A shaman takes the pipe, and as part of a ritual that probably went on for hours (there are ethnographic analogues) used it to suck objects out of ill or wounded ‘patients.’ Sometimes the patient was cut first. It is possible that sometimes the object was something really embedded in the patient, and perhaps removing it was a good thing. In other cases, the objects removed were small stones, bits of chicken bone, other household objects, and perhaps the occasional carved sacred thingie presumably put there by some other, evil, shaman.

Except in those rare instances where a shaman may actually have removed an object, the presumption is that the shaman used sleight of hand to make it appear that some object or another was pulled from the subject’s body.

So, one day I was walking along the path in my study area in the Ituri Forest, in what is now known as the Congo, and a man I barely knew approached me. He was someone whom I believed to be half “Pygmy” (Efe) and half “Villager” (maybe Lese or some other group). We had a common language or two, so we chatted a while, but he was clearly disturbed by something. Finally, he told me that he had come down from the north to find me in order to get some medicine. This was fairly typical. We anthropologists were the only people for hundreds of kilometers in all directions that had any western meds, so we were often prevailed upon to treat this or that disease. We had some training to do it, and we maintained as much of a supply of medicine as we could, and were happy to do what we could do even if it seemed sometimes like we were spending all of our time running an impromptu clinic rather than doing our research.

Anyway, the man had a leaf in his hand, a leaf of the type used to wrap up and carry around pretty much anything one might want to transport. These leaves served as wallets, baggies, waste disposal devices, cups, and so on. He unwrapped the leaf and as he did so, it became obvious that it was quite bloody, and in it were a couple of stones, a chicken bone, and a piece of string.

“The shaman removed this from my arm” he said, showing me where he had a bleeding abscess. “It worked, he cured me of the abscess. But now I’ve come to you, so you can give me your medicine and cure me of the shaman.”

It took me a while to understand. He was not using the term “shaman” but rather, the local word that I had come to understand as “Witch” according to the local lexographies compiled mainly by missionaries. But as the conversation progressed, I understood that the person who had used a tube (made of the aforementioned leaves) to suck these objects from this man’s arm was what we would call a shaman. Furthermore, the shaman was a Pygmy, and heretofore we had not encountered Pygmy shamans in this area. Later on I was to discover that one of my best Pygmy friends, and one of two or three key informants, had been a shaman all along. But whatever. At the time, it was a moment, for me, of discovery, and of great interest. I never got to meet this man’s shaman, but I did provide him with antibiotics to cure the man of the shaman’s efforts which, in turn, may or may not have helped with the abscess.

And this all came back to me yesterday as I lie on an operating table not drugged but numbed, and my shaman, I mean, doctor, moved his gloved tweezers-holding hand towards me to show me what he had just “sucked” out of my leg. It was a couple of inches of string, covered in blood and some cyst-like tissue. Through the procedure just accomplished in which this object was removed from my body, I WAS CURED!!!

I was thinking that I had to go down the street to find a Pygmy to cure me of the doctor’s activities. But just at I was thinking that, he told me he’d write a script for antibiotics, just in case.

The string was a small portion of what must have been a few feet of string used to tie my tendon back to my patella and quadriceps muscles in my right leg. Somehow this bit of string, which was no longer doing anything important, had elicited an immune response, which caused the growth of a cyst on the proximal/ventral surface of my kneecap. In other words, I had a painful bump sticking out of my knee. If it got rubbed (by wearing pants and walking around) it would become quite sensitive. At other times, it would just hurt for no apparent reason, and it would hurt a LOT, as in “Ice pick in the knee” pain. At all times, it made it impossible to comfortably kneel on that knee.

So I went in yesterday to have it removed. I was brought by a nurse to a “procedure room” where I laid down on a special bed/chair thing. Special juices were used to wash my knee, and I was draped in bright blue paper sheets. The surgeon came in and with the nurse’s help donned a funny hat and a backwards robe and some rubber gloves. The process of dressing up the surgeon was highly ritualized, with modestly stylized movements and highly selective touching and various choreographed moves. The cutting itself was all business, but the excitement of finding the source of the illness and removal of it from the body was palpable. We did not really know for certain what had caused the growth of this nodule, but we had guessed, it turns out, correctly.

