Hopalong Cassidy Joe

by Cathy

In the course of one week, my husband had the stomach flu, celebrated his birthday (while he had said flu) and nearly broke his ankle playing basketball.

Late on a Monday night, the back door creaks opens and in hops Joe with the help of two guys he plays basketball with (while I sat lounging in my robe and turban-like towel wrapped around my head, fresh out of the shower). He fell into an armchair, his face distorted with pain. I looked down at his right ankle. From mid-shin down, bulging out from the bandage below it, was a lump the size of a half grapefruit. His foot honestly looked like some kind of Elephant Man deformity. He was wincing in pain and trying to adjust the ghetto bag of ice the guys threw together at the gym: doubled up fruit market bags filled with ice that was now melting and leaking through at a rapid pace.

After a brief rundown of the accident and the tossing around of remedies to help him (apparently this has happened to one of these guys three times) they left. With the closing of the door, Joe's macho guard dropped like a dead weight. He let out a long, screaming moan, which he was obviously stifling since he fell. His ankle looked bright red and I swear it was pulsating. I set him up with a chair and pillows to elevate his foot, refilled the ice into a clean freezer-sized Ziploc bag and let him try to calm down. When the ice had numbed it over, we weighed the options of when to go to the ER and decided to wait until the morning.

A quick visit to the ER the next morning rendered his ankle surprisingly NOT BROKEN but he had a badly pulled outer ligament (high ankle sprain). The doc gave him crutches to get around and ordered him to rest, ice and elevate. He had to lay low and couldn't drive or even play basketball again until he got an okay from the doctor.

This sounded like a prison sentence to Joe, who is a MAN and has gargantuan PRIDE and is fiercely independent and generally doesn't do well when he is sick. His days consist of constant sitting and shifting and elevating and he complains frequently that his ass is constantly hurting and numbing up from all that sitting. The first day it was extremely painful for him to take his foot down from elevating it. I was busy working and going to parent/teacher conferences that day and couldn't get his pain meds filled until 8pm. "I NEED DRUGS!" was how I was greeted when I finally got home that night.

Getting used to the crutches is a whole other ballgame, as he fumbles with the awkwardness of getting it right and turning corners. The first day, while I was at work, he decided to hop around the kitchen on his left foot instead of using the crutches, when his left foot suddenly gave out and he fell, pretty much on his swollen, bruised, wrapped up, jacked up foot. Apparently he let out such a scream that it freaked out Ari and she began crying while Bella was trying to help him up. What a scenario.

I ran a bath for him that night and trying to figure out how to lower him in while still elevating his foot and not getting it wet. That alone was a mission of SWAT team proportions. You see, his foot needs to be not only elevated but iced cold pretty much the whole day, so inserting it into the scalding bath water that Joe prefers to bathe in would probably cause his clubfoot to explode, so it had to remain out - at least for that night.

It's been almost two weeks now and he's gotten the whole hopping/elevating/icing/stairs/crutches/bath routine down pat.  In the meantime, he's getting more frustrated at being cooped up and I've had to stifle numerous one-liners and other comedic references to his situation for two reasons: 1) his annoyance with my unwarranted comedic relief would feed his frustration, and 2) KARMA. I don't want that bitch coming back to hound me down.

Buuuuuuttttt.....the girls and I just can't resist. I've bit my tongue many times but as we hear him rickety-racketing his way down the hallway with the crutches or being greeted by his giant, rainbow colored foot elevated on pillows stacked up to the ceiling every time we enter a room, we can't stop ourselves. The remarks, which tumble out upon inception, have been too varied and too numerous to count - peg leg, clubfoot, old man Joe, Crutchety Kyle, Hopalong Cassidy, Hoppy Papi, My Left Foot, Shrek Foot...

All we're doing is trying to make this bearable for everyone, most of all Joe, right? Laughter is the best medicine, isn't it? I just hope that Karma, that bitch, is laughing right along with us on this one instead of taking notes.


Side note to readers: I would have posted a picture of his foot, but seriously, it's so ugly and so gross and so ugly...I will spare you.

Side note to Karma: The fact that I didn't post any nasty pictures of his foot, chalks up some good, non-Karma points in my favor, no?

Stomach Bugging

by Cathy

As is probably expected from a trip to Mexico, I came down with some sort of a stomach bug/flu/virus the night I returned from Cabo. Was it Montezuma's Revenge? Was it the water? Was it the stomach flu circulating on the plane? Who knows. All I know is that this mutha was turnin' my stomach out.

Before I went to sleep that night, I felt a little queasy and attributed the symptoms to some 'bad sausage' I ate for dinner, a meal my husband lovingly had prepared for my welcome home. I fell asleep and was awoken at 3 a.m. to some major stomach pains. I got up to use the bathroom and...nothing. I could hear my intestines partying it up - gurgling, twisting and churning the night away - but I could not relieve myself. It was the strangest feeling. I dragged myself back to bed and desperately tried to sleep off the pains. By the next morning, I had a fever and felt like my body was run over by a Mack truck.

My husband continued tackling the daily routine, something he had by now become an expert at: lunches, school and activity shuffling, dishwashing, cooking and everything in between as I quietly napped most of the day and got up to munch on some saltine crackers and wait out this 24-hour bug.

