Thomas Sullivan

                                               6  COMMENTS follow

Shhh.  Don’t want to disturb the Spirit layers.  Okay, let’s hold hands in a circle across the miles.  Now dim the lights or just close your baby blues.  See the floating trumpet?  Make that a floating T-sax (after all this is a séance to get in touch with Sully’s ghost), and let’s hope he doesn’t actually play the damn thing — rock ‘n roll RIP!  Brace yourselves…  He’s baaa-ack!

Seriously, good folks, I am not a zombie.  Go ahead, one pinch.  OUCH!  See?  And I really was grateful and touched by all the expressions of concern as I went through some physical trauma and the sawbones fired up the buzzsaw a time or two.  But now I have escaped stitches, gauze, tape, ace bandages, plaster cast, surgical wear, meds, a deflatible rubber boot that allowed me to work out in the pool, and a pitching wedge that did for a cane.  My gloriously naked body is better than new (it could only be better) and my odometer is rolled back to — oh, say – 19 or 20…decades.

So now I must apologize profusely if you are one of the many people I kinda blew off with glibness when you were so gracious as to ask after my status.  The thing of it is I hate to be a whiner and I’m a pretty stereotypical male in that when I’m injured I just want to be alone.  Maybe it’s an evolutionary echo, like a fear that if you expose your vulnerabilities, the sabertooth tiger will get you while you are lying injured under a bush.  But it was rude and immature of me.  So now in a shameless bid for your sympathy AFTER THE FACT, and hopefully to get an amusing column out of it, I’m whining and coming clean with all the answers and details.  Call it another of my Cannibal Essays, geared as an object lesson in converting mundane life into stylized prose.  There are no bad experiences for a writer, as they say, just material. 

So there I was last January skiing in the dark and pissing off my muse who thought I was altogether too far removed from suffering for my art.  This explains the vindictive irony that I simply wiped out on a nothing sweep of snow, falling softly and I thought in a controlled way but somehow tearing my rotator nearly clean off.  Don’t you love it when the surgeon calls in his colleagues to look at the MRI all excited about the extent of the injury?  Yes, I lied to my friends a little when it happened — lied to myself — actually tried to ski a couple of times sans poles before the sawbones cut.

It is probably not an exaggeration to call me an orthopod junkie.  In order to simplify life, I regularly visit the offices of a coven of terrific trauma surgeons who collectively account for my various injured limbs.  It is only a slight exaggeration to mention that, due to some overlap, I am able to send broken body parts in separately and on occasion keep simultaneous appointments.  When I come to the reception desk the nurses immediately begin laughing, and if I announce my intention to see a veterinarian or a gynecologist, I am pitied but scarcely doubted.  Thus, I have a reputation among the “sturgeons” for not taking treatment seriously. “It would be you…” said the state’s leading carpal tunnel doc when just before he retired I became the first patient whose wrist surgeries he had to repeat.  But see, this is good, because he said I heal so fast that the nerves didn’t have time to abate.  In the postmortem after the rotator cuff repair, that surgeon said the same thing, that my range of motion was better after three days than he had expected in two weeks.  True, one of them also told his nurse, “Don’t bother telling him what to do, he’ll just do what he wants anyway,” but let it be known, I was a very good patient this time. 

The sawbones made sure of that by scaring me to death with his enthusiastic account of how he had to chase my rotator somewhere south of my derrière and haul it into place with a special technique that sounded like a tractor pull and crucify it with twice the number of pins, stitches, and surgery time as usual.  Oh, I was awed and contrite after that.  Didn’t protest when he strapped my arm to my chest or insisted I stay in the hospital overnight or wanted to give me fentanyl for pain (the drug that is 80 times more powerful than morphine and that the Russians used to kill terrorists in that opera house a few years back).  Hate the stuff on account of I think it shuts down my bladder and I never met a catheter I liked.  They always warn you to stay with someone the first 24 hours, but if I feel like I’m in trouble I usually drive over to Wal-Mart and hang out in the pharmacy near the meds.  Not this time.  When my boy-child drove me home I even asked him to stay a while.  Went by the book.  Straight arrow.  I r a good patient – yessir…mm-hmm.

