My wife thoughtfully fell through the garage ceiling just before I was scheduled for a nice, restful 13-day vacation. With all the doctor visits, home care arrangements and wheelchair handling, I didn’t get much rest. But of course, the goal was to get my wife on the healing path, so that she wouldn’t require surgery. Surgery would mean nuts and bolts and pins and plates holding her bones together, and a much longer recovery period.
Yesterday was the day where the doctor would tell us whether surgery would be necessary, and we had been looking forward to it with nervous anticipation.
I woke up at 5:30 to get my daughter ready for school. Because there is a limited supply of school busses, the school districts use them six times every day. The first trip is to get high-school kids to school. The second trip is to get middle-school kids to school. The third trip is to get elementary school kids to school. The process is repeated in reverse later in the day to get kids home. Anyone who has lived with a teenager (or anyone who has actually been a teenager) will tell you that this is completely the opposite of how it should work. Teenagers need their sleep, and are capable of horrible acts of violence against their well-meaning parents, who have to face them and fix them breakfast at that unreasonable hour.
Nonetheless, I was up much earlier than I like, after 13 days of sleeping late. Because I knew I would be up early, I scheduled a dentist appointment that morning at 7:00. I arrived, not yet fully awake, and was ushered into a room containing one of those electrically-operated chairs that can be configured to thousands of positions, none of which are comfortable. I think the CIA uses them for waterboarding.
The dental assistant was new, a woman about my age with a thick accent. I asked her where she was from, and she said, “Poland.”
I said, “Oh that’s interesting. What part of Poland?”
“Southern Poland,” she replied. I should have sensed that she was evading my question.
“Yes, but which city?” I asked.
“Auschwitz.”
I swear I had no idea there was a city where the famous Nazi death camp was located. I just assumed it was out in the countryside somewhere, to provide privacy for the atrocities that would be committed by members of the German Master Race. Where I live, school children are often taken on field trips to the clean, charming theme parks for which the city of Orlando is famous. I didn’t ask the dental assistant where school children in Poland go on their field trips.
I spent the next few minutes struggling to make light conversation, until the dentist arrived to jam a needle into my jaw, injecting what felt like a quart of burning Novocain. Frankly, I prefer a cup of coffee at that hour of the morning.
An hour later, slack-jawed and drooling, I drove home to pick up my wife, who had an appointment at her school to meet with her boss and clean up some paperwork. While we were in her office, a little boy from third grade was ushered in with his teacher. The teacher said, “Josh has something to tell you.”
Josh, looking very uncomfortable, said, “I think I’m in danger.”
My wife asked him what he meant, and he said, “Because bad men might find out that I know the secret code.”
At my wife’s school, there are electronic locks on all the exterior doors, and teachers who take kids out to recess must enter a numeric code to open the doors to re-enter the building. Josh’s teacher explained that he had shown intense curiosity about the code all year, and had been shoulder-surfing to try and learn it. Eventually, he succeeded. His teacher found him telling other students about it, and she had to explain to him why the code was a secret. Now she needed the administration to change the code, and she wanted Josh to know what pain in the ass he had caused. In about 10 years, look for a kid named Josh to be arrested for hacking into the Pentagon launch-control computers.
Finally, we headed off to my wife’s doctor appointment. They took some X-rays, and the doctor peeked at them briefly. I don’t know about you, but I always want doctors to show more interest in my X-rays than they do. It’s the same with auto mechanics. They are professionals, and they’ve seen so many broken bones and leaky head gaskets that they can identify them with just a casual glance. So it always looks as though they’re not paying attention, and might miss something.
He quickly spun around and said, “Everything looks good. No surgery.” He told us that my wife needs to stay off the ankle for 4 more weeks and she can then begin to hobble around. The shoulder will take a little longer, and she’ll need rehab, but probably just what they call “at home” rehab, where she does some exercises on her own time. She’s relieved to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Personally, I’m relieved to be back at work.
Showing posts with label X-rays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label X-rays. Show all posts
Friday, January 5, 2007
Sunday, December 17, 2006
The Evil Pump Genie
Years ago, we owned a house in Boston that was in a kind of depression, sitting lower in the neighborhood than other houses. Shortly after we moved in, a Catholic church up on a hill nearby paved an acre of their property, thoughtfully angling the pavement in such a way that rainwater ran off down the hill, directly into our yard.