There is another element to this which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, in a sick and morbid sort of way. Many years ago, when I was very little, there was an evil girl who lived down the street … Mary Beth something or another. I won’t go into great detail about her at this point but at present you need to know this: During the summer weeks that we were living at home (we spent most weeks in the forest somewhere) on a very regular basis, every couple of days, Mary Beth would at some point chase me down the street and push me to the ground, laughing, and then just walk away. The thing is, no matter where she started chasing me, she always pushed me to the ground in the same exact spot. The spot was my parent’s driveway. And, I think she was trying to insult me. You see, we had one of the only driveways on the street (as I think back, I can’t recall any other ones) but, unlike other driveways in the larger neighborhood, it was not paved. It was a messy gravel driveway with a few patches of tar where the car’s wheels always stopped, but that was it. The kids around the block had paved driveways, but we had this slummy gravel driveway. Anyway, since it was gravel, that meant that when Mary Beth pushed me into the ground, I would get bits and pieces of gravel in my knees. There were occasions when I had to spend some time pulling bits of sharp gravel from my knee-skin before dressing the wound. At first this was alarming to my mother and other members of my family, but after a while, after it happened dozens of times, no one seemed to care any more and Greg pulling the gravel out of his knees became just one of those things that happened a few times a week, like my brother polishing his buttons (he went to military school) and my father sorting through multiple listings (he sold real estate) and my mother making a dress (yes, we made our own dresses).

So, I had in the back of my mind the idea that maybe the thing in my knee … the core of the nodule of pain and discomfort … was actually not a direct result of the surgery done to repair the tendon, but rather, a piece of driveway-gravel that had migrated (as an indirect result of the surgery, presumably) to the front of the kneecap from a more innocuous hiding place.

“But it would have dissolved by now” you say. Well, maybe. There are three things the driveway gravel could have been made out of: Slate, graywacke, or rhyolite. I’ve listed those three in order of hardness (increasing) and potential reactivity (decreasing) to an acidic environment. Believe it or not, I’ve occasionally wondered since then what kind of stone that gravel was made from. And, although I think graywacke or some sort of slate is the most likely (given the geology of the region), a rhyolite stone would likely survive for longer than metal shrapnel.

Eventually, the driveway was paved. The city came by to pave our ancient brick-paved street and put in concrete sidewalks to replace the deteriorating, undulating slate walks. They had no plans to pave any driveways, but when my father started buying the workers six-packs for their lunch breaks, they inexplicably discovered a work order apropos the laying of macadam on the Driveway of Doom … thus, ending that era of my life because, clearly, driving the gravel into my knees was Mary Beth’s only objective.

I wonder what she’s doing these days? Probably neither shaman nor surgeon.

The physical therapy is in full swing and it is very nasty. In terms of overall pain, walk-ability, etc. I’m on an undulating plateau because of the therapy (both as inflicted by a professional and self inflicted as per his orders). The other day the physical therapist was manipulating my leg, bending the knee and such, and I was enduring the pain without complaint, focusing on a point in the distance and very purposefully ignoring the horror of it all (hey, I’ve been trough a couple of child birthing classes!). At one point, a very excruciating point, the physical therapist stopped and said to me, “I am assuming that if this hurts, you’ll let me know, right?”

At another time I noticed a very worried expression on his face. You will remember that there is a sort of round nodule object thingie under the skin on my patella, which we now believe to be one of the six anchors my surgeon used to tie off the cables drilled through the kneecap and knitted onto the tendon. Well, it turns out that he (the physical therapist) was thinking this anchor might pop through the skin as he bent my leg, based on how it and the skin over it looked.

He noted that something like that had happened to him recently with another patient. I noted that if the anchor popped through the skin, to let me know right away so I could get a picture of it. I mean really, that is TOTALLY bloggable.

So a few more weeks of intense physical therapy and exercise, and I hope to be able to walk up and down stairs with both legs. Maybe by the end of June. I’m hoping this whole thing will be little more than a dull thud in my knee by the end of July. Then, in mid August, back to the surgeon to get that anchor cut out!

Any way, I’m hosting it this month, and I hope you will write a post on plants and send me the link.

I went out earlier this week for an extensive and intensive activity, for the very first time since the morning of February 16th, when I accidentally had an accident that accidentally caused what would be the hardest step in the amputation of one’s lower leg to happen in a single second, fully retracting (i.e., cutting in half) the tendon that hooks my upper leg to my lower leg, right side. I prepared for the trip with several short drives and walks, including one very grueling trip to the supermarket.

The activity was meeting up with my student and friend Charlotte and her husband Pete over at the Science Museum of Minnesota to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. Charlotte and I are hoping to write up a review of the exhibit, though we’ve not yet settled on where we would publish it. Likely, we’d do a couple of different versions. In any event, we are already discussing with Stephanie Zvan and Mike Haubrich the idea of doing a Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio interview on the topic. And, of course, there will be blog posts. Get ready to learn all about the Second Temple Period.

