Reflecting on Pain

Have you ever seen one of those pain charts – you know, the ones the show little pictures to help you decide what number to assign to your pain? Yeah, well, I have been reflecting a bit on pain lately and decided that the stock chart just doesn’t work for me – so I made some modifications.



Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think I am a badass that doesn’t feel or acknowledge pain – I mean I get all light headed when I have blood drawn – it’s just that I have a hard time getting all emotional about stuff. I mean, if I thought contorting my face and crying would make something that hurts feel better I would be all over it. I am a huge advocate of medication. Ibuprofen is nearly my best friend.

Anyway, yeah, a one for me is pretty much where I am at waking up. Being as old as me hurts just a little bit. I suspect that in the future I may be waking up at a 2 or a 3 or worse.

Two, well that is the equivalent of watching an episode of glee. The stomach is slightly off, vision is slightly blurred, and I develop a concern for the whereabouts of my man card.

Three is root canal pain. I mean you can’t really feel anything while they auger the guts out of your tooth, but there is some moderately uncomfortable after effects that keep on giving for a few days. Or weeks if it gets infected. Yeah, that’s a solid 3, maybe a 4.

You know what is definitely a 4? Listening to any song by Josh Groban. An entire album would be like an eight – but who the hell does that? You lift me up my ass.

This one time I broke some ribs. That was about a 5. It only hurt when I breathed. If it would have hurt all the time it would probably be higher. It was about the same when I cracked my sternum. Again, with the breathing thing.

This other time I had a nasopharyngeal tube. That’s fancy talk for a tube that goes up your nose, turns the corner then goes down into your gut. It didn’t really hurt that much, but on the basis of constant annoyance I give it a 6. As a general rule, I think that any time there a tube going up something that wasn’t meant to have tubes going up it – that’s at least a 6. Like the time I had the barium enema.

My appendix ruptured once. It was like a twelve or a thirteen – but it only lasted like a split second, so I only give it a seven. Thank god you only have one of those things – that was kind of below average.

Eight is like a bike race. A really bad bike race. This one time I raced the Tour of Eagle Crit – It was like a million degrees and there was some fuckwit barbequing and smoking up the whole backstretch. My lungs haven’t been the same since. I am assuming that good bike racers may be able to amp it all the way up to 10 on the pain scale, but me? Me, I’m mediocre on my best days – so I will stick with eight.

If having a tube inserted in an orifice is a 6 then having a tube with some type of grasping devise on the end is definitely a seven. If said device is actually used to extract something from said orifice you may as well bump that on up to an eight. Now, if the something being extracted is, well, larger than the orifice you can launch that up to nine. At least nine depending on the relative size of the object and the orifice.

That’s why I feel pretty comfortable saying that the time I had a Mini Cooper sized kidney stone extracted from my, well, you know – that was a 9.5.

I would say that the last one was a 10, but I wanted to leave a little room for err, improvement.

That stuff about objects and orifices? Yeah, I think that applies to having babies too, you know, in case you were wondering.

Right, anyway, with the 10 hanging out there I head into my man procedure tomorrow. I am fairly confident I won’t achieve a 10, but it is my sensitive bits and all.

Ok. TTFU. Later.

Oh My

It’s t-minus 4 days until my fecundity modification procedure and I think I might puke. Not then, now. I really hate it when people whine, but I am going to make an exception for me and my bits. I really like my bits.

You would think that all that bike riding would make me infertile. That’s the stereotype I hear anyway. And I have to admit that I have referred to my bike seat as a rolling vasectomy in the past.

Look, I started a sentence with ‘and’ – waiting for the lightning bolt.

Right, anyway, impending pain. Not good. No bike till me bits feel better. Nothing good can come of that.

At least the Steelers won. That’s always good.

I think I will go chew my nails.

The Laser Spectacular

It's not like I am stupid or anything.

I mean, I knew when the dentist asked the assistant to get the laser that something strange and wonderful was about to happen. After all, I am a kid of the Star Wars generation. When lasers come out bad guys start dying and strange new worlds start blowing up.

The smell of burning flesh was not one of the wonderful things that I anticipated when the laser was busted out. They made me close my eyes so I wasn’t entirely sure if it was my flesh that was burning but since the dentist was wearing special glasses and therefore had his eyes open I was reasonably sure that the flesh burning wasn’t his.

I am still not positive what was going on with the laser, but there is this little black ring of charcoal around the bottom of my new crown where my gums used to be.
Turns out that going to the dentist is one of those things that sucks, but sucks less if you do it more often. I say it is one of those things, but off the top of my head I can’t think of anything else like that. Maybe that’s why I didn’t go for 10 years or so. And that is definitely why I am paying now. In dollars and pain.

Speaking of things that suck, my 2011 year of suckitude seems to be snowballing. My cell phone died. Now how am I going to take pictures? And call people for help? My internet connection was broken last night.

One of my neighbors has an unsecured wireless network that is much faster than mine. That doesn’t suck.

I was doing some trainer time the other day and watched The Big Lebowski . I always wondered why this guy at work calls me Duderino. Bitch. The guy at work, not the Lebowski.

