Friday, December 13, 2019

REVEALED

The answer came this morning in a call from the hospital. It was my physician's nurse and she was calling to tell me that the 563 X-rays they put my leg through last week have been looked at by either a radiologist or a very highly trained monkey and the answer to the pain in my knee was revealed.

Yes, I'm going to string this out because why not. It's too ridiculous for words. However, let me reveal to you that I was in considerable pain in the right leg about 17 years ago and asked my then father-in-law about it and speaking as a doctor of nuclear medicine who really doesn't like radiologists, he took me in to his hospital and had me X-rayed to see if any of the screws holding that 15 inch plate in my leg had come loose. Not at that time.....

Now? Now they say one screw near the top has come out and is drifting around in there which explains quite a lot of the pain if not the swelling. The knee doesn't bend without considerable pain and mostly it prefers to sit fully extended and man-stretch; if you will. No, it doesn't go wide, it goes straight out in front of me where anybody can trip over it and earns nasty looks from people trying to walk by who don't know that it doesn't bend and just assume I'm being an asshole.

I just went looking online for a book I'm reading now because it turns out that I no longer like paperback books especially ones with really firm spines. I bought it first in 1980 and it's a little long in the tooth but well worth rereading. Lee Correy wrote some good stuff under that name. I was less impressed with the stuff he wrote under his own name. It came out in 1980 and falls well into the yawning gap of copyright malarky. It may not show up on digital format for another 50 years.

To this day I cannot throw in a semicolon without thinking back to how the Exile in Portales used to school us on the proper semicolon employment and grammar. I'll accept that I'll never learn.

9 comments:

(not necessarily your) Uncle Skip said...

I miss Buck.

HMS Defiant said...

Yea, me too.

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

I hope you can get the screw taken care of, soon.

capt fast said...

those who think we are assholes for any reason reflects poorly on themselves. they have no clue what other people are involved with unless it is on a soap opera on daytime tv and had institutional scab picking performed on it by the cast of "the view"(a tv show staring such emotionally blind and intellectually deaf women that one simply wonders if they are self funded or what).

HMS Defiant said...

I need the stick and carry it but not all the time. I'm good for short trips but I have not, since I stopped being an OOD been able to stand for any period of time. I can walk, walk in circles if need be but to simply stand, not me. I have to confess, I saw some of the things back when I was young and didn't really understand the underlying pain. I have to admit, I saw a new doctor last week when I went in and before the knee blew up. I'm the last one of 10,000,000 Americans who told their doctor it hurt but I'm good. She looks at my med prescriptions and says we can update this.........but you're not taking any.

I'm not a Marine or a seal. I don't think pain is something or other leaving the body. I took that x-ray and the 06 (me) gave it to the doctor and told him I was not under any circumstances doing the daily dozen and jumping jacks. My boss, the commodore was OK with that, I used to run retrograde around the NOLF IB and pass him on the way. He was satisfied that I was not turning into a fat exercise shy kind of guy. My leg would handle running but the lateral stress of side straddle hops, no way.

I've had a blue tag for years. I got it for something else. It still bugs me to see people with no excuse using them. They pop out of the car and scurry.

When is the last time you ever saw in writing anybody use the word scurry?

My sister-in-law and brother still park in people in handicap spaces and call the police on fakers. They're bound to get shot some day but then, she used to cut hoses on yards that were getting sprinkled during the first great San Diego drought.

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

Scurry is an excellent word!

HMS Defiant said...

One of the titles I enjoyed back in the day, Wordsmith. I never write it now without thinking of Terry Pratchett. There was a wordsmith. He and just a handful of others had THE POWER.

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

The loss of Sir Terry was a blow to writing, and to humor.

Paul L. Quandt said...

It appears that we ( you and I ) enjoy a number of the same authors.

Thanks for the post.
Paul L. Quandt