Loose Bodies

My post-operative surgical instructions list many things I should not be doing right now. Among them are driving a car, walking without my super-sexy surgical boot, and getting my bandages wet.

Not among them is write blog posts, so here we are, and yes, I am hopped up on Oxy at the moment. Buckle up.

I arrived at the surgical center just after 6 a.m. this morning for the removal of two bone spurs on my right big toe. How those bone spurs came into being can be filed under “middle-aged man ailment.” That one of those bone spurs was shattered into pieces the doctor called “loose bodies” comes from the fact that, while disassembling an old couch so the trash guy would take the smaller pieces without charging us extra, I may or may not have dropped a piece on my toe.

Yes, that hurt. No, I told no one.

That is, I told no one until bending my toes during my curling matches started to become problematic. The right foot is the one with which I push out of the hack and into my extremely sexy glide toward the house before releasing the stone with the deft touch of a sculptor. The bone spurs and loose bodies were making that challenging. And even then I still didn’t tell anyone with words. After nearly three decades of marriage, The Missus picked up on my non-verbal cue – a limp following a Sunday curling match.

Speaking of The Missus, she is not a morning person. The 6 a.m. arrival time meant a 5 a.m. wakeup call for her. I awoke at 4 and couldn’t get back to sleep. All this so we could sit around for an hour after all the prep stuff was done, waiting for my 8 a.m. operating room reservation. Add her lack of morningness to my pre-op nerves and there wasn’t a whole lot of conversation on the drive, which was fine. She and I know each other well, and that’s a good thing.

The surgery itself went fine. One second I was in a butt-cold operating room with a mask over my nose and mouth, being told to breathe deeply, and the next minute I was in recovery telling The Missus how beautiful I think she is. My operation history, which dates back to a 1999 gall bladder removal, has revealed that I am very expressive with my emotions when I come out of surgery, and this trip was apparently no exception.

And so now I am free of loose bodies and the new owner of a surgical boot and a compression thingy that I have to wear for a half hour three times a day so as not to get blood clots. I have my pain meds, three issues of Scientific American, my book (Stephen King’s Black House), my journal, the TV remote, and Luna The Wonder Bulldog next to me.

If all goes as plan, it’s back to work (from home) for me tomorrow, though I will not attempt to write too much content while on the Oxy.

That might not be on the post-op instruction sheet either, but I think I’ll play it safe.