The movie wasn’t as good as I expected. The two hours on the trainer were priceless. By priceless I mean worthless. Why am I training for not racing? I might take up bowling. You can be fat and still rock at bowling. I can’t think of any good fat bike racers.

And a good weekend to all, and to all - well whatever.

I May Be a Garbage Man Holiday

You know what I don’t get? I don’t get how garbage men decide which days to take off.

I mean some days, like say Labor Day, they don’t work so they have a three day weekend but -wait for it- when they take a day off they have to make it up on the following weekend. So they get a three day weekend one week, but only a one day weekend the next. Is that better than two, two day weekends? Well I guess that’s what I don’t get. Personally, I would think that you would have to be pretty damn good at weekends to make a one dayer a good one. Maybe I am just not very good at weekends.

Speaking of garbage, my new big ass garbage and recycling cans kind of suck ass. I mean, they hold a lot of stuff and all, but they also hold water on top of the lid. That would be ok, but when you open the lid all the water rolls off the top and into the can. I did that (dumped water in the can) like five times last week. It was probably only a gallon or so, but when it mixed with the shredded paper inside it made something like that organic whole wheat spaghetti crap. Only with more flavor.

Right, so I could lift and tilt the entire garbage can to dump the water on the ground instead of into the garbage can then open the lid, but invariably it’s raining when there is a puddle on top of the can and I just want to lift the lid and toss the trash – in my haste I almost always make recycle soup.

At first I thought it was just me, but when I was talking to one of my trashy friends I discovered that he too experiences recycle soup. Yeah, it’s a trash can engineering fail.

I wonder if anyone goes to school thinking that one day they will design garbage cans.

Probably not. Hence the fail.

I was riding my bike yesterday. I saw a guy walking down this hill while I was riding up. And then I saw him again when I was riding up the second time. And then I saw him again when I was riding up the third time. And then I saw him again when I was riding up the fourth time. The fifth time he was gone.

I may be a garbage man holiday to him.

In Motion

I decided that the easiest way to ensure that 2011 is better than 2010 was to make sure that the end of 2010 sucked. With that in mind I scheduled a root canal with a jury duty chaser to close out the decade. I tried to get vasectomized in there somewhere as well, but am afraid I failed, and that will contribute to the suckitude of 2011.

Turns out the delay in my fecundity modification doesn’t really matter. You see, I forgot about Newton’s first law of motion. Yeah, the one that says shit in motion tends to stay in motion. That’s right, a crappy end to last year just bleeds over into this year.

It seems that a root canal is the gift that keeps on giving. A week and a half out and it still hurts. I mean, not really hurts, more like throbs. Not really all the time, but some of the time. I called the dentist, he prescribed me some antibiotics. I am pretty sure that means that there is an infection spreading throughout my dome. Good times.

The achy tooth didn’t make jury duty much fun either. I used to think I wanted to try out jury duty, you know, because it would be interesting. Well, turns out when I got selected and it was entertaining. Entertaining all the way up until the time the kids started testifying about their dirtbag fathers lude and lascivious conduct. Freaking asshat.

I will admit that the 12 angry men scenario in the jury room was interesting as well. Yes, it was interesting, but not as interesting as it was frustrating and disappointing. Who would have thunk that one of the jurors was also a narrow minded fool? (No it wasn’t me).

Anyhow, yeah, crap experiences like that are a gift that keeps on giving well into the future. Now I am pretty sure that 1) I don’t like people, and 2) that innocent until proven guilty works best if you are guilty.

Maybe I would feel better about it if I had been riding my bike. But I haven’t. I am at the part of the winter training season where Frodo leaves the rest of the fellowship – normally at this point of the year Gollum would have burned in the lava by now, and maybe Luke would have had his hand chopped off by his dad. Yeah, normally by this time of the year I would have lost the feeling in my extremities at least dozen times – but this year, well this year, all my digits are fully functional. And my pants are fitting tighter.

Did I mention that my computer blew up? Well not actually blew up, just stopped functioning normally. It was trying to sell me bogus antivirus software to clean up the virus that it installed. When it wasn’t doing that it was trying to surf porn all by itself. Yup. Lesson learned. At any given time you are only one click away from trouble. On the bright side I should be one step closer to achieving my geek card for formatting my hard drive and re-installing my computers operating system. Oh yeah, and the battery is dead too – doesn’t charge and new one costs more than the computer is worth.

The brakes on my truck are squeaking. The front tires on my truck are something less than treaded, but they are slightly less worn than the tire on my favorite bike wheel. The homeowners association raised my fees and doesn’t like it when they can see my garbage cans.

One of my dogs still eats the other dogs poop. On the bright side I only have to pick up one dogs worth of poop. We started feeding my old dog expensive joint medication – it is working. It gives the old dog more energy to get into trouble.
The Best of Bootie 2010 mashup album came out, but it isn’t as good as it used to be. That’s ok, mine isn’t either.

Anyhow, the point is, like Newton said, shit in motion stays in motion.