Raging Against the Dark -- and the Clumsy

There is an old Peanuts cartoon that I have carried with me since I was a kid:

It has stood me in good stead all these years. I especially enjoy pulling it out when I am being lectured on my negative attitude. Call it the “half-empty” philosophy, but it's still just a bit more accurate than those “half-full” optimists.

I've been reading book two in an inevitable mystery series by Daniel Friedman, a young man who has created an 88-year-old crotchety detective in a way that I know he knows this old guy. A Jewish detective in the 60's in Tennessee, during the battles of the civil rights era. And now he's in an assisted living facility driving everybody crazy, barely able to stand up but still wielding his .357 against the bad guys.

I can really relate to that. I want to go out bitching about getting old; I want to do it loud enough that all those young folk can't ignore it.  And this past week has really been about cursing the darkness, and this time it's not my usual rant about politics and stupidity.

A week ago, on Monday, on a beautiful day, I walked outside and picked up a partially filled water bucket so my tomatoes wouldn't go from hardy to dead in this damned drought. Before it was even off the ground, I felt a pain shoot up from my calf to my thigh and seemed to be en route to my back when in that split second I dropped the bucket.

Something similar had happened before, some 8-10 years ago, on the tennis court, where I was doing absolutely nothing strenuous. Just like this time. It was so painful that I was barely able to walk to the car and then into the house after a painful 10-minute drive from the courts. It was a Friday; I know because I did something I never did, and called in sick for Saturday, on a day we were at half-staff. I also called the Blue Cross hotline, which I had done about every five years, and mostly for my kids. I was assured it was probably a pulled muscle, and sure enough after a couple of days I was back at work.

Back then I had my son to act as a reluctant gopher so I could stay off my injured leg. He was also there to listen to me gripe, which I tend to do when I'm pissed off about not feeling well.

But it's some ten years later, and I'm not just pissed off that I hurt myself doing something that shouldn't have hurt, but I'm here alone and reliving the moment when I thought I felt the pain start to move to my back, and thinking about what I would have done if I had fallen to the deck and not been able to get up. So I have an active imagination. It could happen.

I called Blue Cross, which hotline has gotten more lame as the years since its inception have grown. They have some minimum wage twinkie answering the phone these days, screening before you get to talk to a real nurse. I was in pretty excruciating pain, but I knew I wasn't going to get any help till I had gone through twenty questions. But after I had already identified myself, she – very slowly – informed me that she was going to have to ask me some questions. I took a shallow breath and with astonishing politeness said, “I'm in a lot of pain here, so could you please get on with it?”

For people who answer the phone these days, the emphasis is not getting the caller what they need. It is on being friendly. This is because more often than not, when a customer calls, they are not happy, and chances are pretty good that they are not going to get what they want. So businesses have changed their customer contact model to accommodate this, not by giving people what they want, but by making those poor slobs on the front line be more maddeningly polite, and making their jobs hinge on it. So this young lady who knew her calls were being monitored was going to be upbeat and polite no matter what, and had absolutely no clue about the pain and worry I was trying to convey.

But she kept on. She asked me for my birthdate. I told her it was 7-19-1951, and she said,

“Wow, a summer birthday – that's great!”

I wish I were making that up.

She was also excited about the fact that I lived in South Carolina; I think she either commented on the weather or how pretty it must be, but to be honest, I had stopped listening.

Finally she was done performing and had gotten all the details that she already actually had sitting on the computer in front of her the whole time. She promised me that a registered nurse would call me back in ten minutes.

The registered nurse was certainly an improvement, but after saying she had never heard of my leg pain doing what I claimed it was doing, and ruling out anything BCBS might be sued for if they didn't advise me to go to the ER, I had to ask her if it was okay to take ibuprofen with my other medications and whether I should put ice on it. To be honest, I was just happy to have what I was doing confirmed. I figured the purpose of this hotline was to save BC the cost of hospital care, but if it came down to getting sued for bad advice, they would have recommended the ER.

There was a time when I would have gotten a call back in 24 hours, but this wasn't it.

