{"id":4003,"date":"2013-02-01T06:00:43","date_gmt":"2013-02-01T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allandouglas.com\/blog\/?p=4003"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:41","slug":"getting-a-leg-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/getting-a-leg-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting a Leg Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite humorist bloggers and authors, Charles Gulotta, once posted an article in which he discussed the trials and travails of Restless Leg Syndrome<\/a>.\u00a0 It\u2019s quite entertaining and I don\u2019t mind at all if you go read it (if you haven\u2019t seen it already) before we proceed.\u00a0 Go ahead, I\u2019ll just have another cup of coffee while you\u2019re away.<\/p>\n

Oh, good, you\u2019re back.\u00a0 Have you ever had such problems?<\/p>\n

The only time I myself ever had such an experience was in Junior High School after having encountered multiple knee injuries while participating in football, wrestling, gymnastics, and track & field stuff.\u00a0 On this otherwise normal day, I was coming down the long, winding central stair case of the four-story school when my left knee suddenly decided it wanted to be somewhere else and departed, claiming it would meet up with the rest of my body parts in the cafeteria at lunch time.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Naturally, this had a rather unsettling effect on the rest of my person, which was not prepared, especially since Left Knee was the one actively engaged in lowering the rest of the body down to the next step at the time of its sudden departure.\u00a0 The whole kit-n-caboodle dropped, bounced off the steps and began rolling down the stairs, collecting other body assemblages as it went.\u00a0 The whole thing began to snowball as this mass of tangled arms, legs and assorted body parts began to pick up momentum.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for all of us, this collection of beings ran into something immovable.\u00a0 His name was Dan.\u00a0 Dan was built like a brick, and almost as smart, but he was a good guy.\u00a0 He helped get the tangled, cursing mass untangled, though it remained cursing.\u00a0 From the sound of things, I expected to be torn to bits by the angry wad of humanity.\u00a0 But when Dan lifted me with a forearm like a hydraulic piston and set me on my feet, we discovered that Left Knee was still unaccounted for and I began the scene all over again, except the angry mob saw me coming this time and hopped out of the way, allowing me to slam face first into the steps and skid a ways downward.\u00a0 Dan said, \u201cHmmm\u2026 knee\u2019s gone.\u00a0 Prolly why he fell before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just at that moment a school official appeared out of thin air.\u00a0\u00a0 I never figured out how they did that; any time there was trouble, no matter where it was, within seconds some school staff member would appear as though beamed in to start taking names and issuing threats.\u00a0 My antagonists decided there would be no blood bath today and hurried on to their next classes.\u00a0 Except Dan; Dan was pressed into service to help carry me to the nurse\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

She called my parents, my parents collected me and made an appointment with the hospital for me to be looked at.\u00a0 It was decided that I\u2019d torn a cartilage in the knee and a flap of that had gotten between some things it should not be between, and this was a problem.\u00a0 I spent the next several weeks undergoing physical therapy to strengthen certain knee muscles enough to be able to take the place of the cartilage which was scheduled to be cut out.\u00a0 Mostly, this \u201ctherapy\u201d involved sitting on the dryer at home doing leg extensions with a net bag of canned goods tied to my foot.<\/p>\n

The surgery is a story unto itself, encompassing my death, an out of body experience, my restoration to life, and an (almost) romantic encounter with a nurse called Thumper.\u00a0 But that is a tale for another time.<\/p>\n

This was before the modern, enlightened times of microsurgery and laparoscopy.\u00a0 To get at the offending cartilage, they laid my knee open like a fileted fish and chopped it out.\u00a0 I think they used a stone axe because the scar tissue that formed afterward required repeated surgeries to clean up.\u00a0 Fortunately, by the time these were required arthroscopy was coming into general use and was improved over the years.\u00a0 The last of these surgeries was little more than an office visit and a day on the sofa watching sci-fi movies before I was back at work.<\/p>\n

After the scourging that Left Knee was subjected to for having gone AWOL, it has since thought better of simply abandoning the rest of my body without warning and has not done it again.\u00a0 Although, it does complain bitterly during rainy weather that it would prefer to stay in bed while the rest of the gang goes off to take care of the daily chores.<\/p>\n

After the surgery I spent a couple of weeks under the tutelage of The Marquis DE Sade (a.k.a rehabilitation therapist) learning to walk again; major damage to a limb (like this surgery) will cause the brain to switch the limb off to protect it.\u00a0\u00a0 Getting the power restored was not pleasant.\u00a0 Then a few months on crutches at school, bullies forcing me to learn to become a crutch-ninja, \u00a0my coming out (or coming off) coinciding with a school swim party where a track team-mate challenged me to a friendly race, the heart-warming feeling of a whole pool\/gym\/track building full of school mates chanting, \u201cGo Doug, Go! Go, Doug, go!<\/a>\u201d, and an (actual) romantic encounter with a young lady I didn\u2019t even know cared, but went on to become my first serious girlfriend.<\/p>\n

All in all, it was a grand adventure.\u00a0 Not one I ever want to repeat, mind you, but one I\u2019m glad to have experienced once.\u00a0 But I do feel bad for Charles, whose wandering leg adventure is an on-going story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite humorist bloggers and authors, Charles Gulotta, once posted an article in which he discussed the trials and travails of Restless Leg Syndrome.  It’s quite entertaining and I don’t mind at all if you go read it (if you haven’t seen it already) before we proceed.  Go ahead, I’ll just have another … Continue reading “Getting a Leg Up”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-4003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-adventures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21169,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003\/revisions\/21169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}