The result of the event, during which I was on my feet for more total time and more continuous time ever since Feb 16th, was that my knee hurt in new and amazing ways all the next day. Which I consider to be progress.

I heard via email that my son said “mama” today. I replied that most cultures have words like mama, ima, afa, aba, apa, papa, baba, and so on and so forth to denote mother or father, and that these are among the first sounds a human baby utters, over and over, with slight variations. In other words, this is parents cheating, by defining the word for themselves as very similar to random sounds almost all babies produce copiously. It did make me wonder, though, if there is historical competition among males and females as to who’s word is likely to emerge first. Or, if females manipulate the situation so they can make the baby say “father” in front of “husband” before saying “father” in front of the “Maytag repair man.”

Speaking of the Maytag Repair Man, I hope you have been enjoying, or at least, noticed, the series I’ve started over at Quiche Moraine. I’m culling short bits of 1960s period TV shows that were widely watched and likely influential in the development of American culture. Unfortunately, since I’m using Hulu clips, the clips themselves may be visible only to those in the US. That is one of the reasons I’ve put this informal study on Quiche Moraine rather than here. QM is, in theory, slightly more oriented to a regional audience (but only slightly so).

One of the interesting things is this: I can find lots of sexism, classicism, racism, authoritarianism, and so on, but almost no explicit anti-gay stuff. So far I’ve only seen one item, where the police chief in Dragnet ends a tirade about the collapse of community enforced morals with a phrase like “… they’re even trying to tell us that homosexuality is to be lauded.” Unfortunately for my Hulu Project, this phrase comes at the end of a long sequence that I would otherwise not bother with.

More interesting, of course, is the fact that homosexuality is almost invisible, both as an explicit genderizer for normal day to day character development, but also as a social or personal evil. Sure, there’s lots of manly stuff which partly defines the path around Teh Gay, and there is the occasional eyebrow twitch over this or that bit of fruitiness, but homosexuality is more or less treated as one might treat pornography on TV in the 1960s. Don’t. Shades of Amazon book classification schemes.

The fact that there is almost no explicit antisemitism (but too much Christian-like god worship) together with the lack of gay bashing could just be an outcome of the fact that TV was already controlled by the Gay Jewish Conspiracy. Just sayn’

(Is it possible that my laptop, as I type this, is sending signals to my Roku and making it do things? Or are these pain killers better than I thought…)

Anyway, the reason that I’ve been blogging less is simply that I’m more engaged in longer term writing projects, and work thusly related. Don’t worry, though. That involves developing projects that will be represented here on this blog as well.

And, one of the maintenance things I’ve been working on is related to my desktop computer and the blog cave. I’m totally redoing the way I hook up my computers, peripherals, and the ten thousand miles of cable that make this blog possible. Before the computer boxes were on the floor, and the monitors/keyboards/etc were on the desk, with the cables forming a huge blob like mass partly engulfing both. Now, everything will be on the desk (which is a hollow core door suspended on 2-drawer file cabinets) and the cables will be running between things in bundles held together with cable ties and suspended beneath the desk on hooks. Today, I installed the power sources and started putting in the LAN.

This is harder than it sounds, because to do some of this work I have to be on the ground working under the desk. Given my leg injury, that means creating an “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” scenario every now and then. I’m just glad no one is watching this. It’s pretty funny. Funny-Pathetic, not Funny-Ha-Ha.

How do you have your cables hooked up? What tv shows do you think influenced your cohort’s cultural development and how? Do you find the Dead Sea Scrolls interesting and would you like to know more about them? And, finally, why is everyone so indifferent to plants?

In the video I showed two weeks ago, I raised my upper leg to the level at which my lower leg more or less dropped of its own accord perpendicular to the ground. I then extended my lower leg using all the abilities my quad muscles had at the time.

In the following video I do the same thing, but with the brace on, so my quads are working against the weight of the brace. In the first video, that extension was very very weak. Had there been a headwind, I would not have been able to move the leg at all. This time, not only do I raise the leg farther, but I can tell you that there was more strength in the move. Not a lot more, but some.

Starting tomorrow, I get to exercise that muscle a bit more.

