Just shoot me

When I broke my leg and had surgery on July 15, my doctor and nurses told me that my recovery would take six to eight months, so this is the information that I passed on to family and friends. The unanimous response was, "Oh, you were just high on morphine. They said six to eight weeks." Could be, I thought. Great, six to eight weeks.

Friday I finally got to see a doctor in Illinois. This was six weeks after my surgery, so I'm thinking, Today I'll find out if I get the cast off today or in two weeks. Well guess what? Turns out I did hear correctly, and for the first time in my life, I wish I weren't right.

The projected time that I'll be up and walking again is 20 weeks. No, I didn't mistype a zero, and no, I don't mean 20 days. Twenty weeks. In the meantime, I'm physically able to sit. Even the activity I was doing, my doctor says is too much.

So my leg is back in a fiberglass cast, and in four more weeks, I may get one of those robo-leg casts that I'll be able to remove so I can move my ankle. Not walk yet, but move my ankle. Not even baby steps. This is the pre-"What About Bob" therapy. Move your ankle around the desk. Move your ankle get on an elevator. I aspire to baby steps.

The rest of my weekend was great, and I'll tell you all about it later.

Clowns and Babies

I remember my first Halloween. My parents made me up like a clown. In the pictures, I am adorable. At the time, I was terrified.

I remember sitting in front of my parents' large bedroom mirror as they put the makeup on me. I could see my mom and my dad, and I could see me. But it wasn't me! It was a terrifying doppleganger of me with red hair and bright red lipstick. I had been replaced! That's a terrifying thought for a small child.

That particular transformation may be the root of my lifelong fear of clowns. Around the same time, my parents used to take me to a McDonalds that had a life-sized statue of Ronald McDonald, who I called "Funny Clown" (or, as my mom impersonates my voice at that age, Fuh-neee Clah-ooon). If I knew we were going, I would start to say, "I want to see Funny Clown!" and not stop until I was standing in front of the statue, at which point I would begin to shriek, "No like Funny Clown!" Then my parents would pacify me with a strawberry shake and fries.

Lest you think all of my early childhood memories are traumatic, I shall recount my memory of the birth of my sister. My dad drove me to the hospital to see my mom and the new baby. The whole way there, he kept telling me, "Mommy isn't going to be able to pick you up. She's very weak, so don't ask her to hold you," over and over again. I recall thinking the two-year-old mind's equivalent of, "What do you think I am, an idiot? Of course she's too weak to pick me up. She just squeezed a person out of her body for crying out loud!"

We arrived at the hospital, and I saw my little sister for the first time. I saw her through a glass window; it was kind of like the zoo. I can still see the image in my head of her tiny body lying in whatever the plastic troughs hospitals lay babies in are called, her tiny hand curled under her chin as she slept. Then my mom came out to see us. She was wearing a blue hospital gown with dots on it, and she did indeed look weak. But guess what the first thing I said to her was. "Pick me up, mom." Not despite my dad's admonitions, because of them. I later learned that I inherited this particular character flaw from my mom. She and my dad were walking through a Parade of Homes house that had a note on the window that said "Please do not touch the curtains." My mom said that she never would have dreamed of touching the curtains, but because of the sign, she wanted to.

In January, that tiny little baby who I saw through hospital glass 22 years ago will have a baby of her own. It is apparently a modest child (unlike its mother), so I don't know if I will be an aunt or an uncle, but I do know that I will not ask the mother to pick me up. She once broke her fingers trying to do that.

Memory

I learned in my Intro to Psychology class in college that any memories before the age of five are suspect and probably constructed from what someone else told you about the events you "remember." While I enjoyed most of the class very much, I thought this was a load of crap. I have many memories before the age of five, and I remember details that no one taold me.

When I was two years old, my family (meaning my parents and I) lived in a converted boarding house. We lived upstairs for a while, then downstairs. Sometimes we shared the house with family friends, other times with a psychotic woman who sang "There is a Balm in Gilead" while her children screamed. Apparently, when we lived downstairs, some women lived in the room above my room, and they used to wake me up having loud, screaming sex with different guys every night. I don't remember that (although I do remember their coming over and introducing themselves when they moved in; they seemed nice).

What I do remember about that house is playing outside. When I was five or six, we moved to a less nice neighborhood, and I played outside less frequently. But I played outside all day at this house. The neighbors next door seem to have changed about as often as those up- or downstairs. The first neighbors I remember are Adam and Bobbi-Jo. We used to ride bikes in the driveway between our houses. They had a big-wheel. I had Bucky the Wonder Horse. He had a red saddle that you could lift and he had a storage compartment inside. In case, I guess, I wanted to load him up with coffee and baked beans and ride off into the sunset.

Sometimes we would play in the backyard. Later, a family with older kids would move in and monopolize it, but at this point, we could go back there. One feature of this backyard was a cellar door leading to the house's basement (on a side note, J.R.R. Tolkein said that "cellar door" was the most beautiful word in the English language). The door couldn't have stood more than two feet at its highest point, but to my two-year-old mind, it was an Everest that must be scaled (sadly, I had no rain barrel to slide down).