Boston is in a part of the country where rainstorms drift in, hang around for three or four days sprinkling the area with a modest drizzle, and then float lazily out to sea. The rainfall was usually light enough that you could walk two blocks without an umbrella and barely get wet. However, once in awhile, a tropical depression would slide up the coast, dumping torrents of rain on the city. When this happened, a sloshing stream of water would flow off the parking lot, filling up our low-lying driveway, and flood the basement. It took a couple of years of legal threats before the church installed storm drains in the parking lot, which pretty much cleared up the problem In the meantime, I bought a portable sump pump.
Whenever it rained hard enough to worry me, I’d break out the pump, slosh through the puddle in my driveway, drop the pump in the lowest point and run the hose out to the street. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes the pump just couldn’t keep up, and we’d spend a week drying out the basement.
When we decided to move to Florida, we thought about selling the pump, but I knew that tropical storms were a regular occurrence in Florida, so we decided to keep it just in case. But we soon discovered that Florida has had lots of experience with tropical storms, and neighborhoods are well-drained. So the pump has been sitting in our attic for a decade.
Recently, a friend of ours told us she was going to have a yard sale, and wondered if we wanted to participate. We discussed the many useless objects we owned, and agreed that the pump has fallen into that category.
There are many variations on the story of Aladdin, but my favorite is the one where the genie was imprisoned in the lamp by a sorcerer, where he remained for 1000 years. During this time, the genie vowed generous rewards to whoever should release him. But over time, the bitterness of his imprisonment turned him against mankind, and he swore to kill whoever let him out of the lamp.
As our pump sat idle in the attic all those years, the genie inside must have undergone a similar transformation. It must have made a chilling decision when it overheard us talking about our plans for the yard sale.
In Florida, storage space is hard to find. Attics are usually accessed by a narrow pull-down ladder between the joists in the garage. Usually, the homeowner buys some plywood and creates a semblance of a floor, on which boxes of Christmas decorations, empty suitcases, unused furniture, childhood memorabilia and other junk is piled in huge, unstable towers.
My wife climbed up the ladder and began sorting through the lifetime accumulation of crap that everybody thinks they will want someday, but which usually becomes a burden for their children to dispose of after their death. She handed down a series of items, including a cane chair with a giant hole in the seat, a trash bag containing a Queen-size egg-crate foam pad that we used to spread on the futon whenever someone would visit (because the futon mattress was like sleeping on bags of QuickCrete), and other bric-a-brac. Eventually, she came across the box containing the pump.
I stood on the attic ladder, and my wife pushed the heavy cardboard box across the flooring to me. I grabbed the box, and executed a pirouette on the attic ladder, so that I could descend facing outward, holding the box in front of me, my behind bumping from rung to rung. You probably think you know what happened next, but you don’t.
My wife returned to her rummaging, as I gingerly stepped down the first rung of the ladder. Suddenly, I heard a loud crash. I was holding the box in front of my face, so I lowered it a bit to look into the attic. I didn’t see my wife, so I demanded to know what had toppled over. Hearing no answer, I lowered the box a bit more, so that I could see across the ceiling of the garage. There, in front of my eyes was a hole the size of my wife. I lowered the box a bit more, and saw her, lying on the garage floor, gasping for breath.
Somehow, I stumbled down the ladder and dropped the pump box. My wife was obviously in pain. She had stepped off the plywood flooring onto the sheetrock that composed the ceiling, which cannot support that kind of weight. She broke through and miraculously landed on the trash bag holding the rolled up foam rubber pad. But she had struck something on her way down and couldn’t move her left arm, or stand on her left foot.
She was able to hobble to my car and I drove her to the hospital. It was about 10 pm. We were swiftly ushered into an emergency room, where she was examined by a Physician’s Assistant and given Percoset for the pain. After several hours, she was taken away for a painful set of X-rays. She had broken the ball joint in her left shoulder and a bone in her ankle, which at this point may require surgery to correct.
We were in the emergency room until 6:30 the following morning, watching reruns of Deal or No Deal. A combination of our confinement and sleep deprivation made me bitter and angry, to the point where I swore I would kill the next medical professional who promised to take care of our needs “in a few minutes.”
The wife-sized hole.
The landing pad.
The contents of the landing pad.