And things went swimmingly at first — learning how to change a light bulb by letting it drop into a clothes basket and shaving my head with one hand and pouring water from a jug spigot into a glass sitting in an open drawer below, etc. Admittedly boredom drove me to press my luck a little, e.g. snowshoeing or dragging a canoe into the lake while the ice was breaking up (a spring thaw event not to be missed!) and poling one-arm along the zigzag lightning channels.  But no harm done. 

What’s really dangerous is following the doctor’s orders, and being too cautious, and rehab, and sleeping!  Sleeping — totally dangerous!  You can crawl into a knot and strangle while sleeping.  Last year my bicep ruptured in the middle of the night!  It was strained while bailing out a boat with a 5-gallon bucket, but I was just lying in bed and suddenly it felt like warm wax dripping down my arm as it peeled off.  That was the right bicep, and after the injury to the left rotator cuff, the doc mentioned that I ruptured that bicep too.  I asked him if he reattached it, and he said “nah, you’ll probably never notice the difference,” so now I’ve got matching ruptured biceps. 

It got more complicated at rehab.  Lisa, who is gifted with the touch, manipulates my arm for half an hour once a week.  I was not trying to be macho, but since I didn’t think stretching could cause any damage, I kept telling her to ignore my reflexes as she torqued my arm, and she did, and that was how my elbow suddenly swelled up like a grapefruit.  One of the standby sawbones aspirated it and compressed it, but when the Ace bandage came off, it just ballooned up again.  X-rays showed zero arthritis, so it had to be a ruptured bursa sac.  When the doc drew off fluid this time, he got nothing but a cup full of black blood, and thus I was sentenced to 10 days in an elbow cast.

Are you getting the picture here?  The Incredible Mummified Man.  I slept in micro bursts swaddled in bloody rags and felt like I was in a Japanese game show where every time I figured out how to wash an armpit, they slapped another cast or ridiculous Velcro wrap on me.  Plus, after making fantastic progress in rehab — months ahead of schedule — I now had to stop all exercises.  Except that I did a lot of hiking.  A LOT.

So why did I opt for toe surgery– don’t ask.  Yet another sawbones saber-dancing around a surgical gurney.  BTW, I recommend not joking with the nurses as you are about to be anesthetized on the slab.  It was, to say the least, impolitic to quote CrackBarbie: “The last nurse I had was four chest hairs short of being a dude!”  (har, har).  Too late the realization dawned on me that the nurse behind the surgical table was, in fact, a dude.  Lights out before I could apologize, and I woke up fearing I would hear people in white discussing my sex change operation (har, har).  But they stuck to the script and so far no funny urges. 

Now welded into a surgical boot with a pin stuck through the end of my toe to hold it together and using a pitching wedge for a cane, I barely missed not sleeping for the next 30 days, and it dootaleebop didn’t cha-cha-cha affect my sanity at all!  Headline: MAN HANGS HIMSELF WITH ACE BANDAGE WHILE LYING IN BED.  Shades of David Carradine in a Bangkok closet.  Absolutely normal, I suppose, for a wretched writer wearing an elbow cast, shoulder sling, 33 miles of Ace bandage, a surgical slipper and bloody stuffing coming out of all seven orifices. 

Did I mention the bath?  I am so clever.  Figured out how to sit in the freaking tub with a surgical boot braced on the wall and an elbow cast looped over the soap dish while shaving my head with one hand.  You probably think my skull looks like hamburger, but nay, the problem was that I never got through a single bath without dipping the cast in the soup.  When the itching kept me awake, I tried holding the cast arm over a burner on the stove to dry it out, and that’s how I set an Ace bandage on fire.

