MAN OF STEEL

Sunday; over 6 hours of surgery, 1 plate, several screws and one pin later Sweet Thang has been sliced, diced and reassembled. Only the left side of his pelvis was broken, thank goodness. The doctor says that he’ll have to stay in a wheelchair for 6 to 8 weeks without putting ever putting his left foot on the floor (he’s so big that if he puts any weight on his left side the new hardware won’t support him until the bone grows back) and then undergo 3 to 6 months of physical therapy but the future looks pretty good. He has a good chance of a full recovery if he’ll just take it easy and let Mother Nature do her healing thing.

Ever since he woke up from anesthesia, he’s been talking about having hallucinations while he was under. Something about being in a war zone complete with battle cruisers. Sweet Thang is ex-navy so I guess that’s where the dreams came from. Today they took away his morphine pump and started him on oral pain meds. He kept telling them that they could take the med-pump but he needed to keep the button, kinda like a pacifier (I spent the weekend at the hospital and watched his thumb twitch on the button even when he was asleep). I got tickled because he would be talking and fall asleep in the middle of the sentence, doze for several minutes, and then wake up and finish what he was saying.

He’s still in a lot of pain, when they tried to put a bed pan under him he screamed. Thy still haven’t tried to get him up and I hope I’m not there when they do, hearing him scream if almost more than I can take. It’s hard enough to hear him moan while laying immobile; he still can’t stand for the head of his bed to be raised up and I know that it’s going to hurt like a bitch when they make him move but he can’t come home until he proves that he can do more than just lay in bed.

I’m afraid that recovery is gonna be a long hard road before it’s over. Thursday looks like his discharge date, he’s going to his parents’ home but they have health problems of their own. Last year his Dad had a stint put in and his Mom has had a stint and 2 colon surgeries in the last 6 months, but there’s no where else for him to go; I have to work and neither my home nor his are wheelchair accessible. He’ll have to leave the hospital in an ambulance, have a hospital bed with one of those grab bars to pull himself up and swing over to the wheelchair. The bed is supposed to be delivered tomorrow and arrangements have been made for a large wheelchair and a potty-chair. Home health care has been arranged to come 3 times a week to help bathe him (he can’t get in a tub or shower) and do whatever else needs doing. Thank goodness the girl who pulled out in front of him had insurance because the bills are going to be outrageous.

I’m afraid that Sweet Thang is in for more than just pain. His Mom is making it her mission in life to force him to lose a lot of weight while he’s helpless and she’s already made the statement that he can’t smoke at her house. They’re both hard-headed so it’s gonna be a battle of wills. I plan to go stay with him whenever I can so they can get out and have some free time. I wish I could do more but I have to make a living and they don’t give you family leave unless you’re married.

Thanks for all y’alls good wishes and prayers. I’ve told Sweet Thang about my cyber buddies and he’s thankful for all the support.

OUCH!

My eyes feel like they’ve been boiled in oil and I’m so tired I could sleep for a week. A young girl pulled out in front of Sweet Thang’s bike yesterday and I spent most of the night at Huntsville hospital waiting for the medical staff to decide what all was wrong with him, getting home at midnight and waking up at 3:30 this morning to come to back to work.

He’s got a fractured pelvis and is in a lot of pain. It could have been worse; the doctors say that his leather biker jacket saved a lot of hide and although he’s got 4 stitches under his chin where the helmet strap dug in, the helmet itself got scuffed up instead of him getting a cracked skull. They haven’t done surgery yet, something about letting the swelling go down so they can reposition the bones better. Last I heard was maybe this afternoon or tomorrow he’ll go under the knife. The poor Thang has got some kind of binding wrapped tightly around his hips to keep everything still and they’re dosing him with heavy duty pain killers which don’t seem to be helping much.

I went online and did a lot of research, seems that a pelvic fracture is the most painful bone injure you can have and all the remedies involve either pins and plates or some kind of external halo-type brace screwed into the sides of his hips. After all that Sweet Thang is in for months of rehab, most of the articles I read say anywhere from 3 to 6 months. It’s hard to tell because I don’t know how many fractures he has or where they’re located other than that all the damage is in his pelvis. I can tell already that it’s gonna be a long summer.

I was told that Sweet Thang is so big that it took 8 men to put him in the helicopter and that he’s so tall that he almost didn’t fit. He said that he remembers his feet hanging out the door as they took off. On top of all the physical therapy that he’s going to have to go through, he’s going to have to lose a lot of weight in order for his pelvis to support his weight.

Y’all all say a little prayer to whatever deity that you like and maybe light a candle for him, he’s in for a long and painful recovery.

UPDATE: Surgery's scheduled for tomorrow. His left pelvis is broken top and bottom, and it's gonna take plates and screws to fix it plus an incision all the way across his belly in order to get to the broken bones. His left hand is broken and they're checking out his left knee because it's turned blue and looks as if it might be broken or dislocated also (the doctor said it looks as if he hooked his leg over the handlebars on his flight off the bike). Don't know when I'll be updating again as I'll be at the hospital for a while.

