Pain is for quitters

Due to the physical therapy, I’ve been feeling pretty good, so when a friend called asking if I wanted to work a wrap day…

I don’t think I need to finish that sentence. My answer would have been yes no matter how I’d been feeling. Work is work, and my main objective is to get enough hours to keep my health insurance.

The first half of the day was easy – I was in a lift, taking down lights that were hung from the pipe grid.

Then, after lunch, we got sent up to the perms to drop out some lights. Dropping out lights isn’t all that physically taxing but is very repetitive. One unties the lines, then loops the rope around the handrail and then lowers the light (never, ever, let the rope slide. Friction creates heat and heat burns gloves and hands. Use a hand over hand motion) to the ground.

After a few hours of this I was, as the kids say, fucked up big time.

As I descended the ladder at the end of the day, a twinge let me know I’d overdone it, and on the drive home the nagging pain that I thought I’d conquered resurfaced.

Not, of course, enough pain to stop me from doing some kick sets in the pool after work, but still… pain.

Just enough to remind me that I overdid it, but what the hell am I supposed to do? Turn down work because my wimp of a body isn’t performing?

I don’t think so.

I was, however, very glad to have today off. I went to the physical therapist, who tried her best to make things better and then sent me home wearing a weird patch that lit up and hopefully, will make everything better before I have to push carts up an incline tomorrow.

Yay work!

Gotta keep that insurance.

Filed under: Work, crossfit, health, healthy-living, pain, patch, physical, therapy, transportation, Work

Ready, set, shower!

Filed under: camera, hazardous, mishaps, Photos, Work, injury, pain, rubber gloves, tape, water

Home again, at last.

Long ago, at a party, a friend who had spent her entire adult life in a wheelchair said to me “When you’re handicapped, everything is a procedure.”  At the time, I nodded sagely and sipped my drink while I tried to look like I had a fucking clue what she was talking about.  After the last 24 hours, I completely – truly – understand.

I’m still working on the procedure, but since I’ve only been up and about for the past day, it’s all fairly new.  At my wonderful saintly friends’ house, the only time I had to get up was to go to the toilet – everything was brought to me and I even had help taking a bath. Now, I’m on my own and were there webcams in my house, my antics would be comedy classics.

See me try to carry a cup of coffee (yes, I know it was stupid) while on crutches and spill it all over the cat!

See me trip over a throw rug!

See me try to coax hissing coffee-soaked cat down from the top of the bookshelf!

See me try to retrieve errant crutches after they fall just out of reach!

See me try to wash the dishes and keep my foot propped up at the same time!

Best of all – see me try to bend over and pick something up off of the floor!

Hilarious.

I’m sure it’ll get better – I just missed out on the crutch practice days that I would have had without the complications.

Because nothing ever seems to go all that smoothly for me, I picked up a staph infection at the hospital. Not at the incision site – on the top of the foot. I was fine at first, but as soon as the hospital’s anesthesia wore off, the foot began feel like it was on fire.  Since I have actually set fire to myself (on more than one occasion), this is a feeling that I know well and quite frankly don’t care for all that much.

The medication wasn’t helping the pain at all, so  the doctor was called and he told me to take more of the medication, which made me vomit. Repeatedly.  I have now officially poisoned myself with vicodin. Sweet. Remind me not to do it again. I don’t know how people get addicted to that stuff.

I got a better pain drug and was much happier once I managed to get my face out of the trash can.

Although I didn’t have internet, I had cable TV (I’m going to miss that), the best dog ever to keep me company and wonderful people who kept me fed and updated my blog for me. I owe all of them something spectacular now.

When I went to the doctor for a check up, he just scratched his head and said that he couldn’t figure out how I’d gotten the infection – then wrote me a prescription for antibiotics and said that if there was no improvement in five days that he was going to have to re-admit me to the staph factory hospital.

The good news is that the infection’s definitely clearing up – I still can’t put any weight on the foot, but it’s stopped hurting so much when it’s not elevated, which was the one obstacle to my going home.

So now I’m back home and I have the internet again. Of course, the first thing I did was go online and order some padding for the crutches because my armpits look like hamburger.

I’m going back to the doctor in the morning. I don’t suppose he’s going to let me drive yet, so I’m planning on being stuck in the house for another week.

Which isn’t a bad thing – I have a lot of stuff I have to get done if and when I can manage to balance.

Filed under: humor, mishaps, Non-Work, bunion, cat, coffee, crutch, foot, ouch, pain, recovery, surgery

How much has to happen before it’s officially a bad day?

My internet connection is like an indifferent lover – it dissapears for days at a time and despite my desperate pleas, doesn’t tell me where it’s gone, who it’s with or when it’s going to come back. I always swear I’m going to leave it for something more reliable, but I never do.

This latest outage was almost a full week, and service was just restored this evening. I think it’s the heat.

I’m just about ready to break up for good, though. There are some decent deals on other, more attentive companies offering faster and better connections. Now that I have internet again I can look around and see who’s offering what in my area.

Speaking of stuff that I just don’t need, this morning as I was on my way into work a guy cut me off on the freeway and I slammed on my brakes without bothering to slap my hand on top of my cup of coffee, which, of course, went flying and completely soaked the front of my car – most of the coffee fell into the center console, soaking the flotsam that happened to be living there (’cause I don’t clean out my car often enough) and my bluetooth headset ( I plugged it in to see if it’ll charge. Keep your fingers crossed).

