you know how most people have bad backs, bad knees, something like that? yeah. apparently, your elbows can fail you, too. two months ago, i had to shovel snow every other day for two weeks straight. this involved not only tossing a total of about 4 feet of snow off our driveway and sidewalk, but also beating the holy hell out of as much as an inch of ice so i could scrape that off, too. apparently, this went beyond the sphere of “good upper body workout” and smack in the middle of “permanent damage to your aging joints, you dipshit.” i had to admit the soreness, pain, and intermittent numbness were a problem when they were joined by several fingers going dead white, cold, and completely numb for hours on end. an appointment in orthopedics ended with a diagnosis of cubital tunnel syndrome, and a month of curtailed activities and wearing some dead-sexy elbow pads. at the end of that month, it was a little better, but definitely not all better – so i wore the pads for another month, and really scaled back the activities. at this point, i’m down to no fencing, no banjo, no violin, no snowboarding, and a really limited repertoire of sexual positions. (think about it. how many sexual positions don’t involve bracing yourself with your arms in some way? yeah.) on top of that, i’ve now had to ask PRM to do all the vacuuming, mopping, and lifting of laundry and dishes, which is just what he needs in the middle of a 6-month period of his residency class taking twice as much call as normal (to buy themselves 6 call-free months at the end of their residency to study for their final board exam.)
unfortunately, it’s steadily gotten worse. i spent a couple of hours last weekend staring at a white, then purple left arm that felt like it was under alien control. it finally started to go back to “normal” (which at this point is about 30% incapacitated) just a couple of shades shy of crayola’s newest color, “time to go to the emergency room puce.” yeah, i’m thinking i might not make it to the fencing tournament i had registered for this saturday. dammit.
k. so i have another appointment with ortho friday, during which i think we will schedule surgery. this appointment will be just a couple of hours after i get a probably very stoned and/or grumpy MonkeyBeef out of HIS surgery to slap some tubes in his eardrums and un-deaf his stupid little ass. i’m sure he’ll be SUPER impressed with yet another doctor’s office at that point, to a degree that maybe can’t be solved by obscene amounts of candy.
anyway, the basic point here is, we’re kind of busy. on top of the call schedule and the bitchwork, PRM is trying to get his exact snoring/non-restful sleep issues diagnosed and solved. so, he finished off a 6-day run of 14-hour night shifts last saturday morning, tried like hell to catch up on sleep and get his schedule reset for work monday morning, and then monday night went straight to the sleep lab to get hooked up to a bunch of fancy machines. the sleep lab lets you go to sleep at 10PM, then wakes you up and kicks your ass out the door at 530AM with a shower and a continental breakfast. so PRM went straight to work tuesday morning at 7AM, and then rolled straight from that into the tuesday night shift. he called to talk tuesday afternoon, and he was calm and happy… and also sounded like he had just smoked a full ounce of the stickiest produce the great state of iowa has to offer. i kept trying to get him to admit he was hallucinating, but he swore up and down he was fine. like, fiiiiiine, duuuuude. it’s all good.
yeah. all i know is, i’d hate to be the guy in the ER trying to carry on a conversation with dude on call in radiology tuesday night.
ER: have you read that study yet?
RAD: the study?
ER: the found-down head CT?
RAD: yeeeeeeeeah. yeah, i think… i think so. yeah.
ER: and?
RAD: duuuuuude.
ER: does the patient need surgery?
RAD: who is this?
yeah. he was tired. but he survived, got home at 4AM, and went right back to work at 1PM today.
so. that’s the big update on the random health complaints of the loser household. the elbow surgeries each (yeah, i managed to fuck up both of them, and i’m assuming they’ll fix them one at a time) have an 8-week recovery period, in which PRM will continue to do all the gruntwork around here at the same time as his bitchin’ double-call schedule. and all the kids will conveniently be out of school. hehehehehhehhee. but so far so good! he gets run down by too much time away from home, and i get depressed about not being able to do any of the things that really make me feel good – i don’t get to be an athlete, i don’t get to be a musician, and i don’t get to do the housework… yeah, i know. i’d be happy as hell to not do the housework if i were shoving it off onto, say, an underpaid illegal immigrant. but i’ve always taken a lot of satisfaction in being able to lighten PRM’s workload so that when he’s not at work, we’re not running errands or cleaning or doing other stupid shit. we’re playing with the kids, playing music, hanging out, enjoying ourselves. kinda sucks right now; on top of the workload mess, my elbows, and PRM’s sleep issues, we’re both trying not to beat ourselves up over assuming that MB’s pediatricians had ruled out fluid in his ears instead of letting it leave him unable to hear speech for who knows how long, and worrying about how hard it’s going to be to get him caught up with the talking thing, when he’s developed some pretty satisfactory non-verbal strategies for taking care of his baby bidness. i don’t think we’ve had this much stress piled on us since the year PRM was finishing his PhD, starting his second year of med school, we had a toddler and two newborns, and $300,000 worth of hospital bills to keep SpazMonkey alive.
somehow, neither one of us has had an emotional meltdown. far from it, actually. we went out for a movie and wings saturday night, and wound up laughing pretty hard about how our only goal for the next three months was to be really, really nice to each other, because we had to be just one hurt feeling away from a front-lawn fist-fight worthy of an episode of cops. i’d like to say that we’re handling this with such grace because of how mature and spiritually evolved we are, but it’s probably more likely that we’re too exhausted to register anything more than a lukewarm “fuck it.”
anyway. enough of that crap for a while. the twits have turned 6, spring has finally arrived and stayed, we’re flying kites and planting tomatoes, and i have lots of other fun stuff i want to talk about in upcoming posts. like pranks. and boobies!
