helluva week

within the last week, there’s:

another star that possesses the mirror ball trophy…

a new “American Idol”

a new Indiana Jones movie

and…my dad, with his left arm in an immobilization sling.

Wednesday, he was working on a ladder, cleaning the gutters over the deck off the family room. (i know, i know...what in the hell is a 68 year old man doing on a ladder in the first place?? hah! you don't know my dad, huh?) anyway, the ladder failed…bent about three feet from the bottom…and he fell. i got a call from my mother as i was on my way to forge for lunch. a quick call to my boss and i was with them at the ER. he had been taken to a emergency room cubicle and was sitting in a wheelchair in a ridiculous amount of pain, convinced he had broken his upper arm near his shoulder.

two shots of dilaudid, an x-ray, a shot of morphine, a cat scan and a few hours later, the doc said he had dislocated his shoulder and fractured the bone at the top of the humorus bone…the ball bone that goes into that shoulder socket. ouch.

it took another 45 minutes for them to get a larger room open for what the doc called the “reduction” of his shoulder…which meant they were gonna put it back in place. eek. i’ve seen that on tv and it looks icky. they sedated him and popped it back into place. took another x-ray to make sure it was where it needed to be, and the fracture had moved back into place as well, exactly where it needed to be to heal.

they put him in an immobilization sling and sent him home with a prescription for the big V. he’s dealing with it as well as my father can deal with this stuff. he’s off the pain meds by now, which is a good thing. the emotional rollercoaster it had him on was just like mine was…an hour after taking it you’re happy for an hour, then wanna kill someone, then wanna cry your eyes out, and finally long to punch someone right in the face. then it’s time to take another pill and start the crazy cycle over again.

my poor mom is bearing the brunt of most of it.

oh, and if you read a little farther down the page, you'll see what Wednesday was. Mom’s birthday. if you remember, last year on her birthday, he was in the hospital with atrial fibrillation, and i was getting another neuroplasty injection in my spine. birthdays just aren’t any fun for her, huh?