So when the pain hadn't gone away by Tuesday morning, I called my orthopedist. The last time I saw her was in January and she was getting back from a few days off for the holidays, and she was too busy to talk to me about my concerns about my six-month knee treatments no longer working. I know she has a couple of little kids, and her practice is booming, and I felt concern that she wasn't able to be as good a doctor as she was when she first joined the practice. Not angry, just concern.  And ready to think about finding a new doc.

But I hadn't done it yet, and this time, when I asked for an appointment for the next day, Wednesday, I was told that she had just gotten back from vacation and was booked up. I should wait till the next day and if I was still in pain, I should call my family doctor. Hmmph.

Well, on Wednesday morning, that's what I did. But I didn't want to really believe I was still in that much pain, so I asked for an appointment for Thursday or Friday, and was given 10 a.m. Friday. About an hour later, reality hit and I called back and said that if she couldn't see me right away I would go to the ER. And being the wonderful person that she is, she fit me in that day. And even though she couldn't understand why I was feeling the kind of pain I was feeling, she gave me four different prescriptions, which I was happy to take with me.

I am (she said protesting way too much) not the kind of person that readily takes drugs. This doctor had to frighten me nearly to death (or actual cardiac palpitations) in order to convince me I needed to take Diovan for my blood pressure. And then I had reached a point a year ago where arthritis had flared up so badly in my hands that I couldn't open a water bottle before I was persuaded to go to a rheumatologist. I am now taking Plaquanil, which is this scary stuff that is prescribed for malaria, they don't know why it works for rheumatoid arthritis, and for which I need to see an ophthalmologist once a year just in case the drug begins to make me go blind a rare but actual side effect.

When I had surgery for a torn rotator cuff some six years ago, I took so few oxycodone that I had a bit of a stockpile. Other times when I was in some pain, I considered taking an oxy, but given how evil they are, I had always talked myself out of it.

Not this time. This time I had started taking one-half pill to help me sleep, then moved right along to a whole pill. And when my doctor asked me how many I had left, I lied and told her fewer so she would give me a bigger prescription, just so I didn't run the risk of having to feel that kind of pain at night.

On Friday, when I was still in pain despite all the meds, I called my orthopedist again, and this time asked for an appointment for the following week. Nope. Too busy. And all the partners were too busy as well. But they did agree to put my name up on a sticky note in case there was a cancellation.

Fortunately, by Sunday, I was for the first time feeling like I was definitely on the path to wellness.

I climbed off my porch, three stairs that I have handled cautiously since my knees and I have stopped getting along, and pulled a few weeds. For the first time all week, my little adventure did not cause hours of pain. So I decided to load my car with the recyclables that were going to the dump on Monday. And as I took the second step I missed my footing and didn't fall – I tumbled – off the stairs. You have all probably experienced a fall, and even if it is only a few inches to the ground, you feel like Alice in Wonderland falling through the rabbit hole. My legs both banged up on the brick stairs and my back seemed to hit and then slide along the same edges, and in that especially well-choreographed move, I stopped the fall with my hand.

In those few seconds, I did manage to yell, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

So there I was trying to heal one stupid injury and giving myself another one.

And that is what I am raging about.

The really stupid thing about this whole adventure, besides the fact that I seem to have survived it, is that 1) after injuring myself in an attempt to water my plants, it frigging rained that afternoon, for the first time in weeks; and 2) I'm thinking that it could have been a lot worse and I'm actually lucky; and 3) things happen in threes, so I'm just waiting for the next hit.

So today I'm not going to rage against stupid politics and politicians. I will just settle for being pissed off at getting older and having a body that will routinely and unpredictably remind me of that, and and of course the fact that I will continue to make it worse by doing those stupid human things like falling down a couple of stairs.

I very carefully stood up and checked various parts of my body for injury.  I ascertained that all those body parts that had made contact were scratched and sore but still functioning.  Then I said “fuck it” and I went down those stairs one more time, and this time I hauled up that 25 pound bag of cat litter that was in the car, that is so much cheaper than the ten pound bag.

Cursing the darkness makes it all possible, getting back up and doing it again, and probably surviving once more.