The home of the evil pump genie.
Boston is in a part of the country where rainstorms drift in, hang around for three or four days sprinkling the area with a modest drizzle, and then float lazily out to sea. The rainfall was usually light enough that you could walk two blocks without an umbrella and barely get wet. However, once in awhile, a tropical depression would slide up the coast, dumping torrents of rain on the city. When this happened, a sloshing stream of water would flow off the parking lot, filling up our low-lying driveway, and flood the basement. It took a couple of years of legal threats before the church installed storm drains in the parking lot, which pretty much cleared up the problem In the meantime, I bought a portable sump pump.
Whenever it rained hard enough to worry me, I’d break out the pump, slosh through the puddle in my driveway, drop the pump in the lowest point and run the hose out to the street. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes the pump just couldn’t keep up, and we’d spend a week drying out the basement.
When we decided to move to Florida, we thought about selling the pump, but I knew that tropical storms were a regular occurrence in Florida, so we decided to keep it just in case. But we soon discovered that Florida has had lots of experience with tropical storms, and neighborhoods are well-drained. So the pump has been sitting in our attic for a decade.
Recently, a friend of ours told us she was going to have a yard sale, and wondered if we wanted to participate. We discussed the many useless objects we owned, and agreed that the pump has fallen into that category.
There are many variations on the story of Aladdin, but my favorite is the one where the genie was imprisoned in the lamp by a sorcerer, where he remained for 1000 years. During this time, the genie vowed generous rewards to whoever should release him. But over time, the bitterness of his imprisonment turned him against mankind, and he swore to kill whoever let him out of the lamp.
As our pump sat idle in the attic all those years, the genie inside must have undergone a similar transformation. It must have made a chilling decision when it overheard us talking about our plans for the yard sale.
In Florida, storage space is hard to find. Attics are usually accessed by a narrow pull-down ladder between the joists in the garage. Usually, the homeowner buys some plywood and creates a semblance of a floor, on which boxes of Christmas decorations, empty suitcases, unused furniture, childhood memorabilia and other junk is piled in huge, unstable towers.
My wife climbed up the ladder and began sorting through the lifetime accumulation of crap that everybody thinks they will want someday, but which usually becomes a burden for their children to dispose of after their death. She handed down a series of items, including a cane chair with a giant hole in the seat, a trash bag containing a Queen-size egg-crate foam pad that we used to spread on the futon whenever someone would visit (because the futon mattress was like sleeping on bags of QuickCrete), and other bric-a-brac. Eventually, she came across the box containing the pump.
I stood on the attic ladder, and my wife pushed the heavy cardboard box across the flooring to me. I grabbed the box, and executed a pirouette on the attic ladder, so that I could descend facing outward, holding the box in front of me, my behind bumping from rung to rung. You probably think you know what happened next, but you don’t.
My wife returned to her rummaging, as I gingerly stepped down the first rung of the ladder. Suddenly, I heard a loud crash. I was holding the box in front of my face, so I lowered it a bit to look into the attic. I didn’t see my wife, so I demanded to know what had toppled over. Hearing no answer, I lowered the box a bit more, so that I could see across the ceiling of the garage. There, in front of my eyes was a hole the size of my wife. I lowered the box a bit more, and saw her, lying on the garage floor, gasping for breath.
Somehow, I stumbled down the ladder and dropped the pump box. My wife was obviously in pain. She had stepped off the plywood flooring onto the sheetrock that composed the ceiling, which cannot support that kind of weight. She broke through and miraculously landed on the trash bag holding the rolled up foam rubber pad. But she had struck something on her way down and couldn’t move her left arm, or stand on her left foot.
She was able to hobble to my car and I drove her to the hospital. It was about 10 pm. We were swiftly ushered into an emergency room, where she was examined by a Physician’s Assistant and given Percoset for the pain. After several hours, she was taken away for a painful set of X-rays. She had broken the ball joint in her left shoulder and a bone in her ankle, which at this point may require surgery to correct.
We were in the emergency room until 6:30 the following morning, watching reruns of Deal or No Deal. A combination of our confinement and sleep deprivation made me bitter and angry, to the point where I swore I would kill the next medical professional who promised to take care of our needs “in a few minutes.”
The wife-sized hole.
The landing pad.
The contents of the landing pad.
The home of the evil pump genie.
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