DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER>>>>>>MORBIDITY ALERT
OK, here I go again. I have, as any of you who get past the first line of my posts, long since proven myself incapable of "lightening up" since I started posting here, and that pattern shows no sign of altering, for the immediate future.
Today has brought home to me that there is a very fine line between life and death.
Case in Point Number One: I was walking my dog in the courtyard of my townhouse today, and my screwy neighbor -- who walks his dog in the same area all the time and knows that both of our dogs run free in our mutual driveways -- started to back up his car out of his garage. My dog, being a playful and goofy little guy, ran straight for the rear tire of the car. I screamed as loud as I could to catch his attention and it was only pure luck that he survived, since my voice neither seemed to affect his actions nor did my neighbor -- even after seeing me -- pause his reverse motion.
Case in Point Number Two: my ten year old daughter, coming over the walk the dogs later today as she does each day after middle school, was crossing a nearby semi-busy street with a "Walk" sign using her Razor scooter. Some idiot apparently was on his cell phone and nearly ran the light, causing her to fall into the gutter of the street, banging up her knee and hitting her head. Not only did he not stop, but he proceeded to run the light before it turned green. If I'd been there, I would have at least thought about carjacking the vehicle behind him and going after the damn fool.
Case in Point Number Three: in approximately eighteen hours, I will receive general anaesthesia for the tenth time in the past eighteen months. Soon after that, some doctor is going to place some sort of metal drill through some sort of tube in my back and proceed to send an arthroscopic drill through it into my kidney, so that he can crunch up a kidney stone there which has apparently grown to three inches in diameter through some miracle of neglect and absurdity. Once he is through doing this Roto-Rooterish activity, he or someone nearby will vacuum up the particles.
(I plan to ask that I be allowed to take them home. My partner does not want me to mount them on a ring for him, nor does he for some reason think that it's funny that I'd want to....but I ask you, what could possibly be more personal? OK, maybe funny is the wrong word. Ever seen a kidney stone? It's got all sorts of crystal surfaces, it's really easy to see why it causes pain working its way through your system, especially at the very end where no crystal should exit.)
Why the last one? Because the first few times I went under general anaesthesia, I really didn't think much of it. But the more that it happens, the more that it makes me wonder if I can keep beating the odds and wake up afterwards yet another time. I had a series of six steroid injections into my back last summer before I ended up having three of my vertebrae fused in September. That night, a nurse at the hospital noticed that my breathing was particularly labored and irregular. As a result, it was determined that I had five blood clots on my heart. I spent the next ten days in that hospital, fighting for my life, at one point being moved to a CT scan by a sadistic orderly who stuck his hand directly into the place where bone had been removed from my hip and smirking at my agony. On Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, I will stay in that same hospital. Grateful for life? Sure. Ambiguous about going back? You bet.