The blog knew. I swear it did.
The minute I decided to resurrect it, whatever higher power, force, blogosphere God there is (Blod, perhaps?) looking down on all things blog-like decided that things should take a godawful turn in this house, and thus justify the existence of Home Is A Four Letter Word.
Hubby has a back injury. Not just a pulled muscle or something that needs a packet of frozen peas held up against it but, it turns out, four bulging discs. Ouch. Yeh. Nasty.
After screeching in agony all weekend, he pulled some strings to get himself an MRI scan at a hospital. Funny that you pay hundreds of dollars a month into a private health insurance plan and yet you can’t even get to see your own doctor, isn’t it? So many calls were made to our general doctor and to specialists, and we got stuck in a loop: he couldn’t see a specialist with getting a scan; he couldn’t get a scan without getting a referral from his general physician; the physician wouldn’t see him because she was too busy. Lucky for Hubby that a physician pal could call up a hospital ER department and insist on an appointment. Otherwise, well, I don’t know where we’d be.
So in he goes to ER, whereupon he is given much pain medication. Like, enough to make Keith Richards blush or Lindsay Lohan to widen her eyes in horror. Through the same physician pal, Hubby already had a prescription for codeine. Plus he was taking Benadryl to try to help him sleep. Then in hospital they piled on some Percocet, Valium and morphine. Just the Percocet would have done me fine, thank you. Lucky him. Or so I thought. Despite resembling one whole episode of Breaking Bad, he still didn’t sleep that night.
So this, tonight, is now his third night in hospital. They might operate, they might not. Meantime Hubby is feeling better. I know he his feeling better because today, when I and the kiddos went to visit, he was sitting in a chair wielding a stick with a grabber thing on the end of it, all the better to boss us about with. He could lift it up and jab the air to make a point. The kids didn’t like it one bit, although Munchkin liked that the end of it was magnetic, and he and Dad’s grabber stick attached themselves to various metal bars around the room.
Hubby is also bored. I know this because he started talking about the various other implements we could consider buying, in addition to the grabber stick thing. There was a whole catalog of medical help-me-I-can’t-move gadgets, sitting there on a table (just far enough out of reach that Hubby could happily demonstrate the grabber stick thing). The page of the catalog was flipped open to what looked like giant scissors, but double scissors. You put our fingers through two big loops at one end, and very far down on the implement, after a few more loops and crossed bits of metal, there was room for…
Oh God I almost can’t say it. Toilet paper. Yes, really. You bunch up a bit of bog paper, grab it with this scissor thing and wipe your bum. It’s for people who can’t turn around enough to do it normally.
Hubby also wants a seat for a toilet, one that fits on top so he doesn’t have to bend down too much. My Gran has one of them. Which kind of drives home my point. I mean, for God’s sake – are we 80 already? I see my future and I don’t bloody like it. To hell with ‘in sickness and in health’. If I have to wipe my husband’s bottom I’m outta here. Which is, presumably, why this clever catalog exists: as much to save marriages as to preserve bad backs.