My Dad, The Doctor (Part Three)

A doctor tells his patient: "I've got good news, and I've got bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"

"The bad news," answers the patient.

"Okay," the doctor begins, "your son is dead, your daughter's in a coma, your wife has run away with your best friend, your dog got run over by a car, and you have an incurable rare disease."

"Holy mackerel," the patient said, only he didn't say 'mackerel.' "What's the GOOD news?"

"The good news is that there's no more bad news."

    
     I tell you that old joke to set up the exciting conclusion of the sad adventure of me hurting my back. A story, I might add, that attracted almost no readers. But don't feel sorry for me, send money instead. Anyway...
     The bad news is that my Dad either still thought I was making fun of the way he walked or he got tired of watching me hobble around the house like an invalid, because he interrupted his baseball-watching just long enough to asked me what I was going to do about my back.
     "Well," I told him, "my wife wants to give me a muscle relaxant, but I don't take pills."
     "I didn't ask you what you weren't going to do. I asked you what you were going to do."
     I had no answer for him. I avoid taking prescription drugs if at all possible, the doctor's offices were closed, and I wasn't going to go the hospital's emergency room just for a slip disc or whatever it was. All I had was a list of things I wasn't going to do. And, by the way, I'm omitting all the usual clicks, whats, and other distractions. I don't think you want to be here all night.
     My Dad, however, wasn't really interested in what I was going to do. He was more interested in telling me what to do, and that was just his way of leading up to it.
     "What you need to do is take the pressure off your back," he told me.
     "Dad, how can I do that? It hurts when I sit, it hurts when I stand, and it hurts when I lay down."
     "Get two bricks," he told me. "Put them at the end of your bed, so that it lifts the box spring. That way, when you sleep, your spine will stretch into place."
     I thought about that.
     I remember watching an episode of Wings, where the Hackett brothers bought some gravity boots so that they were able to hang upside down like Richard Gere in American Gigolo, but I don't remember any of them saying it was good for a bad back.
     Then I remembered the last Batman movie with Christian Bale. That is to say, I slept through most of it, but I remembered seeing the part where Batman was hung by upside down by his feet after he had his back broken by Bane.
     Hmmm... it cured Batman's back, Joe Hackett married Helen, and the American gigolo sure was catnip to the ladies. Maybe there was something to my Dad's advice after all.
     Of course, I'm just being facetious. I don't based my medical treatment by what I see on TV or in the movies. That would be silly. But...
     ...in a way it did make sense. And...
     ...what harm would it do?
     So I followed my Dad's advise. I got two bricks, placed them at the foot of my bed so that the box spring lifted up about four inches, and when I slept, it was at an angle, with my feet higher than my head.
     I felt like a dork.
     My wife even went to go sleep in another room, because she didn't care for the idea of sleeping at a slant. The idea of all her blood rushing to her brain made her cranky and unsympathetic.
     "It's bad enough I have to listen to your snoring," she told me.
     Did it work?
     Well, when I woke up after the first night, the lower part of my back still hurt... but... the rest of my back didn't stiffen up the way it usually does after a good night's sleep. The reason my back stiffens up is because I've spent a lifetime sleeping on my side, because my sleep apnea isn't as severe that way. My body's gotten used to it, and my skeleton and muscles have developed to accommodate that, but when I got my CPAP machine to help with the snoring you just heard my wife complain about, I had to learn to sleep flat on my back or my pig-snout of a nose-mask would shift and air would leak out. Well, like my wife sleeping on a slanted bed, my back just doesn't care for it, and, as a way of registering a complaint, it stiffens up painfully.
     Only not after the first night on my new bed. The next morning, my back was a little better. I could actually bend over to tie my shoes without crying. The morning after that, still better.
     I tell everybody who will listen that I was healed on the sixth day, and on the seventh I rested by inviting my wife back into our bed. Nobody buys my story.
     My Dad continues to ask me, "How's your back?" Even though he knows it worked. He just likes hearing me tell him...
     "It's better, Dad."
     It's his way of reminding me I shouldn't underestimate him.
     Yeah, I guess he still can teach me a thing or two, although I admit that grudgingly. It must be a father-son thing, my not really wanting to give him full credit for curing my back. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't.
     Maybe he saw American Gigolo, too.
     