RAIN DROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD

Why is it that every time I take a day’s vacation, bad shit happens?

Example: years ago I had a week of vacation and had plane tickets to go visit a long-term long-distance lover in Saint Petersburg Florida. The day before I was to board the plane Dad fell off the front porch, cracking his skull on the sidewalk, and my entire family wound up spending the week in Birmingham at the hospital praying that he’d be OK. Not saying that I begrudge the time with him or that missing a romantic week with one of the world’s best lovers (a whole ‘nother post in itself!) was more important than family but just as an example. I’ve had vacation plans canceled by Mother Nature, acts of God and disasters of various kinds both large and small.

I took this weekend off for Moulton’s 3rd annual Chicken & Egg Festival, the first summer to-do of the year. Sweet Thang and I were signed up for the Chicken Run (a motorcycle poker run) this morning and I had plans to take the Grandmonster to the shindig later. Some of my favorite local bands are playing this afternoon and I was looking forward to running up on relatives, friends, and old classmates that I only see once in a blue moon while listening to some great jams. What happens? Sweet Thang has to work and the heavens have opened with the worse storm of the year!

So we’re trapped in the house while liquid sunshine streams down the window panes and thunder keeps up a rolling drumbeat. Maybe Old Man Sun will poke his shiny bald head from behind the clouds later on and we’ll be able to go wade in the mud, hopefully catch a few of the bands and let the Grandmonster enjoy the kiddy games. Maybe even see the fireworks planned for tonight but it doesn’t look good; Mother Nature is putting on her own fireworks right now and the Weather Channel shows the entire Southeast under a severe thunderstorm and possible tornado watch.

If it stays dark and dreary, I guess we could always bake cookies.......

TITILICIOUS

OK all you penis-packing testosterone laden members of the blogsphere, you can stop reading right here; this is a girly post that doesn’t concern you. Consider yourself warned and read on at your own risk.

MISSION: To find the perfect undergarment to wear beneath racer-back shirts and tank tops.

Karen and I spent the day in Florence bra shopping. ALL DAY! With no results. Now you would think this would be a simple task considering almost every woman’s clothing store sells bras. Karen’s a normal size (I won’t embarrass her by posting her over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder size) but I’m a 36-F (sometimes even a 36-G. What can I say; my family was blessed in the boobage department). Sometimes I feel like I should have stared in the Woody Allen movie, "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex" where the runaway boob ravages the country side!

I didn’t have high hopes for myself because they don’t make a wide variety of bras in my cup size that don’t have a 40 or above chest measurement, but I figured that fitting Karen would be a cinch. We hit Kohl’s, Sears, Parisians, Dillard’s, Victoria’s Secret and several places that I never heard of. I saw T-backs, bustiers, corsets, strapless, criss-cross, convertibles, body shapers, body stockings and a couple of things that I don’t know what you would call them but nothing worked. We found tons of stuff for flat-chested teeny boppers but nothing that suited Karen. Either the straps were too wide set on the shoulders or something else was wrong with them.

I didn’t find anything to even remotely fit me that had a T-back and didn’t look like something that ought to have the word “granny” on the label. Hell, most of the tiny things didn’t cover much more than my nipple! Don’t the underwear manufactures of the world understand that we well-endowed women like sexy lingerie too? I want to wear lace and pretty colors! I own dozens of tank tops and have a bitch of a time hiding bra straps. Forget racer or T-back tops, I can’t find anything remotely sexy to hold up the mounds of flesh hanging off my chest and going braless is totally out of the question! It was impossible when I was young and at the age of 51, after Father Time and gravity have had their way with my tired old body, it damn sure ain’t happening now.

What I don’t understand is now that women are getting breast implants faster than they get their teeth cleaned, why can’t you find something to fit a breast that’s bigger than an apple? How hard can it be to take a pretty bra and make it in a bigger size? I figure that if I lived in New York or Hollywood the shopping options would be different but even when I shopped on line I couldn’t find much more than what is around here.

Boobilicious Babes of the world unite! We should get up a lobby group to force the bra makers of the world to fit us with sexy undies! Give us lace! Give us colors and stripes and animal prints! Give us T-backs and strapless! We deserve, NAY, we demand equal lingerie rights!

FREE AT LAST

Happy Easter, Y'all. Hope everyone had a good day with friends and family, that you didn't OD on candy and that you found the prize egg at the egg hunt.

The outage is over and I finally have a few days off starting last Friday. I spent the first day doing my best impression of a coma, sleeping for for 16 solid hours cuddled up with the two cats, and spent the rest of the weekend with my ample ass parked on the couch watching movies and trash TV. Working weeks of 7 12's will really get to ya! Now it's catch-up time for all my long delayed chores, including filing those damned tax returns.

Since I've been lazy I really don't have anything else to post about, so I'm going to catch up on some of my favorite blogs.