Two days later, ON MY HUSBAND'S BIRTHDAY, he caught the same mutha. He awoke okay enough that day, donned some dressier clothes and set out to renew his drivers license. By the time he came to pick me up from work, kids in the back seat picked up from school, he was shivering so bad he was tearing up.

"Let me drive'" I suggested.
"No. It helps distract me. I'll just drive home," he said in his usual stubborn way.

What ensued after we got home, could only be referred to as a tragic comedy.

He took his shoes off and slid under the comforter in bed fully clothed, teeth chattering, body convulsing with shakes.
"Can you throw some of those wool covers over me? I'm freezing!"
I covered him up to his chin. Five minutes later...
"Can you wrap my feet in that other wool blanket? Just my feet? Yeah...there you go. Thanks."
"Anything else?"
"Can you prop up these pillows for me? I'm not comfortable laying all the way down."
"Aren't you going to try and sleep?"
"No, I can't sleep. Can you prop them up higher?"
Propping takes place.
"No, that's too high. Can you bring them lower?"
Propping takes place. Apparently, said propping wasn't quite right for the Goldilocks of Pillows.
"Can you just...I don't want to be all the way down but not too high." [Insert more propping here.] "OK, that's good."
 "Do you want me to sit here with you?"
"Yeah, for a little if you don't mind."
"Sure."
Pause.
"You know that I still have that life insurance policy in place should anything happen, right?"
"Babe, you have the stomach flu."
"Yeah, I know, I'm just sayin'."
Pause. [Insert silent chuckle from me here.]
"Do you want me to get you some water? You should drink liquids if you have a fever so you don't get dehydrated."
"Yeah, sure....Wait! Can I get a straw with that so I don't spill it?"
"Sure, babe."
"OH and can you get me the Vicks?"
"The Vicks Vapor Rub? For what? You're not congested."
"But I need the fumes. They'll help distract me"
Okaaaaaay. No Vicks was found after a house-wide search; probably swallowed up in the giant pink mess of the girls' bedroom.
"Should I put a hot water bottle near my feet? They're like blocks of ice they're so cold!" he said after whining about not finding the said Vicks.
"Why don't you try to get some sleep?"
"I can't."
"OK, I'm going into the kitchen to cook some dinner. Will you be okay?"
"Yeah. But first can you change me?"
"CHANGE YOU?"
"Yeah, can you help me change out of my clothes and put on my pajamas?"
Okay, this was it.
"Dude, I had this for two whole days and all I did was nap and pad around quietly in my robe. You didn't hear a peep from me. You're a total BABY!"
"OK, never mind, I'LL just do it."

So after laying in bed for some time, getting up to change in to his PJs on his own (evident from the groaning and painful moaning I heard all the way in the kitchen) and getting up to use the toilet frequently, (evident from the scream that would be emitted from the bathroom every time he sat on the cold toilet seat) he announced that he was "STARVING." But before he gobbled up some soup, he asked me for some Aleve because his head was pounding.
"How many, one or two?"
"Ten," he replied.

Some more time passed during which any one of the following comments could be randomly heard:

"I'm so cold!"
"I'm so hot!"
"Do you think I need a cold compress on my head?"
"Where's that thermometer??!" (Again, also lost in the cluttery pinkness of the girls' room.)
"I need to take some Nyquil or something to knock me out." (I explained to him that when I had this, this BUG knocked me out and I took three naps in one day. Why couldn't HE sleep?)

"Can you rub the back of my neck? Where's that rubbing oil? No, not the rubbing alcohol, the massage oil!"

"OH MY GOD, your hands are FREEZING!! Rub nice! Rub them together first, Japanese style so they can warm up!" (After a minute of Mr. Myagi-ing, I told him this wasn't gonna work and he should just rub his own shoulders.)

I left him there and went to take care of Ari, who by now, was in the tub and yelling for me to wash her hair, while helping Bella with her math homework, cook dinner, wash the ceiling-stacked dishes in the sink and the million little things that need tending to around the house, then put off the begging from Ari to play tea party with her and review Bella's homework once again.

Finally, towards the end of the night, I went into the bedroom and saw that Joe was sitting up in bed watching television. It must've been a rough few hours for him because his hair looked like an unstyled, jacked up version of Pauly D.'s hairdo - stiff, sticking straight up but in a curly, longer, messed up mess.

Pauly D's infamous hairdo

"You didn't sleep at all?" I asked.
"No. I couldn't."
"I was completely knocked out by this thing. How are you feeling?"
"My whole body aches." Pause. "Can you please rub me down now?" he added, quietly. "Just rub my calves. They're killing me."

I proceeded to knead his calves, then conveniently, this turned into rubbing his lower back, his upper back, his shoulders, the back of his neck, all while attempting to watch television over the moans, groans, ooohs, aaahs that got higher pitched by the minute. It may have sounded like a fun time to someone listening in, but quite plainly put, it wasn't.

Upon finishing the rubdown, he magically!  instantly! felt better. "My God, what did you DO? It felt like you were rubbing the fever and aches right out of my body! I feel so much better now!" He started chirping away like baby bird that just found his voice. His newfound Chatty Cathy phase led me to believe that I had done my job in helping him get better, and go from baby to man once more. And given that I did get some really good laughs from his miserable ordeal, which made the process of helping him more bearable, I didn't mind taking care of my "baby daddy." That's what we do.

And speaking of babies...

Thought I'd add this, you know, so you can get another view of Pauly D's, um...hair