Health and Lack Thereof

No, nothing is going wrong with the vessel that my brain walks around in, but sometimes it seems like it's all around me.

Steve called me from the hospital last night. He went in to have a knee replaced on Monday and was giving me an update. In his usual chipper funnyman self, he opens with,
"Hey, what's going on? You know anyone with a Harley tricycle for sale?"
I didn't get to talk to him very long, but he's doing well and gets to go home today. He'll be real close to home for the next several weeks, but it seems to have went well. I wanted to go visit him while he was in but never got the chance. I wasn't about to go on Monday or Tuesday because his "situation" would have been too fresh and chances are he wouldn't have even known I was there. I'm glad he's doing well though. A knee is something you don't think much about until you can't use it. I'm not talking about the walking and not being able to support your knee--I'm talking about a situation where, for whatever reason, you can't bend it. Whether it's in a cast or whatever the reason, when you can't bend a knee it makes you realize how often you actually need to bend it. Even sitting on a toilet requires you to bend your knee slightly, so you have to have some way to support one leg. And if you have a short distance in front of you, you really have troubles--Ever sit on a toilet side-saddle? A lot of everyday chores will make you appreciate the ability to bend a knee when you suddenly don't have it. Ever try to put your pants on by yourself without being able to bend a knee?

In other medical stuff, my mom and dad are slightly closer to finding out whether he has lung cancer or not. To me, it's a no-brainer--I would just assume at this point that he does. He has smoked since the late 1940's, and was found to have emphysema a few years ago. At the time they found it he had already had it for quite some time, but at least that caused him to finally quit smoking. It was probably too little too late though. We'll see. He'll probably come out of it okay because what they found is fairly small at this point, but you never know. They're still getting yanked around by the hospital quite a bit. Sometimes I wonder how much our method of insurance plays in our getting the required treatment and how timely we get it. For all I know it's just a typical symptom of Medicare.

I guess I'm lucky I'm such a healthy person overall because people have gotten hammered by a flu bug in recent weeks. Some people have been hit really hard too. I've watched a few at work get it and were out for days. Sarah has been sick off and on for a while too. I've been around enough of it to know that if I were going to get it I would already have done so by now. Our gauge at work is whether or not someone calls in sick on Friday. If they're willing to miss payday (most of our employees live from paycheck to paycheck I think) they must be sick.

I guess we're lucky that we humans work as well as we do considering we are just a walking group of finely balanced chemical processes. One small imbalance is all it takes. We should treasure every day we have, whether we're doing anything earth-shattering or not with our lives, right?