry!”

The wife turned beet red….

“Idiot!! Did ya not notice the huge Cross on the back of the robe????!!!…..Good Lord Idiot!!! You had me pick up freaking KKK robes for you!!!!!”

I was shocked.

I looked in the mirror across our bedroom.

And saw the shocking sight of a crippled and booted idiot…clutching onto a walker…..wearing a full KKK Clansman outfit…….

Which, apparently are on sale at our local Wal-Mart….

No way Jose…

I’m just going to commando for now on……

48 hrs since the surgery.

Things are getting ugly.

And the Idiot is starting to smell like a goat.

A few minor issues have cropped up that were not anticipated.

That left leg that is now encased in the Darth Vader boot….has been partially paralyzed since 1999. I am not able to lift and bend the leg very well on a good day. Add a huge bulky brace into the equation and we have found that I cannot manipulate the leg enough to……..put on, or take off, my own damn underoos or shorts! gah!!

Imagine if you will, the idiot, shuffling out of the bathroom, using the walker to support all his weight, commando from the waist down, as his “Finding Nemo” underoos are hopelessly wadded and tangled around his Darth Vader brace after repeated attempts to pull his own pants back up.

sigh…..

So, this is going to be interesting.

Innocent family members and friends that may come by to visit, better prepare themselves for some comical soft-porn as I attempt to untangle my big boy panties off of my brace……

The pain on Wednesday evening was horrific. It got to where I could not go past 3 hours without pain pills. Today, knock on wood, is a little better so far. Obviously, the pain is the worst whenever I have to get up to use the bathroom.

Which is like ALL THE FREAKING TIME….. I think I got the bladder of a baby goldfish…..

I am doing as instructed and have been camped on the bed since I got home from the hospital. I will paint a pic of my nest for ya.

I got my left leg propped up all day and night on two huge pillows. Due to this, we can only see half of the screen of the TV at the foot of the bed. I have the wife’s laptop and my pop-tart netbook on the bed here beside me. I have a small table to my right that has 5 different medications. I have a large jug of flavored water that I drink throughout the day, I have a large bag of skittles on the headboard over my right shoulder, and two bags of Hershey’s milk chocolate over my left shoulder. Beside me on the bed are, the satellite remote, a cordless house phone, my cell phone, glasses, and LuLu the cat….who has been faithfully camped out with me for most of the day and night. And then, of course, I got the Playgirl Magazine centerfold action going on…with my dang underwear still wadded around my brace…where it will stubbornly remain until I can figure out how to dress myself.

Which might take me awhile…..

Also, we have a battle going on here…within my idiot body.

In one corner, we have the diarrhea inducing antibiotics….which causes everyone in the family to gasp and grimace whenever I sneeze or cough…just in case all Hell breaks loose…if you know what I mean. In the other corner, we have the dam-building and highly constipating narcotic pain killers, which are quickly alleviating all fears of a sneeze or cough poopapocolypse….

Translation…. we are at a stale-mate……. I got nothing.

Something will have to give and soon. A guy can only eat so many skittles and chocolates before nature must take its course. I’m just praying the war is resolved AFTER I figure out how to pull up the underoos….

Speaking of #2….

You may remember my recent obsession with…. the “P” word…..in the days before this surgery…

Yep… Pooping

Well, apparently, this will NOT be an issue….even with the 10 Gallon bucket of pain pills that I have…

You Nurses will know the punchline when I tell you that I am on Clyndamycin Antibiotics….four times a day…for like the rest of my natural life.

Clyndamycin is known for one major side effect…

DIARRHEA…… BAD DIARRHEA…… Like…. I might lose 100 lbs the hard way Diarrhea………

Just fricking Wonderful!

That, and I am kind of miffed at my Pharmacy at the moment.

They gave D’Aun all my medications but did not tell her some important info regarding the Clyndamycin….

