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One foot bandaged

Greetings. Irony of ironies that eightfeetdeep is recovering from toe surgery. I had surgery on my left second toe yesterday. Now I have one good foot and one foot bandaged. I remained awake during the procedure though I was dosed a bit with propofol and was injected in the foot with lidocaine or some other local anesthetic. I didn’t give much of a rat’s ass while under the sedative. Yes, I know propofol raises some alarm bells with the whole Michael Jackson and Joan Rivers thing. But I felt only slight pain for a few seconds during the surgery and some minor, dull pain afterwards.

The most aggravating problem with all of this is having to strictly limit my walking to avoid pressure on the affected toe. When I must walk the bandaged foot must be assisted by a surgical shoe. This limited mobility is very difficult when living alone with not a whole lot of money. But if the straightened out second toe is successful, I suppose it will be worth it.

Do not stay thirsty my friends.

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A cliche will likely prove right in two weeks

We have all heard the old cliche about how things being worse before they get better. Perhaps that is what will be soon happening to me.

By no means am I saying I want my situation worse so I suppose I should explain.

For several months now, I have been a virtual prisoner in my own abode. The pinnacle of these months have been taking a trip, mostly by Greyhound, to Houston to see a doctor at the VA Hospital. I mentioned one such trip yesterday. Fortunately, most were better than this week’s trip.

I have been on light duty, phone duty mostly, at work. I spent about six months doing that last year with a torn meniscus and surgery to repair it. Then came physical therapy for a month. Hopefully, this episode won’t going to take that long. I hope.

What has had me tied down for a short time this year has been — ta da — my left, second toe. Is that not appropriate for a blog named eightfeetdeep?

As I have mentioned before I have Type II diabetes. Some time ago I found a sore on the bottom of that toe. It, the toe, and the two adjacent ones are afflicted with hammertoe. You can read all about it in the link. As a result, the toe keeps being hammered when walking. With diabetes, such ulcerations tend to heal very slowly, if not ever.

I have been seeing a podiatrist for a couple of months now. He suggested, and I tend to agree, that hammertoe surgery is called for. This is a rather long and technical look at the operation written by a podiatrist. If you know a little of the basics of medical terminology, then it isn’t all that difficult. But basically, I will have some bones cut on in the toe and they should heal within a couple of weeks. I will probably need a week off after being “surged.” Isn’t that a better term than operated upon? No? Who cares what you think?

My podiatrist said he has done “thousands” of these surgeries and that they only take 10-to-15 minutes. Of course, there is the waiting around all morning, plus recovery, then figuring out how the hell I am getting home from Houston. I will figure that out and I better do so pretty damn quick because my surgery is in two weeks.

Oh my. Well, like I said. It will be worse before it gets better. Damned cliche!

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People yell. Who cares?

These days I am still not running on all cylinders. Well, my truck isn’t. Perhaps I am not doing so as well.

I went for a routine, more or less, appointment yesterday with the neurologist at the Houston VA Hospital. I have developed a routine of traveling to the hospital by Greyhound bus rather than in my own vehicle. It can get expensive.

Luckily, the Houston Metro Rail runs near the Texas Medical Center. I can stop at one of the transit centers and catch the 1 bus to the VA Hospital. And vice versa.

The trip went okay, I made it back home in time to watch “Justified.” I did have one of those flashes of anger that kind upset my day.

I was at the Downtown Transit Center in Houston, just about a block from the Greyhound station. I was walking on the platform, going nowhere in particular, “just waitin’ on a train,” as Jimmie (the Yodeling Brakeman) Rodgers wrote and sang. All of a sudden, this loud voice boomed in my ear.

“HEY,” It was if this guy with the loud voice had a bullhorn in his hand.

When I turned around I saw this muscular black guy in his 30s or 40s — I will explain why I make that distinction in a moment. I must have had a puzzled look on my face because I was certainly puzzled.

“You were in my way and I hollered ’cause I wanted you to move,” said the guy, walking with a woman, not at all a beauty queen.

“You didn’t need to yell, I’m not deaf,” I said, yelling, not nearly as loudly as he.

I have no idea why this guy felt he needed to holler at me. His face couldn’t have been no more than a foot behind my ear. Catching a glance at this guy who was then standing on the platform with his companion, it seemed as if he was either angry or was perhaps just an angry guy.

Some guys are just mad or get mad at the drop of a hat. I was like that once, a whole lot like that, for a good while. It was a manifestation of depression, a psychiatrist told me, when I realized after spinal surgery that I was seriously depressed. “Depression is anger turned inside out,” the doctor said. Maybe so, but what is an umbrella turned inside out? Uh, don’t know that one either.

The wandering loud guy may have just had a bad day. Or a bad life. Maybe he just doesn’t like white people.

Race relations is a rather complicated matter in my case. I grew up in East Texas which is more like the Old South than the West. Hell, my great-grandfather fought in the Confederate Army. If you think about it, that’s pretty recent, relatively speaking. As I grew up, went to the Navy and worked with and became friends with people of all colors and ethnic groups, race became a bit less complicated.