The knee is still very swollen, which is partly why I can’t bend it very far. But I can now get in and out of the passenger side of a car very easily. Well, clumsily and it hurts, but at least I can get in. Pain levels are about the same as two weeks ago, and the mysterious bump continues … I’m starting to think it is one of the knots from the ropes that were used to tie the tendon on. If so, it must have slipped down the patella a bit, which is strange, but, well, it’s holding. There is no sign of it going away, so there’s a chance it will have to be cut out.

I’m hoping, thought, that it is a piece of extra patella bone. It would be cool to get a bit of one’s own bone. Make a hash pipe out of it or something.

However, I feel a bit less optimistic, perhaps simply more realistic, after a couple of days doing a few things differently. The truth is that seven weeks of virtual inactivity totally mess up your leg.

In the following video of my leg, I make two motions. In the first motion, I flex my hip to bring my upper leg to an angle such that my lower leg naturally rests, without any force, perpendicular to the ground. A normal leg would rest in this manner with the hip flexed a much higher angle, well over 90 degrees. This shows the stiffness of the joint which has been kept straight for seven weeks with only some flexion.

I can flex the knee joint another 15 to 20 degrees by forcing it mildly, but this is the natural droop of the leg.

The second movement, which I do twice in this video, is the maximum extension of the lower leg that I can achieve with my quadriceps. Granted, this is working against (a tiny bit of) gravity, and against knee stiffness, but this is pretty bad. Well, it is good because the tendon is still trying to grow back, and I don’t want to have strong quads pulling on it just yet. And it is good because it means that the tendon is in fact attached to the patella.

I have been able to leg press over 1000 pounds. I generally make it a goal to max out (with both legs) the leg extension machines at the gym. Typically, my neighbors borrow my quads if they need something hard, say, to shape metal objects on using a hammer. The only thing Chuck Norris is afraid of is my quads.

Or, should say, used to be afraid of.

Damn.

After two weeks, I’m to shift to more aggressive work with quads under supervision of physical therapists. Interestingly, he says I can drive whenever I can get in the car and work the pedals. So maybe a few weeks. Strangely, the LAST step in the process will be removing the brace. The brace stays on well into cane-use period, which in turn probably starts in about six weeks.

The Alien bump object I had mentioned on Facebook is likely an internal stitch, which will either go away or he’ll cut out at a later time. Pain levels are not really expected to go down soon, but they aren’t bad now, and the pain is increasingly meaningless which makes it quite tolerable.

So, regarding what I can and can’t do, I’m looking at two weeks with no change, followed by a couple weeks of aggressive effort to make change happen, during which time I’ll start being able to do things I’m restricted from doing now.

Most importantly, he did not look at my knee, turn pale, and say “Oh my god, what have we done… WHAT HAVE WE DONE!!!!” … or anything like that.

The bad things that happened: 1) I watched Mama Mia; and 2) I broke a tooth. The tooth will require a root canal and cap. That’s not so bad compared to the memory which shall never leave me of Pierce Brosnan in a musical. OMG. Yes, yes, the impending root canal will be a pleasure.

On Microsoft, JH of Linux in Exile run new numbers on booting Windows 7. He can now make a direct comparison between Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Linux on the same hardware. There are differences. This is interesting, check it out.

Regarding the Robot, it appears that Abe is dead.

Somewhere off the coast of Chile a pioneering underwater robot named Abe lies in a watery grave today.

The Autonomous Benthic Explorer (ABE) was one of the first truly independent research submersibles, being both unmanned and un-tethered to its launching ship. While on its 222nd research dive on Friday all contact with the craft was lost, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has announced.

Check out the original post, which includes comments by the robot’s original masters.

So, what did I have for dinner? That’s not important. I just title some of my posts “what I had for breakfast/lunch/dinner” to mock those who complain about chatty blog posts. I do that when I write chatty blog posts.

I have a new relationship to the world around me for various reasons. I notice hard surfaces more now, and they seem harder. The oaken armrests of the chair I’m sitting in mock my soft human body parts. I am no longer inured to characters on TV getting thrown to the ground or whacked with 2 x 4’s as seems to happen so often. Going down on the ice or missing the landing. Ouch. I feel a little burned by my experience. The world is covered with ouchy surfaces. I don’t like them.

I’m wrestling with the problem of my own neediness. Lots of people are there to help, and everyone has been very good. Mostly, people are graciously taking over the things I used to do but can’t now. So I see my wife now, en passant, as she goes from one thing to another. I discovered something that I can do for her that I never did before, which gives her back some time, and I hope to find more things like that. It is both heart warming and very troubling to find that yes, I really was doing stuff that was needed, and yes, I can (fortunately) be replaced, and yes, this is a huge burden for others. Not that they say it is, but it is.