Tuesday evening, I started feeling REAL ILL….temporarily interrupting my tear-jerking rendition of “The Theme from Barney”…. (Yep…the idiot’s singin kids songs now…) “I love you…you love me…we’re a happy famileeeeee”

I did some research on the Clyndamycin and found that you have to be sitting up for 30 minutes after each dose, or you can develop severe nausea, vomiting, heartburn……and DIARRHEA…….

So, of course, I was laying here in bed, on my back, on Doctors orders…….when I started to feel like I was gonna barf up a water buffalo. Thankfully, sitting up on the bed, along with 2 Christmas cookies, provided a quick recovery. I will be chewing out the pharmacy in the near future though.

I was still in LaLaLand when the Surgeon came out to talk to the family after the surgery. Word to the wise, never let your demented Father repeat exactly what the Surgeon says about the gory details of your surgery. Apparently, my procedure was akin to a gruesome scene out of the movie “SAW”…with four different quadrants of my foot and ankle being carved open, spread apart, followed by tendons and ligaments being cut, dragged, pulled, and then re-attached…with a power drill…DEEEEEP down into the bone……

This is where I passed out during the remainder of the rest of the details…. So, Dad got his long-awaited revenge for my little practical joke where I told his new Doctors office that he was trans-gendered and awaiting his big surgery.

The Doc also said my heel bone is now crooked, thanks to the foot itself now being straight, and that I need another surgery on it sometime down the road. I don’t know the actual details of how he will do the surgery, but my giggling Dad tried to paint a picture of the Doc just sawing off my heel bone with a rusty handsaw and no anesthesia. I’ll wait till I talk to the Doc again personally before I let you know what he really intends to do.

And finally, I think I set a new record for quickest surgery and discharge. I was wheeled into surgery and then was sitting in my car just 2.5 hours later. The Recovery room experience was kinda like..

“Mr. Packawack……wake up Mr. Packawack….”

(mfffffff)

“OK..He’s waking up….get the wife back here…..”

(nffffffff)

“OK Mr. Packawack….your wife is gonna help u get dressed while I take out your IV….”

“OK Mr. Packawack….just sit down in this wheelchair while I take you down….. Mrs. Wackypack….you get the car and meet me at the front door in 37 seconds….”

(mffffffff!!)

“OK Mr. Packawackypack…..it’s been a pleasure…..good luck to you….I hope you feel better soon….”

(Mfffffftttttt!!!!!)

“Mrs. Wackalckapack….what’s your husband trying to say? I don’t understand…”

Wife glares at Nurse.

“I think he wants to know when you are gonna take his breathing tube out of his throat”

“Oops….I knew I was forgetting something…..Mr. Packastack…just lean your head way back on your vehicle headrest while I yank this puppy out real quick….”

It only took about 2 hours before the wife FIRST resorted to extortion…

Something happened that I said would be good blog material….at which point she asked me if I really wanted to blogging anything about her….while my care rests solely in her hands….

AS to what she actually did that I found funny….I honestly can’t remember….. I blame the pain medication.

Four hours after arriving home, she “accidently” whacked my bad foot with my own walker…for the first time.

I having taking to singing the Barry Gibb high-notes of all the Bee Gees classic hits during the worst pain episodes….and getting whacked with the walker launched me into a stirring rendition of “Staying Alive” that really would have been worthy of an honorary Grammy Award.

Just in case any of you have some pull with the Grammy Folks…

And Jamie….. NO….. I will NOT allow D’Aun to film me singing!! So…you better hope she can catch me when I am not looking….

The pain really comes in waves at the moment. I expect tomorrow to be the worst day…and then things should slowly improve each day. My toes are exposed, so we will watching them like a hawk to gauge the circulation in the foot. I go back to the Doc next Tuesday to get the bandages changed. I have orders from the Doc to stay in bed for the week except to go to the bathroom.

I’ll go into more detail about what the Doc did and said tomorrow…… in between renditions of “Jive Talkin” and “Nights on Broadway”…..

As of right now, I don’t have any regrets about choosing to have the surgery. I can’t wait till next week for the bandage changing so I can see if the foot is noticeably straighter!

Time for another round of happy pills…..so I will see ya’ll on my next post in the morning.

See ya!