When I got home tonight, I had to soak the entire front section of the carpet in cleaner and then wet vac the whole unhappy mess. I could still smell coffee afterwards, so I got the screw gun and removed the center console in order to spray underneath. I hope I got it all – it’s really unpleasant in there right now. I love coffee, so you’d think I’d be overjoyed to have my car reek of it. Not so much.

I also hurt my back at work today. This particular set has a super-shiny (and super-slippery) floor. While it would be nice if construction could wait to lay the floor until after we hang the lights, sometimes that’s just not possible, so we have to put layout board (which is a very thick cardboard) under the scissor lifts so the tires don’t mar the floor. Since we weren’t given enough board to be able to cover the entire floor, we weren’t able to tape the board down and we had to keep picking it up and moving it to where the lifts needed to go. In case you were wondering, thick cardboard laid down over a slick surface does not give the best footing in the world, so I slid a few times and now my back’s killing me.

I’m going to have to dig out the back belt just to get through the day at work tomorrow.

Aside from the lack of internet, the searing pain and the coffee soaked vehicle, this week hasn’t been too bad. I’ve had 7 am calls on a lot which is fairly close to my house, but I’ve had to be there by 6:15 as this particular lot has a trash truck which makes its rounds along the only drivable route from the ‘crew’ gate to the parking structure around 6:30 or 6:45. There’s no way around the trash truck and getting stuck behind it will result in being late to work despite being on the lot with plenty of time to park and walk to the stage.

Of course the parking structure has it’s own entrance, but only execs are allowed to use it. The rest of us have to come in the peon gate and drive across the lot to said structure while trying to outrun the delay causing trash truck. This has forced me to get to work very early, which means I’ve been able to sit on the tailgate while drinking my coffee and reading my paper before we’re called in, so I haven’t really minded.

I’ve also been working with some really wonderful people, so in that respect it’s been extra nice week.

Today I had a 6 am call and I would have been there around 5:45 but I had to stop and try to mop up spilled coffee, which, by the way, I didn’t cry over.

Oh, wait. That was milk. Never mind.

Filed under: mishaps, Non-Work, Work, auto, back, car, coffee, food, health, mess, pain, spill, vacuum, Work

I’ll be fine once the bleeding stops.

Since I had no work today (that’s not necessarily a bad thing – I worked all night Friday night so I lost Saturday. I know I got up, went out and did…something. I just don’t remember what that something was. Then, Sunday was the annual trip to the LA County Fair where I once again overindulged on strange and disturbing fried foods – so I needed a day to recover and maybe get some weekend-type stuff done), I got up bright and early and did my laundry, and then, because I felt like a challenge, I decided to take the cat to the vet.

This is never a decision to be made lightly. This particular cat, who is all of 7 lbs, can somehow manage to scream louder than an air-raid siren when she’s placed in the kitty carrier and driven anywhere. But lately she’s had this weird thing with her eye and I was starting to get worried about it. Basically, she scratches all the fur off the corner of the eye and then walks around the house shaking her head and crying. I figured since she usually sits on the back of the couch and glares at me silently or sits on my head while I’m trying to sleep, I should probably ask a trained professional if there might be something wrong with her.

So, when I got to the vet, he looked her over, took her temperature, thought for a moment, and then said “I don’t think there’s anything wrong, but I’m going to send you to an ophthalmologist just so he can have a look at the eye. They have some specialized equipment that we don’t.”

Dude. It’s a cat.

Right at the number one position on the list of things I am simply not going to do is stuff a fur-covered Klaxon into a cheap Chinese plastic box and then drive across town to a fucking kitty eye doctor in Santa Monica just because.

Hell, I don’t even think I’d take a quiet, well behaved cat that just sat there in the passenger seat and didn’t fuck with the radio or anything all the way out to Santa Monica just to see a specialist because the vet thought there wasn’t anything wrong, but still, let’s have a look. Or something.

No. I have to draw the line somewhere.

I held the fucking kitty eye doctor’s business card up, shook it, and said “Didn’t you just tell me you didn’t think anything was wrong?”

Clearly, this was not what he was used to hearing from clients.

Sometimes you can just tell that someone is used to dealing with post post-modern middle aged urban professionals (muppies? mappies? puppies?) who have pets instead of children.

“Well,” he stammered “I don’t think it’s really anything, no. I…I just thought you might… just want to be sure.”

Okay, fine. How about I take your word that it’s nothing, and then if something out-of-the-ordinary happens, like she grows a second head or starts oozing green goo or explodes I’ll think about giving the fucking kitty eye doctor a call.

At some point during the conversation, said kitty decided that a really great place to hide from the bastard who was torturing her was under the front of my shirt – in the process of her trying to climb in and my trying to pull her out so said bastard could give her a shot she shredded up a fairly significant portion of my skin.

Guess I should have had him trim her claws, too.

He gave me some eye-drops to put in her eye and I think I’m going to wait until tomorrow to start them. Discretion being the better part of valor (or so I’ve been told), I need to stop bleeding before I take on any more epic cat battles.

Filed under: life in LA, mishaps, Non-Work, Off-Topic, rants, band-aid, cat, crazy, monday, pain, pet, screaming, vet, weekend