Monday, June 25

I've finally made it three weeks past a hip replacement, and I think they removed more than just a hipbone.  Part of my brain, which contains humor, has also been excised.  The only time I've laughed in these weeks was when I was running down innocents with my battery operated shopping chair at Wegman's.  Now, that WAS funny.

I was not built for problems, especially physical problems.  I come from a long line of people who use their bodies as bulldozers or plows.  My first week home with the walker, I devised a system of hauling large objects behind it, like a suitcase, with a couple of ropes. My father, a man who certainly lived a short distance from his body, once saved his van from accidently rolling into the car behind him by placing his entire body between both.  This worked out well as he didn't get sued. Getting his body out of there with the help of the police proved to be a problem, though.

Getting around with two crutches, as I do at the moment, presents its challenges.  Did you know that handicapped folks like me have to have all these handy dandy tools in order to pull their underwear up, haul cans off the shelf, or grapple with the wet bar of soap that fell on the floor when they take a shower (on a tub seat)?  I drop a crutch on the floor, then I have to thump over to get the plastic gripper to pick it up.  If I drop the crutch in the library parking lot, as I did last week, I have to use the other crutch to push the fallen one up my leg, where I can grab it as I hang on to the car.

The crutches did come in handy a few weeks back, though, when my sister's cat came banging into the house with a terrified chipmunk in its mouth.  The chipmunk escaped into a back bedroom, and after Marcia built a track for it out of  long, buttressed walls of shoes and dirty clothes along the edges, the chipmunk came flying out into the kitchen. It was very alive, and I loudly thumped my crutches to serve as further guideposts to the great outdoors.

One of the most interesting devises for Handicapped Happiness is the raised toilet seat.  Mine is pink and plastic and, so deep that it's hard to remember there's water beneath the shoot.  Women who visit the house don't show too much queasiness around it, perhaps because they have less equipment to lose in the mysterious center.  Men come to the house, ponder how to befriend the thing, and then wrench it off to do their business in a manly way. They forget how the thing fitted over the toilet (both seats have to be up).  There are a lot of sounds and swearing  until they emerge, usually in defeat, and ask a woman to put it back on.