But I also have realized some folks don’t like you because of your color. Wow! It took me a good part of my life, to discover a truth that millions others grew up knowing first hand. Stupid ass honky!

I don’t go around thinking about whether this person or that likes me or detests me. Well, maybe with some people. I have definitely been wrong about what people think. But here I am near 60. So I think: Why should I care?

It’s like the expression on a coffee cup my sister-in-law, Barbara, gave me upon graduating college some 35 years ago. I loved the sentiment then and still love it. It said: “Excuse me. You have obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.”

There it is.

 

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Bad Boys better hide, COPS is coming again

Last week the Beaumont City Council approved an agreement with Langley Productions “related to the filming of the Beaumont Police Department for the television show ‘COPS.'”

If you live on Pluto, COPS is the show on which police from various cities and counties throughout the country exhibit scads of police officers encountering mostly law-breakers. Many of those perps seem to either wear no shirt or a sport a “wife-beater.” Some of those suspects may even be wife-beaters.

This is the second time the long-running TV show has visited Beaumont. While the folks from COPS stayed for whatever period, the previous stay only resulted in a small chase in a neighborhood which resulted in one friendly perp was arrested.

I watch the show every now and then, such as now when the satellite system here is acting strangely. I have to admit they encounter the interesting, the pathetic, everyone it seems other than the innocent. Always at the end of every encounter, it seems, the police officers appear to impart a “moral of the story.” That is among the outcomes of the show that I really dislike. I also do not like the actions of a great many officers. This is specifically related to their command-giving and their telling suspects not to “resist” when sometimes it appears the police officers’ actions may lead to “resisting.” Police chases are also a subject that I could pontificate on from here to then.

When police chase a subject, he may not know who the person is that is running. Sure, the person chased might be a murderer. But in some cases, the person runs for what he or she may perceive is a large jam to avoid. Of course, once the officer starts chasing, then technically the offense increases.

I’ve said it before and I know law enforcement officers who admit that it is a personal affront for some one to run away from then. This is especially the case when officers have to chase someone on foot.

Oh and something else that drives me up a wall is what I am watching. A suspected prostitute they arrest her for DWI after failing a couple of sobriety tests by a narrow margin. I just hope I am not suspected of DUI because, even sober and I no longer drink and drive, I would definitely fail these stupid field tests. My diabetes has taken a toe-hold on me, no pun intended, but I have hammertoes on my left feet. One has an ulcer that I have tried to clear up for two months. That’s just not working and I will have surgery next month on my toes to hopefully correct them. Either way, there is no way in hell I’d pass any kind of “roadside gymnastics,” as Gary Trichter, a certified DUI/DWI attorney in Houston, calls it.

I would raise the thought that problems now faced in the country with what seems to be an explosion of police shootings could be due to the COPS factor. I can’t prove it. And it may be years before that is either proved or disproved.

Please don’t think I dislike cops or cop shows. Some of my favorite shows are police-oriented, some live, some recreated and some pure fiction.

Nevertheless, COPS will be back on our streets sometime soon for better or worse. Our police will continue you their often dangerous jobs perhaps playing for the camera, but hopefully not.

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Thoughts from inside the noise maker

Yesterday I took that long, noisy trip inside the MRI machine at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston. The best I can recall it was the seventh MRI I have had. All but two of those tests were for my problematic cervical spine. I was just reviewing my 60 pages of radiological reports on the “premium” VA website. Not all those pages deal with MRI reports. There are a ton of X-rays of knees, chest and feet. These results did give notice of previous bilateral C-spine problems that were treated by different surgeons on two different occasions and who worked from the back and front of the neck. The latter MRI picture exhibited:

 “Evidence of status post ACDF with bone graft and anterior fusion with endplate and screws from C5 through C7.”

That is to say the results of my last surgery was seen by the radiologist and it showed what is known as a “Anterior Cervical Diskectomy with Fusion (ACDF). That procedure was accomplished by removing a sliver of hip bone and using it to fuse with a titanium strip fastened with an endplate and screws from the fifth to the seventh cervical vertebrae.

The test is pretty simple. You are stuck inside a tube as an electromagnetic machine presents its cacophony of loud, erratic-sounding noises while it slowly pictures different levels of your inner-workings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Aj2QspPf7s

A word of warning: If you experience a mental flameout while listening to all 33 minutes of this video, don’t blame me.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I imagine most others do as well at some point in time, just why this damn machine is so loud. Never mind that one might picture the different noises, which can sound like anything from a washing machine about to spin out of control to an alarm warning a nuclear meltdown. Rather than try to explain, I found an excellent article from Caltech than lays out the MRI mechanics as well as the why of the loud noises. This column from the American TInnitus Association goes more into the noise aspect and how there are some not-so-loud MRIs out there.

This trip into the tube is to look for possible reasons why I have developed a subset of new pain from my ol’ C-spine. Hopefully,  the radiology report might explain why I also suffer occasional tingling in my right bicep. I also hope that whatever it is causing the problems isn’t something too terribly dramatic. These days I would rather look for drama in a novel or on TV.