A man wakes up in the hospital. Before he can panic, the doctor tells him: "I've got some good news, and I've got some bad news. What do you want to hear first?"

"Well, the bad news first."

"You were in a terrible car accident. Your legs were  injured so badly that we had to amputate both of them."

"That's terrible! What's the good news?"

"The guy in the next room made a very good offer for your shoes."

 
 

Raising My Father

RaisingMyFather.blogspot.com

jimduchene.blogspot.com  Fifty Shades of Funny

@JimDuchene

  

Who's The Alpha Dog? (Part Two)

"Well, how did you hurt your back?"
     It took a little coaxing, but my Dad was finally starting to believe I wasn't making fun of him.
     "Picking weeds," I told him.
     "Picking weeds?"
     Yeah, picking weeds. I've got to come up with a more exciting story about how I hurt my back.
     The guy I told you about, the one who couldn't help me load my cooler onto my truck? He was a Border Patrol agent, and he hurt his back moving the desk in his office.
     What a wuss, I used to think. I guess I can't think that any more. (Although I probably will.)
     He's been on light duty ever since, and no longer goes out in the field any more. Instead of paying him to be so bored he decided to rearrange his office furniture, our tax dollars are paying him to sit and play solitaire on his computer.
     But I digress...
     "You look fine to me," my Dad says, settling it.
     His attention is immediately diverted when my wife places his breakfast feast in front of him.
     It irks me that my wife caters to him so much, but she loves that old guy. I guess that's better than the alternative. She could hate him. It's been known to happen in some families. He could annoy her as much as he annoys me, in which case my life would be an additional circle of Dante's Hell.
     My Dad, God bless him, enjoys being served. He thinks he's the alpha god in this household. I see him chowing down on the breakfast my wife just served him.
     Maybe he's right.
     Two eggs, bacon, hash browns, and toast, lightly buttered. Coffee and a glass of orange juice, no pulp. After breakfast, she'll serve him a slice of pie or a pastry, something sweet.
     There's a song by Chuck Brodsky, where he sings about how he and his father, ever since he was a little boy, have played Ping-Pong all his life. When he was a boy, his dad would let him win, but every once in a while, he would get in a good shot, just to show that he could.
     When the son became a teenager, he started playing for blood. There was nothing he wanted more than to beat his old man, I mean, really beat him. And then came the day when it happened. Both father and son played as hard as they could, neither giving the other an inch. The son wanted to win so bad he could taste the chum in the ocean. The father didn't want to lose, because, well... any man of a certain age understands why.
     I remember my Dad once telling me that turning thirty was no big deal. Forty, however, was another matter. When you hit forty, he said, you know that things aren't going to come as easily to you as when you were young.
     So when the son won, he whooped and hollered and celebrated, but, as time passed, he discovered it was an empty victory. One that made him feel sad in the deepest part of him.
 

Things would never be the same

When I learned to beat him at his game

Now we play like gentlemen

Volley back and forth again

Neither of us keeping score

We don't need to any more

Now I don't want to slam at all

Don't want him to have to chase the ball

Let's just keep this thing in play

That's the whole point any way
 

     My Dad's 94 years-old.
     I guess I can let him be the alpha dog, if he wants.
 
