Luke.... I am Your Father

I know, you are shocked. Another post so quickly?

Well, since I'm sitting here with my foot iced and elevated and no where else to go I thought I might regale the vast emptitude of cyberspace with my continued trials and tribulations.

Recently, (and I use recently in the current bureaucratic sense of health care meaning in the last 6 months) I had a sleep study done and I travelled to Indianapolis to get my results yesterday. Now, this would be a boring post or Facebook update except for the crippling heel pain that I was suffering from some unremembered injury this past holiday weekend. That converted an otherwise ordinary and boring drive to the Indy area into an unrelenting exercise of controlled torture. Every fissure in the road surface converted itself magically into a jolt of agony much like that of an icepick being driven into my left heel.

Upon arriving at my designated appointment, I had to park 1/4 of a mile away in the parking lot and hobble to my destination whilst watching spry 80-somethings leap from their vehicles in the handicap parking and sprint to the entrance. It was about this time that I thought that the doctor should be able to prescribe a temporary handicap parking permit with any other medications...

After limping/crawling my way to the second floor for my visit, I learned what has no doubt been apparent for many years, that I do have sleep apnea and I need a CPAP machine. Fortunately, I did not receive my machine yesterday, as I doubt I could have carried the damn thing. I am returning tomorrow for the fitting and such. I did, however, manage to make an appointment to see the orthopedic guy regarding my crippling heel pain. After some ridiculously expensive x-rays and some none-too-gentle prodding of the sore heel I was informed that I have a Haglund deformity. This is a fancy medical way of saying I have a bone growth on my heel that shouldn't be there. By hyper-flexing my foot, I managed to irritate the bursa sacks near my Achilles tendon with the aforementioned genetic monstrosity protruding from my posterior end of my calcaneus.

So I received a giant Aircast for my foot. When combined with the two knee braces and the forthcoming CPAP machine, I am quickly turning into Darth Vader. Or perhaps, since these things are so damn expensive, I should just change my last name to Austin and be done with it.
Either way, I won't be uttering the most misquoted phrase of the Star Wars movies, because I am a geek and I know that this is a Misquote. The actual quote is here.

Christmas

I had an awsome Christmas this year. Sure I had to work, but it was an amazing day.

This is my forst Christmas as a nurse, and I do not think I have ever worked on the actual holiday itself before. About a week or so ago, my wife decided that since I was working for the Holiday, she was going o provide dinner for some people at a recovery center. My initial reaction was, "whatever..."

Christmas morning found me in the kitchen, preparing and roasting the turkey and stuffing While my wife slept after her long night of work on Christmas eve. As I was working on the food, I realized that I had not ever done this before. I was cooking a meal for a group of less fortunate strangers and I was doing it for free. Gratis. I'm sure during my years in the restaurant business I may have cooked a meal for someone less fortunate than me, but I damn well got paid for it! I don't even know these people and I am making Christmas dinner! After the food was in the oven and going, I had an hour before I had to prepare for work and I decided to call the center and let them know that my Wife was not cooking the meal there like originally planned but that the food was indeed coming. The gratitude I heard in the voice on the other end of the line was profound. I just threw a turkey in the oven and MacGuyver'ed up some stuffing using some Hardee's Sausauge biscuits instead of real sausage. It was nothing to me, but this guy on the other end was almost in tears.

Bolstered by this experience, I went to work in the nursing home. One of our residents has been declining in health and I was there for her and her family when she passed away a couple of hours after my shift started. I had the privledge of caring for her since my first day of work as a nurse, and in fact she was the very first patient to whom I administered medications. It was a really rough Christmas for her family and I was glad I was able to be there for them and honored to help.

Before Christmas this year, if you had told me that this was going to be my Christmas experience, I would have thought that it sounded like Christmas was going to suck. After yesterday, I can only say that I had one of the best days of my entire life. I have always heard that there is great joy in selfless giving, I just never really believed it until now.