The Occasional Joke


Nurse: Patient's name?

Centurion: Marcus Licinius Crassus

Nurse: And his date of birth?

Centurion: 115 BC.

Nurse: All right. And what is he here for?

Centurion: Cataphract surgery.


Tuesday, June 12, 2007

How efficient

The argument went like this: A tumor in your hip has removed enough bone that you are extremely likely to fracture something down there, and then it'll be non-trivial to repair. So let's do the repair first, before the fracture occurs, and that'll be trivial, and you'll be walking around in a couple of days.

We pondered this, and decided that "trivial" sounded Ok, and had the surgery. But recovery the last week has been painful and far, far short of "walking around." More like crawling around.

So yesterday, we had the followup-appointment with the osteopod and some x-rays. Turns out that either during or immediately after the surgery, we also had the fracture! Who knew? Neither us nor the doc who was equally surprised to see the pics. Nothing more to be done, since the procedure he did was exactly what he would have done, anyway, and the various kinds of pain, need for crutches for weight-bearing, etc. is explained by the break, so it's still better to have it all over with, but the recovery from the, um, surgery/fracture won't be quite as quick as they thought -- more like a couple of months than a couple of days.

Things somehow, seemed to look up yesterday, though, whether it had anything to do with knowing what's going on in there or actual improvement. I'm hobbling with more vigor, although cooking is an issue, since I can a) move around or b) carry things, not both. But if given a chair and a table, I can do immoble kinds of prep like shelling peas and giving instruction to sous chefs, and so we tried out team-cooking chicken and rice with fresh peas, last night, to great success. Timing is an issue, since I used to cook while Linda gave Coney her evening walk, but we'll work that out, too.

And no, before you ask, we did not watch the last of the Soprano's. To those who did, our condolences, and may your grief be short lived.