 

Raising My Father

RaisingMyFather.blogspot.com

jimduchene.blogspot.com  Fifty Shades of Funny

 @JimDuchene
 

It Only Hurts When I Breathe (Part One)

Getting older sure stinks.
     This morning I woke up at 6:30 and decided to pick a few weeds. This was before I had coffee to lubricate my joints, but the morning was cool on what promised to be a hot day, and the job needed to get done. So I grabbed one of those plastic grocery bags that I also use to pick up my Dad's dog's poops with, and I headed outdoors, still in my pajamas. My plan was, I would pick weeds, then, once done, my pajamas would go into the hamper, and I would go into the shower.
     It almost worked out that way.
     I threw out my back on the third weed.
     Don't think I'm some kind of 98-pound weakling. I've only just spent the last few days cleaning and polishing the wood floors in our house. That's a lot of bending over and moving heavy furniture around. Why can't my wife like the cheap stuff? It weighs less. And not only that, a few weeks back I had helped a buddy of mine move his family's 2,600 square feet of furniture to a house with only 1,800 square feet. That's a lot of weight that I had to shift from one place to another. He had forty big, heavy rocks in his front and back yards alone that I loaded onto my pick-up truck by myself, and unloaded at his new house. They were nice rocks, but... rocks? More like mini-boulders. Personally, I would have left them behind.
     Where I went wrong was I should have done some stretching exercises before I bent over to pick that first weed. I stretch before I lift weights, I stretch before I go jogging, and I stretch before I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders, but who stretches to pick weeds?
     I didn't throw my back out completely, though. I just aggravated a vertebrae at the base of my spine, but it hurt just the same. Still, it didn't hurt bad enough for me to stop what I was doing. Maybe it did, but I'm stubborn that way. I get it from my Dad.
     I finished what I was doing, threw away the plastic bag stuffed with dead weeds, and I walked inside the house. Ready for some coffee and some sympathy. Mainly the coffee.
     "Why are you walking funny?" my wife asked me, one eye on me and one eye surveying the contents of our refrigerator. "You look like your Dad."
     "I hurt my back picking weeds," I explained.
     "Well," she asked, removing a carton of eggs from the refrigerator, and placing them on the counter next to the stove, "did you get them all?"
     That wasn't the kind of sympathy I was looking for.
     The thing about a hurt back is that you can't see it. You can show off a stab wound, a broken leg with a bone sticking out, or a missing limb, and you might even get the proper amount of concern for those minor ailments (depending on whom you're married to), but a bad back is usually considered something along the lines of a lie that you've come up with to get out of doing something.
     "Of course I did," I told her, with a bit more edge than I intended. "Who do you think you're married to, your first husband?"
     That got her to focus both her eyeballs on me.
     "Excuse me?" she said, lifting one eyebrow and giving me The Look.
     "I hurt my back," I told her again, in case she missed it the first time I told her.
     "How did you hurt it?" she asked me suspiciously, but I could see a little bit of her motherly instinct finally kicking in. "You were just picking weeds."
     "That's how I did it, picking weeds."
     "Why didn't you stretch?" she chastised me, her 20/20 hindsight also kicking in.
     "Who stretches to pick weeds?" I asked, which, I thought, was a very reasonable question.
     "You can't just go picking weeds first thing in the morning. Your body has to wake up first. You should have stretched."
     Yeah, I should have, but knowing what I should have done then was doing me very little good now.
     "I know, I know," I agreed. I figure agreeing would get me my coffee that much faster.
     "Well, were you at least able to get them all?"
     It hurt me to stand, it hurt me to sit, and all my wife wanted to know was if I had gotten all of the weeds? I tell you, since you can't actually see the injury, bad backs get no respect. They are the Rodney Dangerfield of ailments.
     I remember one time after church a few years back, I was helping load up a cooler full of bottle water, canned sodas, and ice that the church sold after services as a way to make some extra cash. Actually, it was my cooler. I had lent it to the church, and I needed to load it onto the back of my truck.
