First general anaesthesia of my ludicrous life ended in tragicomedy on Monday when I returned home with my Luke Kneewalker, a pair of Bair Paws no skid slipper socks, and a bandaged right lower appendage that felt like bees were trapped inside and crawling up and down the back of my leg between the excised heel bone and the mid-calf where the muscles were separated to add some length to the tendon.
Periodically the drunken bees would stop and sting me, just to show who is boss.
Fortunately, I was loaded with Vicodin and way beyond cynicism because the day before we had celebrated the anniversary of JFK's assassination and taken the cat to the vet for diagnosis after she stopped eating and drinking and appeared to be determined to die for my sins.
She had begun moping while Mrs. Faustroll was back east attending to her mother's death and burial. I thought Ocean Booger's behavior was the result of stress, but when she didn't improve when Lady Faustroll returned to babysit me through recovery, it looked like a triple play gift for her 61st birthday: human death, feline death, and ten weeks of tending to the bitching and moaning of a cantankerous anti-social socialist old fart.
But things are looking up, the way Richard Faṝina saw they would, with me scooting around and the cat back from the vet and actually eating.
So I'm working at home when I'm not icing the foot and leg until December 7, the 32nd anniversary of my induction physical, and I even had time to sign 100 copies of a broadside my old co-conspirator Paul Fericano is marketing at YU News Service. I completed the year.
But that's another post. I got to eat something and ice the leg.