This Little Piggy Stayed Home
Today, like most days, I called up Jeff to see what was going on in his life. I am in the habit of calling Jeff every day for several reasons. First of all, he’s one of the few men of my age that I know around here, second, he is generally my go-to guy for stuff around the house because he knows the house and he is generally a font of wisdom about household things. I recently referred to him as my nemesis and I don’t think he has quite gotten past that label just yet. It’s a really good word because you can mean it in a serious way if you want or you can use it in a joking way so there is lots of wiggle room with the word nemesis. It’s hard to be proud of being called a nemesis, but its equally hard to get too offended by it either. This word can’t be pleasing or upsetting from what I can tell. That makes it a perfect word for Jeff since he and I like to keep one another slightly off-balance.
Kim and I moved out here in part because we felt that our families might start to need us a bit more as the aging process started to take the clubhouse turn, as they say. You see, she and I are both the youngest of three. She has a wide grouping with a +12 and a +5 and I have a tight grouping with a +3 and a +1.5. In any case, we thought it would be good to all be out here together in our dotage. So, let me run down the litany of maladies we have encountered. To begin with, Captain Woo USN Retired who was one of my riding buddies lost his shoulder to an old rugby or war injury. I started him on my old bike and then sold him my sweet ice blue RT and watched that one have to go bye-bye when his orthopedist demanded it go. That was Brother-in-Law #1.
Then there was Brother-in-Law #2, Baby Bennett (don’t ask the derivation of that nickname…check with Willy Boy about a certain trip through the countryside in Italy). Bennett had the misfortune of having my sister open a bathroom door directly into his cranium while he was dismounting the commode. Ouch! Baby Bennett had to have surgery to his head that left him without a sense of small or taste (a foreshadowing of Coronavirus?), a bunch of fluid on the brain and eventually a nice seven-iron-sized divot in his advanced forehead. Double ouch! As he recovered from that trauma, he managed to get the scourge of our advancing older male generation, the dreaded prostate nonsense. Of course these days it is the tonsillectomy of surgeries (except for that issue of where the surgery is located) and regardless of what direction is chosen for the attack, there is no good or easy way to do it that won’t involve a large donut shaped whoopee cushion for a month afterwards. When asked how his recovery is going, Baby Bennett like to say “It depends”. Get it….Depends.
Kim has also had her share of maladies, but they were before we came out here for the most part. She had both knees replaced and now she can kick and stretch and is as good as new. She had both eyes replaced, which is to say that she had cataracts in both eyes (yes, she is young to be a cataracter). Between all of that and the normal array of what I have come to understand is the Grogg array of family issues, she is doing great.
Just last week, Kim’s older sister Sharon did what all too many senior citizens manage to do, she’d fallen and she couldn’t get up. This was a middle of the night triple-gainer on the way to the bathroom that ended up with a severely broken hip. This is the same thing that happened to friend Gary who fell while doing that underwear dance we all try to do. This is what happened to neighbor Mary who’s son is the top orthopedic surgeon at Stanford University. But Sharon did this in a way that didn’t result in a hip replacement, but just two titanium screws and a titanium rod. Ouch, ouch, ouch! She is right now on her way to a rehab center after she said she wants a really cute Physical Therapist. It seems she’s been falling into him for two days now. Nowadays, it seems two strikes and you are out of the hospital (probably a good thing with all the COVID-19 hanging out in the stairways). Sharon has some serious rehab in front of her since her knees were not in tip-top condition to begin with. I am told that the orthopedic community is thinking of renaming bad knee problems as Grogg Syndrome in honor of the Grogg knees that are simply not designed for endurance. They were quite comely in their prime, but they don’t seem to age all that well. All those years flying around the world must have put too much mileage on them to get to the bathroom at night.
And that brings me to Brother-in-Law #3, Jeff. I have known Jeff for fifteen years now. He is exactly my age, give or take a few months. People might mistake us for brothers based on the fact that neither one of us is a pip-squeak. He is tall and big with a big barrel chest and is pretty much a man’s man who tends towards weight lifting and driving fast vehicles likes planes, cars and motorcycles. He was a rock drummer with an Afro in his youth and his favorite artists run towards quiet bands like Cream and Snarky Puppy. During the years I have know Jeff I think he has had maybe eight knee surgeries, several shoulder surgeries and one or two back surgeries. That’s the thing about man’s men like him and Captain Woo, they beat themselves up in sports and daring do in their youth and then become poster-children for Ibuprofen when they age. The most notable deficiency for Jeff, the Grogg Syndrome knees finally got solved with one replacement and several God-knows-what procedures that were designed to avoid the AKA (above the knee amputation) that 70% of the orthopedists recommended.
Jeff has also had a few years of struggling with Rheumatoid Arthritis and has become very acquainted with Prednisone. Then at the end of last year he was diagnosed with one of the less-serious forms of leukemia (that has to be an oxymoron since leukemia is by definition a serious thing). He has been doing chemotherapy for most of this year and if he had any hair to lose he might have, but other than dropping a few pounds he looks no worse for wear. I know he tires more easily, but in general it seems his system is responding well to the chemo and he is closing in on a good outcome.
So imagine my surprise when I called Jeff today and asked perfunctorily how he was. He said, “not so good.” I knew he had been to the doctor so I immediately asked what had happened. He explained that he has a toe problem. He seems to have contracted some sort of infection in one of his toes and the infection is in his bone. It doesn’t seem directly related to anything else he has, but who knows these days. But the big news was that the doctor told him that in most cases (he encounters this 100 times per year he says) the best course of action is to amputate the toe. It seems doctors always want there to be less of Jeff rather than more. Maybe its a nemesis thing? The toe is his second toe, you know, the little piggy that stayed home….forever. I am glad we are here for all our siblings, but I sense toeless Jeff will particularly need our support.