See If I Make Promises About A Posting Schedule Again

Yeah. That was my bad.

Like I said in my previous post, the holidays are (were) a busy time, and the blog fell on the backburner. That’s a shame, though – there’s a lot that’s happened in the last two-plus weeks and it would have really helped me to decompress.

Lets start with Leftie. He’s an asshole, and he hasn’t gotten any better. In a case of what I believe is called “heterotopic ossification,” (even though I totally heard “homotropic ossification,” but no such Wikipedia article exists for that) the end of my severed bone on my left leg is growing a small but painful crystalline structure into my muscle. They were described to me as little bone daggers on which my muscle gets snagged. There’s nothing they can do about it until the bone matures, which will take five months to a year. If you’re sensing a certain numbness in my writing here, you’re perceptive – I am incredibly discouraged that I was told to essentially suck up the pain, because my doctor is sure as shit done with me. There’s nothing he can do, “despite” all his years of training and experience. Great profession, the medical one. I swear, I’m going to disown any of my offspring that choose to be doctors – disown them with extreme prejudice. Actually, that extreme prejudice probably exactly why they won’t want to be doctors anyways. Alright! Great parenting, Austin.

Stellar job.

But really, I’m faced with an indefinite amount of time with a dagger in my leg that gets caught on and tears my muscles. After I spend less than an hour in rehab trying to walk around, my left leg is tra-ashed. Both are kinda sore for a day or two, since a small part of my leg is taking on a great deal of weight and since the bottom of my severed legs are entirely unaccustomed to impact. That is manageable, and while I do cringe and sometimes make a few arresting noises, I can take comfort in the fact that the pain means my leg is toughening up, and that this is a pain that my body will learn to overcome before too long. But this left leg – that’s just useless pain. I gain nothing from these “snagging” episodes, where I’m paralyzed not only with the pain but with the fear of increased pain from an unfortunate movement that will only worsen things. And of course, trying to walk with the prosthesis only makes me more prone to this mind-stopping, breath-taking pain of the bone dagger digging inside of my muscle. It hasn’t been as bad as the very first time it happened, but it hasn’t gotten better than the third. Scheiße.

“Wait!” you say. “Go back a moment! Prostheses! That’s a big deal, right?!” Well, anything that causes me pain automatically makes me growl at it more than usual – but yes, they are in my possession. The full story will wait until a different day (soon!), mostly because I have my second day of Rehab With Legs tomorrow. I do about as well there as I might have at Rehab On Ice, and my physical therapist infuriates me, and I do have to wake up at 7:15 in order to make it. There’s not really a “but” after all that. I tried thinking of one, but no! That’s the way it is. It’s tough not having legs – no getting around that. My head Egyptian doctor, Dr. Zaki, who had my unwavering trust until he told me to eat a ton(ne?) of beef which made me throw up, did tell me that I needed to be “realistic” during the my recovery and rehab. I hadn’t really done much out-loud dreaming of skipping through daffodil-covered fields – with a quick swim afterward – in his presence, so it nearly offended me, until I remembered what country I was in (Egypt). “Realistic” wasn’t exactly the word he wanted to use, but he wasn’t an English major, I knew what he meant, and my weak American sensibilities don’t make it poor advice. He meant this is going to suck, a lot, over and over.

Oh well. Hee hee hee, that Eeyore.

But, on a positive note, turns out that they figured out when the Rapture is going to occur – May 21, 2011. This is excellent news, because, as you know, the Saved receive glorified and perfect bodies in Heaven. So, I’ve only got about eight years – the End Times after the Rapture last for seven years – to deal with this leglessness nonsense. Just got to get my act together first. Hmph.