First off: Damn you, Wegmans Reduced Fat Reduced Sodium Bacon. I tried you carefully, as I must all bacon products, to see if you’d make my gout twinge. And nary a twinge. I even ended up having a couple of pounds of you over the past three or four months, without a single problem. So, two weeks ago I get a craving for bacon cheeseburgers. And I think it’s safe! And so I get you, the same hamburgers I’d been using from my own freezer, and the same cheese, and this time…
My foot tells me that things are not going to be good for another month. So I’m walking around with my foot registering a four or a five on the pain scale, and I’ll get to see my GP at the end of the month (more on that later) but until then I’m going without endomethicin, just advil for the pain. Walking sucks. Sitting sucks. Pushing wheelchairs a half mile, one-way, really, really, really sucks.
“Wait? Wheelchairs? Where did that come from?” I hear you saying.
That’s the real reason I hate the bacon. It chose this time to do this to me. When my father’s Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus decided to start acting up big time, again. He’ll probably be going in for more surgery in two weeks to revise his shunt. Again.
In the meantime I’m doing his driving for him, guiding him where he wants to go, and generally playing dogsbody for him. Not much fun, but nothing that I really mind, either.
Except I have to walk a lot. And since he’s fallen twice in a very short time, we’re making him use wheelchairs as much as possible. (Since his judgment has gone to Hell with his other symptoms, we don’t win this battle as often as I’d like.) And you remember that gout thing I mentioned? Yeah. It really, really sucks.
Then… let’s talk about the idiots out there: If you’re going to use the drop-off/pick-up area of a medical office/building, the proper way to use that is to get your limited mobility passenger out of the vehicle and into a safe position, then park your vehicle, so other people may use the drop-off/pick-up area. Not sit there like the fucking King or Queen of the World and prevent anyone else from using the awning for its designed purpose. This goes for all y’all idiots: FedEx, Medical Motors, Nursing Home buses and private persons.
Get your goddamned clues before I start forcing them into your heads with a nail-studded, ironwood cluebat!
Finally, if you’re waiting to see an on-call nuerosurgeon, and he’s late because he got called to the ER for an emergency surgery, don’t spend your first fifteen minutes when he finally does get free of that and can see you to bitch about the wait you had to endure. Yeah, it sucks. It also happens. And a single sentence, about not appreciating the failure to be warned that your appointment would be delayed is sufficient. Spending fifteen to twenty minutes when you finally do see the doctor, hashing it out wastes his time, and yours. And more importantly, it wastes, my, too - because we have to wait for your fifteen minute temper-tantrum to be finished before the doctor can see you. And he won’t get to see us until he’s seen you. You idiot. The rest of the five hours we were stuck waiting there weren’t too much fun, but hearing that diatribe when you finally got to see him, knowing we were supposed to be next made those fifteen minutes the most infuriating of the whole fucking day.
You aren’t going to be getting the cluebat applied to your head. Your cluebat will be applied as a suppository.
And, finally, Dad. Will you for the love of little green snakes admit you can’t move well enough to walk down the 11 degree slope driveway to pick up the morning paper before you fall down again? Please!
It would be at least satisfying to have a button to push, rather than pounding on my desk. In fact, it has become an office meme around here “Hey, Litoris? When you gonna get enough of those remote-kill buttons for all of us?” Especially around Purim.