I’ve discovered that my injury is actually rare and most people who have had “similar” injuries had something really different happen to them. My surgeon carries out hundreds of surgeries a year, and does about five of these a year, tops. The three different home inpatient visitors including two physical therapists I’ve seen have not done this particular kind of injury before. We are all googling me to see what to do and no do. I did not break my knee. I did not break my patella (The fact that some of my patella is gone is a minor aspect of this injury). My tendon was fully retracted. Cut in half. Disconnected. It is an ex-tendon. The knee was not dislocated, there is nothing to be pinned. The tendon simply came off, and then they simply sewed it back on, which involved drilling several holes. On the scale of things that can happen to your knee joint and you keep the leg, this is up near a ten out of ten, but with surgery and proper care I’ll be fine.

Proper care means I don’t move the leg for a long while, yet at the same time, deal with the fact that if I don’t move the leg it will atrophy. So, I do move the leg, but only in certain ways. I have to do one painful and difficult, and in fact rather scary thing a few times a day, and just now a new thing that also turns out to be painful but is so freaky that it is worth it, has been added. So I do maybe five to seven painful variously freaky scary things every day.

Which all sounds bad, but it beats living in a refugee camp in Goma or taking a random bullet on some street corner. I just can’t leave the house, get in car, go pick up my daughter or carry anything delicate or beyond a certain size including a baby.

Progress is so slow that I don’t expect to see a lot of it in any short period of time. Progress is supposed to be slow. That’s the thing. If I push to make “more” (of whatever I’m doing) I’ll break it. I have to bend my knee a certain way, a certain amount. I know I can get the knee to bend more, faster, sooner. That is what one might want to do if this had been a broken bone or a dislocation. But under the circumstances, doing more quicker will break it. More surgery, set back to the beginning, stern looks from the medical staff, delay of start of fishing season, no carrying the baby.

Ok, enough whining. Let’s talk about pain. Some of you may want to leave at this point.

I’ve had my share of injuries and illnesses that hurt, but I know that I’m having a new experience when I get to feel a kind of pain I’ve not felt before. There are several kinds of pain as you know. The stabbing white hot spike, the slicing dulled butcher knife through the joint, throbbing, and so on.

Have you ever had a shiver run through your body, perhaps because you are suddenly cold (or for any other reason)? The shiver really does start in one part of your body and then moves across different, other parts of your body. When it hits my injury, it produces a new kind of pain not like one I’ve felt before, such as a broken bone, torn ligament, muscle spasm, deep bruise, knife or sword wound, or being shot with an arrow. Different. The intensity is doubled if there is a fresh ice pack on the injury. So I’ve learned to put the blanket on when I put on the ice pack on just in case. Shivers hurt. Like a thousand angry grasshoppers jumping up and down on a delicate area of skin. On the pain scale of zero to ten its on a different scale. The weird scale. It’s a four on the weird scale.

The twisted leg pain is also new. It is not an entirely unique pain … I’ve certainly felt the pain of a twisting joint before … but this is a twisting of a joint that is not moving, and that makes me feel as though my leg is somewhere where it isn’t, and at the same time like it is being twisted off. But it is just sitting there. That is one of the two pains that commonly wakes me up. I wake up feeling like something’s got my leg. If I put on the light and remove the blanket and stare at my leg, the pain slows down. That’s the only way to make the pain slow down.

The other waking up pain is a version of the burning poker pain that is a little new for me but not entirely unfamiliar. I should mention that stabbing white hot poker pains do not actually feel like being stuck with a hot poker. That is just how we describe it. The hot poker feels quite different because of the sudden dulling damage to the neurons. This waking pain feels like a hot poker exploding OUT of my knee joint, as though it originated inside somewhere.

I can sit there for long periods of time with what I would call no pain. In fact, the pain is always there, but I don’t feel it. If you ask me I’ll say I don’t feel any pain, then I’ll check in with my knee and the pain is actually there, but I was ignoring it. So when the medical staff asks me about the pain I always pause and think about the answer, because they want to know the truth and not what my brain is pretending.

But really, most of the time the pain is low level with the occasional sudden shift to real pain, which then goes away. Unless I’m taking pain killers at the moment. Then, the low level pain is dulled out of existence unless I really feel for it (which I don’t). But, since I take the pain killers strategically, the spikes of pain that come along are stronger when I’m on the pain killers. The pain is worse by the end of the day, worse at night, and worse after a fair amount of activity.

