I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up!

Friday was the confluence of negative health tides. I never get a head cold--I get pneumonia. In much the way contractors come to my house and shake their heads in disgust, doctors of all varieties look at my various barnacles, ailments and aches and mumble about how unusual that is.

Friday morning, I was making my bed. Yes, that mundane task I do every morning. As I was about to yank up the covers from the foot of the bed (why do I even put all those blankets on my bed? I invariably get hot and they all wind up down at the foot) when I saw a Lego lurking in the pile of my rug. I thought casually to myself, "I'm going to step on that sucker when I come back to this side of the bed. I should pick it up now and save myself the agony. I reached over to pick up that blessed block, and let me tell you, it was the last thing I thought for at least 20 minutes.

My whole world went tie-dye. Many people talk about whiteness or darkness when they experience harsh pain, but my world goes all frizzy. The world doesn't disappear, it just swirls and blurs. My knee had gone out and left me crumpled on the floor. Foot 90 degrees from front. A horrible, tangible grinding sound came from my knee when I righted it. I literally writhed on the floor grunting. There were no words, no profanity, no crying. Just some primordial "I am about to die" guttural sound.

Clooney, sensing pain, runs into the room and begins to lick my face frantically. You know how they say dogs sense our sickness? That's a load of crap. There was nothing WRONG with my face...would he PLEASE stop licking it, but I would not have been surprised to look down and see my knee joint parts sticking through my skin. It hurt that bad.

So, now my knee hurts like craziness. I immediately call CC, an expert in all things muscular-skeletal. Because, of course, her musculo-skeletal system looks freaking perfect, but also, incidentally, she happens to have a professional degree in the area. I go limping over to her house for an expert opinion. After checking it out, she has decided that all the important parts are still attached, but that, indeed, something not good at all happened to the knee cap.

Which is a bummer, because my mom was a carrier for FPS, and my sister and I have both manifested its symptoms. FPS, for you medical know-nothings, is Funky Patella Syndrome. While there doesn't seem to be anything anatomically freakish about us (per se), the knee bone is not well attached to the thigh bone in nursery rhyme verse. My sister, who survived years of elite athletics as a pole vaulter, was felled when she bumped into a piece of gym equipment. That ridiculous injury required weeks of rehab. My mother, strolling the beach as waves lapped at her ankles, was felled when a monster wave of six inches knocked her down and blew out her ACL. And while a bed-making injury was humiliating, it certainly won't go down as the craziest in my family. (It's August, and Dad is still recuperating from Christmas-Light-Hanging induced bursitis.)

Now that the knee was appropriately iced, and I was resting comfortably-ish on the couch, I was able to turn my attention to my other medical ailment: leprosy. I had this crusty, oozy, nasty rash crawling across my chest. I was, at this point, hoping the leprosy would spread and cause my leg to fall off right at the painful knee, but despite its menace, I didn't dare hope the rash would actually spread to the point of usefulness.

Of course, my doctor was out of town for the week.

I nursed my wounds all weekend. I limped about making pirate sounds, and vowing to spread my rash to anyone who pissed me off.

On Monday I, along with a thousand other people, called the doctor--desperate for an appointment. The leprosy was definitely out of hand. The knee was swollen, but usable, no longer my first priority.

Nurse Frantic calls me back, assures me that the office is in chaos, but if I am willing to sit there, they will 'work me in.' I go. I bring my Kindle. You never know how long you'll be trapped in a waiting room. Especially since, for a change, it wasn't the pediatrician's office. So I wouldn't be playing a marathon game of "Don't Touch That." I'm reading Chelsea Handler's book, Are You There Vodka, It's Me Chelsea, an appropriate work for someone of my sobriety level.

I'm sitting under the TV, which thankfully isn't tuned to Faux News, and I scan the waiting room. My internist is part of a large practice, and I always like to see what kind of patients he's seeing all day. Just to put myself in perspective.

The first thing I noticed is that EVERYONE had portable oxygen tanks. Already, I'm thinking, "look at me! Gettin' my oxygen from the air around me! Woohoo! He probably thinks I'm in amazing shape!" Also, since I don't have a BMI in the vicinity of rhinoceros, I'm feeling pretty good about myself. Now, I'm wondering if maybe I'm not too hard on myself and that maybe a slightly overweight one-legged leper might be able to go somewhere in this world.

I go back to reading Chelsea. I love Chelsea. Don't get me wrong, I'm never awake to watch her show, and I have waited however many years to read this book. Even though I'm late to the party, I'm definitely on board now. I'd like to consider myself a lot like Chelsea. Except the little people who have seen my uterus were, you know, fetuses. So, I'm laughing out loud at my book, and the guy waiting in the chair facing me hands me his Winn Dixie receipt and a pen and asks if I can write down the name of the book I'm reading. The guy has a wicked comb-over, is dressed like a shlump, and is affectionately stroking his octogenarian mother's shriveled hand.

This is the paragraph I was reading:

The problem for my dad with the suspenders my mother bought for him is that he hasn't adjusted the straps since he got them. So instead of attaching somewhere around his midsection, the suspenders clamp onto his pants three inches below his nipples. Now picture the suspenders attached to a pair of sweatpants. This vision is what first led me to coin the term "camel balls."

There is NOOOO way CombOver is going to like this book. But, I write down the information for him, vaguely entertained by the prospect of him reading about Chelsea's back and forth on whether to get involved with a red head and his clownish pubic hair.

Nurse Frantic calls me in, and the Dr, comes to look at my leprosy. I pull open my shirt neck and he visibly recoiles, "blech!" Really, Dr? Is that your official diagnosis? I've got a wicked case of the Blech? Is this like the Clap? He prescribes some unctions, snake oil and steroids.

The knee, he agrees (shaking his head, mumbling about my unusual FPS) is intact, but slightly screwed. (I knew that.) He insists on X-Rays, which even I know will reveal nothing, but whatevs. Chelsea and I can kill some time down in the lab waiting room.

The lab waiting room makes the Dr.'s waiting room look like a MENSA convention. We are talking liver spots and impending death. I briefly thought of mercy killing this bunch by switching out their oxygen canisters for CO2 tanks stolen from McDonald's fountain machines. I went through all the poses for my xray porn movie (spread this, bend this, move this way, hold it, great) and left the ebola-ravaged center in a shower of Purell.

Shockingly, the snake oil is clearing up the leprosy. I got no phone call regarding the Xrays, which means (not shockingly at all) that they showed nothing. So far, I haven't started bleeding from my eyeballs, so hopefully I didn't contract whatever nasty was floating around the clinic, and I survived.

Thanks to Chelsea.