I remember one day playing in the backyard with Adam and Bobbi-Jo. My mom was there somewhere, gardening or something, and I began to climb the doors. But on this particular day, something was different: one of the cellar doors was open. As I was climbing the closed door, I began to teeter. My top-heavy frame (which is larger now, but still top-heavy) fell through the open door and rolled down a flight of cement steps before coming to a stop on the cold basement floor. the next thing I remember is sitting in the kitchen, screaming while my mom slapped Band-Aids on my owies. This I remember vividly. The kitchen was yellow, and the sun was streaming through the big window. The light was so bright and the room so yellow that it felt like sitting in the sun. Then, someone knocked on the door. It was Adam. he had retrieved the rattle that I dropped and brought it to me, knowing it would make me feel better. It wasn't a normal rattle, nothing Tweedle-Dee and Dum would have fought over. It was like one of those bead mazes you find in dentist waiting rooms or church nurseries, only straight, and it had different brightly colored blocks on it. Because no one climbs a mountain without a staff.

Thinking back on the event now, I realize that my mom was around the age I am now. I can't imagine how I would respond to my child falling into a cement basement. But she apparently did OK, because, while I remember the event clearly, I'm not scarred by it.

Take that, Psychology.

Is health really worth it?

Thanks to everybody who shared their thoughts on the last post. I hope the conversation continues.

In the meantime, I am wrestling with my own health issues. Let me recap. I broke my leg in Michigan. I had surgery in Michigan. I went home to Illinois. I returned to Michigan to have a cast put on. I returned to Illinois with a reference for a doctor in Illinois. OK.

I have been staying off my leg, and the swelling has gone down, which means my cast became loose. I called my doctor in Michigan, who told me I'd need it replaced. So I called the doctor in Illinois to get an appointment. A week later, the billing manager calls me to say that they don't take my insurane. The doctor in Michigan doesn't know any other doctors in the area.

So I've spent the last week on the phone with doctors and insurance companies, which is just a butt-load of fun. In the meantime, I've spent more time up and moving around, which is good, but my cast is no longer loose. In fact, it's tight in some places. And I am developing a bad case of athlete's foot. Me. Athlete's foot. What the hell? And I got a bug bite on my hip. All the same leg. I'd say it's my lightning rod for painful complications, except that I injured my other leg at camp a year ago. This is why I stay inside reading most of the time!

Sigh.

To sum up, talking to doctors and insurance companies is more painful than breaking a leg.

Jagged Little Pill

I generally avoid discussing controversial issues on this blog, saving such discussion instead for another blog that I don't link to from here to avoid offending people, but I want the opinions and insights of people who read this blog and don't know about the other. My mom, being a mother herself, has linked up with several other family/motherhood bloggers, and I especially invite comments from those who have likewise been linked to me through my mom.

The issue I wish to discuss is birth control.

My wife begins graduate school on Monday, and I graduated in May and am still seeking employment. A child does not fit into our life right now. At this point one would disrupt the direction we are going, and we would not be able to care for one as we'd like. So we use birth control. We received no backlash from our Christian families, and few people at our Christian school expressed opinions to the contrary. Is this normal?

The arguments I have heard against birth control thus far ring hollow to me. Some say that God gave humanity the command to be fruitful and multiply. I agree completely, but:
1.) With more than six trillion people on the planet, I think we can safely say, "Mission Accomplished" and actually be correct.
2.) The argument implies that the fact that I'm not having unprotected sex at this moment is a violation of God's command.
3.) We fully intend to populate the earth with our offspring, just not right now.

I have talked to others who are proponents of natural birth control and understanding monthly cycles and abstaining from sex when the wife is able to conceive. I don't understand this either.
1.) The same science that helps me understand when conception is possible has also created a pill that accomplishes the same thing.
2.) It's still preventing life, so I don't see how it's any different.

Is this a generational issue, one that was once controversial, but which most newlyweds, even Christians, simply accept as a matter of course? That's certainly how it was for my wife and me, and we are adamantly pro-life, meaning we oppose not only abortion but war and the death penalty. Neither of us considers birth control a violation of our deeply held convictions.

I know that some will disagree, and those are the people whose comments I eagerly await. I certainly will gain nothing by convincing you to agree with me, so don't be afraid to say what you think. All I ask is that, whether you agree or not, you offer your comments in a spirit of love as we attempt together to get at the truth, which is, I hope, important to all of us. Any arguments that I perceive to be ad hominem will be deleted.

Ugh...

If you've ever thought that sitting around all day being waited on sounded nice, then you've never had to do it. Anybody who has can tell you that it sucks. Sure, it sounds nice, and it may be if you have servants whose job is to pander to your every whim. I can't imagine Jeeves ever saying, "I'll get your pipe and slippers when I damn well feel like it. And why do you need to eat anyway, you've been sitting around all day?" Family can say those things. Apparently money buys more grace than love does.

I kid, of course. I am well cared for. But if you'd like to lend me your butler, I would very much appreciate it.

As I lie around trying not to think about how much my unreachable ankle itches, I find myself thinking. Since I am already irritable, my thinking is for the most part unpleasant. I have, in the past three weeks or so, considered everything anyone has ever done that I didn't like. If you've ever done anything that ticked me off, I've thought about it. I may be thinking about it right now. It may have happened long ago, and I may have forgiven you, but right now, I hate you for it.

So, since misery loves company, lets all list our biggest pet peeves. Mine is people reading my blog without commenting. If you've ever done this, I'm angry with you. But you can make up for it by getting me a glass of water. And a sandwich. And on your way, turn the fan up to medium. And toss me that blanket. Do we have any chips?