Formerly, I had two kinds of friends. Those who had seen me in my underwear and those who had not. By the time this is over, I think everyone is going to be in that first category, like it or not. I only have two outfits: A blue robe and another blue robe. I recently made enough adjustments and developed enough finesse to put underpants on and off without too much difficulty or risk. Regular pants (including whatever pants you can think of) are just too difficult because of my brace, and my need to adjust it frequently. Socks are a possibility but so is running for the Senate. Not likely any time soon.

One of the four main muscles that make up my quadriceps would not fire when I tried to flex, which was a concern. So now I have a small electronic device that will make any muscle fire. I think that quad muscle was not firing because when it did it pulled on the knee and caused pain. But now I get to press this button and force it, and having done that a bit I can get the muscle to flex on its own. That’s good. Ouch. But that’s good. But ouch. Well, it does give me something to do!

Two other small items: 1) I always had strangely square knees. Now, one of them is nicely rounded off. 2) This is going to leave a kick-ass scar.

So, I’m not feeling too sorry for myself, and if the above sounds like I am, well, screw you I busted my freakin’ knee, man, get off my case. I am feeling sorry for my family who must endure the dead weight that is me. This enforced inactivity is scheduled for many weeks to come, and that will be followed by slow, controlled, steady rehab.

OK, everyone, stay well.

There are already conspiracy theories developing. A student who didn’t want to take the exam I was carrying at the time of the incident threw the ice on the ground just before I got there. Someone from Nature Network salted the clouds so we’d have a tiny ice storm localized in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. My favorite is that I was knee-capped by Salty Current. But none of these are true. I just slipped, and I apologize in advance to anyone who feels that I have blamed them for … ice.

I was collected quite literally like one collects a fossil one plans to pick apart in the lab. My leg was stuck in a 90-degree angle, and by the time the ambulance drivers were ready to load me onto the stretcher I had frozen to the pavement in fetal position.

After they peeled me off the pavement, I could see a blue anti-shadow where the maintenance people, under the close supervision of the college security forces, had spread de-icer on the barn door, as it were, outlining my livid body.

Soon after admittance to the emergency room, they put a wrist band on me. It says “Fall Risk.” … Now they tell me!

Then eventually came the surgery and all that goes with it.

How may ways can someone as stoned as I am right now spell anesthesiologist? Especially me? I’ve noticed that anesthesiologists are always funny. And surely, they have the hardest job of all in the medical field, bringing each patient close to death then yanking them back to the land of the living just in time. Like using emacs editing commands.

For the visible heart lab at The U, they have a pig in surgery that is shown to visiting students. The anesthesiology is explained over a period of about 10 minutes, showing how it essentially kills you but that’s OK because you are on a heart-lung machine, and all the drugs that work contra each other to produce the desired effect, and even this simplistic explanation of what they are doing is quite complex, and requires reference to a dozen fancy expensive machines and about a hundred kilometers of tubes, cables, and wires.

Then they talk about what the surgeons will do the heart. “Yeah, we’re going to cut it in half while it is still beating!!! Cool!”

But I do not disdain the surgeons. I am sure their job is hard too.

So, the surgery itself involved a spinal and a drug that did not necessarily make me unconscious but did make me very likely to pass out at any moment. I think I did, and in fact, I have only one or two memories of the surgery itself. I remember waking up facing a large blue-green wall. I was strapped to a crucifix. On the other side of the wall, I could hear the operating staff. They were playing Traveling Wilburys music and I could hear the clinking of glasses. I think they were drinking margaritas. I tried to escape my bindings and almost did but then some guy reached back over the blue-green wall and tightened the straps.

Post op was better than pre-op (and in fact I’ve avoided detailing some pretty miserable stuff).

Hint: When you are working with an Occupational Therapist, do not have your wife nearby hanging around with the cute baby that everyone pays attention to. “Ooh… you’re a baby.” (Thump) “Look at the cute baby.” (Thump).

The “thump” in the background is me falling on the floor and no one noticing it because they are paying attention to the cute baby.

I’ll be laid up for a month or so, and I don’t recommend any of this to anyone. But there are people who are much worse off. Julia lost two grandmothers this week. When I talked to her on the phone from the hospital bed and told her all the gory details regarding my accident, she laughed and said I was really funny. It is good to place these things in perspective.

Oh, and I now have a record of how my blood pressure changes in relation to blogging activities. Turns out BP goes up, but not as much as you’d think.