Friday, January 15, 2010
Hey, Wanna See My Scar? Curretage of an Enchondroma of the Hallux, SEXY VERSION!
So it’s been a month, and basically, no, a week. A week? What the hell?!! This is what one week is like, when all I have to do all day and night is stagger around on a massive compression boot, or more properly, off of it? I’ve had more fun having foot surgery, people. Which isn’t saying much. As I am wont to not do.
Let’s get specific, for it is thus that I roll. The surgery went fine, I remember everybody being almost disconcertingly nice and professional, and then there were the circus clowns and their tiny yugo full of nitrous, and kindly Dr Nelson running halfpipes with Susan Boyle, and then they worked me over with their podiatric mumbo jumbo, and I left that night with minimal discomfort and a big-ass bandage on my foot, like this:
And yes, I do have more explicit photos. Your SASE gets mine. Or you can just scroll down. Tell you what, I’ll hide the most gruesome ones a little bit. For the sensitive souls among you. Heh.
So, that’s what I looked like for the first weekend, during which I ate a lot of painkillers (Norco, for those who want dirty details, 10 mgs) and floated pretty comfortably through my days. “Don’t let the pain get ahead of you,” they warned me. This just roused my competitive spirit and I’m delighted to report that I CRUSHED pain. It stood no chance. My spaced-out ass felt pretty much nothing for a full weekend. And can I tell you? It did not suck. Man, I needed that rest.
But after three days I was ready to get back to my crump classes and kickboxing, so I returned to Kindly Dr Nelson to have my dressings changed. Why bother?, I asked myself at first - then I noticed that, inside my splint, the bandaging actually looked like this:
In the words of the ancients, I know, right? So I decided that new bandages, ones that weren’t soaked in days-old blood, might not be such a bad idea after all. And certainly they’d give me a smaller splint, too. I mean, really, that first one was elephantine. Blood-drenched or not, it was just too damn big. So I arrived to KDN’s follow-up with a light heart, if also with a swollen, splinted, exsanguinated foot. Then they removed my bandages and I got to see what they’d actually done to me. And here’s where I’ll do you the favor of just allowing you to click through if you actually want to see some fairly clinical photos of unremarkable surgical sites, stitched up, brought to you by the Chucklehut POV cam:
So that was cool, to see how I’d been violated and fricasseed and just slapped back together like someone’s trussed up thanksgiving gobbler. But in this case, the delicious stuffing crammed in the cavity was my own morselized bone. So again, very cool. I was delighted to see what actually had happened, and significantly more so to see how tidy and regular all the incisions and stitches were, and how cleanly the recovery was going. It looked a lot more significant, and a lot better, than I’d anticipated.
And then it came time for me to get my new, lightweight, adjustable, maneuverable, super-mobility splint. This would be the fun part. I was counting on something with rocket assist, or at least retractable wheels like a decent piece of luggage for gods sake. So you can imagine how I was not expecting to be sent home wearing this delightful LBD:
In this case, LBD stands for Lugubrious Black Device, of course. It’s really heavy, has large metal components that get really cold at night, and its six thick velcro straps may be adjustable but are not actually comfortable. Yes, I wear it when I sleep. But no, I can actually take it off to bathe, which I finally did yesterday. That was my big excitement from yesterday: I bathed, with the assistance of a plastic stool in the bathtub, a handheld shower head, and a leg condom that unrolled over my (lightly re-bandanged under the massive splint) foot and ankle. The sheath’s small stretchy orifice tightly gripped my massive gastrocenemus, protecting me, prophylactically, if you will, against the fell scourge of bathwater.
It felt really good to clean up a little, even with one leg out of the tub altogether, and in the meantime I was able to work on one of my creative projects for the duration of my recuperation, which henceforward I will refer to as my recuperduration, and to hell with spellcheck for saying that’s not a word. (Hah, it says spellcheck isn’t a word either! Noetic existentialism! or something! maybe not noetics, I just looked it up and it seems to mean something else, but it’s metaphysical so I’ll just let it stand in for whatever idea I thought I was having.) The point here, people, is that I got to work on my craft project: A NOVELTY MUSTACHE. It’s still in the beginning phases and isn’t seeming so very novel, actually, but I’ll see how far it gets before my wife takes matters into her own hands. I only see it in the mirror, which I generally successfully avoid, but she is faced with it all the time. Brutal. And I’ll be honest, my defenses are down.
The other creative project I’ve been working on is that short story, which I’m done writing and am now editing. At this point it actually takes a bunch of time that looks non-productive because the output hasn’t changed in quantity, but the quality thing is worth some time on its own. It’s been gratifying but I’ve held off a lot of other smaller writing projects, and this blog, lo, this blog has suffered for it. Which is really what it’s for. I can be so cruel sometimes. But let’s see if I can make up for it a little bit with this little morsel of an amazingly sweet life:
It’s Zach, elbow-deep in decorating gingerbread. The fellow in the background, lying by himself on the tray, with the orangey bits, that’s the one they made to represent me. I will save it forever. Today is Jesse’s 2nd birthday; we’re having a tiny gathering here on Sunday, but I’m totally useless so it’ll be a sedate affair. Drop me a line if you want to check out an advance version of The Dreydelmaker. I wouldn’t lay it on ya unlessen’ you were ready for it....