Monday, March 08, 2010

Song of the Enchondroma, plus bonus Boot-Wearing Excuses!

Today has been a great day.  I took off from work and Kel drove me to Berkeley for x-rays, which I then hand-delivered to my podiatrist, who told me I was healed-up enough to stop wearing my massive velcro boot.  You gotta know, this is big news for Chuckles!  I’m back into wearing two shoes at the same time, ON MY FEET!  I can walk up and down stairs, haul in the garbage cans, and bathe the boys (non-euphemistically speaking)!  Such a sense of freedom.  Such a sense of relief. 

What do you mean, what the hell am I talking about?  Where have you been?  For Gods sake I have been going on about my damn surgery for months now.  But no - you couldn’t be bothered to read any of that, could you?  You were waiting for the movie to come out.  On Blu-Ray.  Well that ain’t gonna happen, chum.  Something about European copyrights, and the Hague Convention, and people not caring very much.  However, you are in luck: I wrote a poem about it instead.  Yes, a poem!  Podiatrist-approved and as gripping as a prehensile toe!  So let me lay it on you so you can keep it forever in your mind:

Song of the Enchondroma

The enchondroma is a cyst
that’s rather cartilaginous
it grows inside a fellow’s bone
and there it lingers all unknown
until persistent low-grade ache
obliges you x-rays to take
Podiatrist or orthopod
will tell you with the voice of God
that you could choose to let it be
and try to live in harmony
with something that will keep on swelling
how much larger, there’s no telling
In time you’ll find that it’s outgrown
the little space inside your bone
Integrity will suffer lossage
just like some overstuffed bone sausage
Better then to cut it out
and biopsy to quash all doubt
and verify that it’s benign
so surgeons thoughtfully design
to drug you up and cut you open
and scoop the sucker out, you’re hopin’
Of course once this has been achieved
of enchondroma you’re relieved
but now you have a vacancy,
a hole where bony stuff should be
but which instead is empty space
so bony stuff they must replace
While you are laid out on your dorsals
they’ll drill some little bony morsels
from someplace you’ve got bone to spare
(the lower tibia won’t care)
So while you’re lying drugged and prone
they stuff those little bits of bone
back into the gaping maw
the tumor occupied before
then stitch you up and send you packing
Enchondroma now you’re lacking
The next six weeks you’ll spend on crutches
and powerful painkillers such as
formulary vicodin
and don’t forget that you are in
a velcro splint to be protective
of the bone erstwhile defective
two months, then you’re finished healing
Doesn’t that just sound appealing?
And that brings me to where there’s no more
to say about the enchondroma.

Now that’s poetry, in the same way as the dog foods that “make their own gravy” actually make gravy.  Which is to say, shut up.  I don’t see you writing any poems about your surgeries.  I think that puts me in the lead. 

Now that I’m finally out of my boot, I will admit that I was getting pretty tired of explaining it to people.  They always figured I’d done something while skiing or skydiving or busting my way into a crackhouse or something, and I always had to explain that it was because I’d had elective surgery, that I hadn’t hurt myself, that everything went great, that I am even more boring than they’d given me credit for.  It’s not like I didn’t have better excuses to wear the boot - I just didn’t have the chutzpah to use them.  But now that it’s all in my past, I think I can share with you some of the reasons for wearing my massive compression boot that I failed to tell anyone while it might have counted for something:

* Lost my foot in a bear trap and it’s only just now growing back
* Related to my second career as a drug mule
* Just a little bit of a podiatric velcro fetish, baby
* My other rocket boot is in the shop
* Built-in metal detector pays for itself in found bus fare
* Right foot is just so powerful that I kept crushing the sidewalk, and wearing the boot is part of my settlement with the city
* Cyber-zombie ninjas got me with an electro-necro shirikin
* Milan couture, dorkbreath

Instead, now I get to say, “what boot?” Unless I’m wearing boots, of course, in which case I’ll say nothing.  In fact, I’ll start now.  Later, dudes.