Sing it with me! Actually, if you have the ability NOT to, that’s definitely for the best. Before you read the below, let me say – there are many, many people I know currently going through FAR worse medical times than I am. This is simply the tale of the circus that has been the last month and a half.

Back in December, my mother at the age of 78 attempted to lift the planet via trying to pick up a gate that was cemented into the ground. A month after the injury, when her doctor realized that there was no x-ray done in the emergency room, she ordered one and what Mom was sure was a pulled muscle turned out to be a vertebrae smashed on one side to the point of a quarter inch of bone holding up her spine. What followed was immediate vertebroplasty – where they inject bone cement into the mass of splinters to glue it all back together.

This process, re-inflating the vertebrae, caused the one above it to break. Either because there was an undetected crack, or just because it was weak. The date was now two months after the initial injury. My sister, who lives near Mom and Dad, is a divorced Mom of two with a job that requires travel. She had used up all her vacation, personal time, and about every other extra second of ‘not in the office’ that any sane job could permit. So I got on a plane the day Mom went in for her second vertebroplasty. Fortunately it went spectacularly well. I stayed in San Antonio for a shade under three weeks while she recovered and got some of her strength back, and while my awesome husband played single dad.

I then came home with my arms intermittently stabbing me about the work I’d been doing that involved motions which my arms resent. My wonderful doctor didn’t have anything new to try for the arm nerve situation. Soooo… though I still like him and respect that he was stumped, I went and found a new doctor. New doctor has some new ideas which we’re working on to see if we can find a way over, under or through the wall. Or maybe we’ll just check around the back. I’m having real feelings for the Ferlinghetti poem about ‘Kafka’s Castle’ (it’s #16 in his book ‘A Coney Island of the Mind’).

I think I actually have my brain back.  Duck!

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