This drove me to try the blue rubber deflatable boot.  With DryPro not only were showers possible, but as the cast was removed and wrappings rotted off, working out in the pool became socially acceptable.  And if a defective squeeze bulb had not messed up the deflating of the rubber boot, I probably would not have hung up like an obscene blue buoy when the thing bobbed out of the water on flip turns.

Out of pity, the surgeon said I could walk all I wanted.  “Like all day?” I asked.  “I don’t think you’ll feel like doing that, but as much as you want,” he repeated.  This led to a reprise of the Bataan death march, during which the bleeding toe became infected.  Thank God for my Maple Grove WalMart pharmacy.  Just two parking lots and a corner of a lake away, I can walk there…or take the elevator.  Like Alice’s Restaurant, you can find anything you want over-the-counter, and it has saved my soul more than once. 

Antibiotics were not enough, so the sawbones pulled the pin on me after 20 days instead of 30.  You’d think that a pin holding a toe together would match its length, but I was shocked to see 4 inches of it come out as if my foot were shish kebab.  “I did some nasty things to your toe,” said the surgeon, “it was basically hanging in three pieces.”  Which is why, I suppose, he only used one stitch that ran through the toe like a clothesline.  More information than I needed to know.  

So there you have it, the unexpurgated skinny.  There is more — the Achilles tendinitis, and how I sprained a knee trying to sleep with my foot hanging off the bed, and falling asleep in the middle of an MRI (clunk, clank — zzzzz) — but in the end laughter is the best medicine, and I’m taking the last dose of that now.  What’s the old saying?  “He who laughs laugh, laughs laughs laughs laughs.”  Yeah.  Whatever.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan )?  It’s fun and unintrusive.  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net. Past newsletters are archived at the website below.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, my new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060 , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.  Have a terrific launch into summer.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/  

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan 

Thomas Sullivan

Comments

Comment by hypnotherapy on June 16, 2009 @ 4:03 am

Hey wonderful….
does he really mean it

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 16, 2009 @ 4:20 am

Is this, by any chance, the hypnotherapist who hypnotized a woman and convinced her that I had stolen her naval? Think State Fair, Michigan, 1980s. I was signing books when this redhead started crawling over me, looking for her belly button…

– Sully

Comment by Robert Jones on June 16, 2009 @ 10:54 am

Your continuing, compounding catastrophes and writing style made for extremely humorous reading – surely much funnier for us to read about than for you to experience. Ow! I couldn’t get very far into your account without hearing Flamingo Frank chuckling. I’m certain I heard a genuine guffaw when I came to your description of attempting to dry your arm cast by holding it over a stove burner and setting an Ace bandage on fire. Overall, it could hold its own in humor when compared even to Jacques Tati’s sequence of catastrophes in his famous film, MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY.

Seriously, you have my sympathy for all the discomfort and inconvenience you experienced. Also seriously, I hope you take mindful heed of the likely “press on regardless” causes and effects related to your painful experiences before you end up being partially eaten by another squirrel.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 16, 2009 @ 11:14 am

Mercy, you used the dreaded “S” word for brown furry rodent (a.k.a. tree rat). Ever since I wrote that column KY JELLY & THE HEADLESS SQUIRREL in September of ‘06, I have been under surveillance. They are watching me from the yard below, even as I type this. Yea verily, Flamingo Frank would have one of his gentlemanly smiles at my stupidity. I shall be very, very careful, amigo…

And thanks for the comments. Glad the farcical tone came through.

– Sully

Comment by Wayne Allen Sallee on June 18, 2009 @ 8:19 pm

Hey, Sully. Man, I thought I was Frankenstein. I think you (more than me) are Bruce Willis in UNBREAKABLE. You seem to heal as fast as I do, and people kept telling me I was more like Sam Jackson in the film. So, yeah. Bruce Willis=Thomas Sullivan.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 18, 2009 @ 8:27 pm

Gives a whole new spin to the phrase “being cast,” doesn’t it? Glad you also heal quickly, my friend. If I take on this new persona of Bruce Willis, do I have to give up being Christopher Walken?

– Sully