     A guy was walking by me with his family, a wife and two young daughters. He was pretty young, maybe his early thirties.
     I couldn't lift the cooler by myself, so I asked him, "Hey, could you help me lift this onto my truck?"
     "Oh, man, I'm sorry," he told me, "but I've got a bad back."
     His wife nodded sadly in agreement. Thinking about it now, I guess she was sad because his pain medication was affecting his you-know-what.
     "Oh, that's okay," I told him. "If you can't, you can't."
     That's what I told him, but what I thought was, "Why you lying sack of... You look perfectly healthy to me." In anger, and out of spite, I lifted the cooler and its contents onto the truck myself with a grunt. I did this in front of the guy and his family, just to show them what I thought of his bad back.
     I couldn't believe a healthy young guy like that would lie to me just to get out of a little bit of work, and that's what I thought my wife was thinking about me when I told her that my back was injured.
     That's the thing about getting older. These days, by the end of what used to be a good night's sleep, I wake up ready for a nap. How the heck does that happen? I've just gotten a full night's worth of sleep. How can I still be tired?
     Not only that, but if I get too much sleep, my back starts to seize up. I'll turn to lay on my other side, and all of a sudden I'm wide awake from the pain of a stiff back. I have to stop and gingerly maneuver myself into the position I want to be in. Maybe I'll fall back to sleep, maybe I won't. It depends on how close I am to dawn.
     But it's not just my back. My knees aren't what they used to be either. Neither is my hearing. I can still hear perfectly fine, as long as there are no other competing noises. If I'm on the phone and the TV is on, I have to go into the other room to understand what I'm being told. The competing noises cancel each other out. I've gotten into the habit of saying "ten-four," just like the truckers, when somebody tells me something I didn't quite catch, because it means neither yay or nay. It just means, "I heard you." Well, I did hear them... I just didn't understand them.
     I have a cousin who shall remain nameless, but I will tell you he's a few months younger than I am. He was at a football game recently, and he got up to walk down the bleachers to buy a beer or go to the bathroom, probably both, and his knee gave out on him. He fell in what looked like a slow motion scene from The Matrix, crying out, also in slow motion, "Nooooooo!"
     Crying out "no" didn't do him any good, and it especially didn't do any good to the people he landed on. He ended up having to have a surgery that didn't work, and now he's going to have to have the same surgery done all over again. I guess the surgeon has two kids he needs to send through college.
     But I'm digressing here...
     My wife finally comes around.
     "Does it hurt?" she asks. When she has to, she can fake sincerity pretty good.
     "Only when I breathe," I answer.
     "Do you want to go to the doctor?"
     "It's Saturday. They're closed,"
     "We could go to emergency."
     "No," I tell her, bravely. "I'll be fine."
     "Do you want me to give you a muscle relaxant?"
     "I don't like taking pills," I say. I really don't.
     "They'll help you."
     "I'll be okay."
     My Dad hobbles in about this time, and dang if my wife isn't right. I am walking like my Dad.
     He looks at the empty stove, at my wife, and back at the empty stove. Usually, his breakfast feast is already being prepared by this time, but, unfortunately for him, I distracted my wife.
     "Good morning, Dad," my wife greets him. I mumble something similar along those lines. "Breakfast will be ready in a little bit."
     "Oh, don't worry about me," he tells her. Not a "hello." Not a "good morning." He's just being his usual passive aggressive self. It's hard to believe that when Mom was still alive, he wasn't above fixing himself his own breakfast. Now, he doesn't even know what a spatula is. "You keep talking. I can wait."
     I get up, and walk over to where the coffee maker is. Now that my Dad is up and waiting for his breakfast, I know my morning cup of gourmet coffee will be second on the list of things my wife is going to do that morning.
     I hobble stiffly over to the coffee maker. My wife sees me, and lets out a cute giggle.
     "Are you making fun of me?" my Dad asks.
 
 

Raising My Father

RaisingMyFather.blogspot.com

jimduchene.blogspot.com  Fifty Shades of Funny
@JimDuchene
 

 

Who's Playing? (Part Six)

This morning I'm working my tail off, cleaning and polishing the oak floor. If I knew getting wood floors was going to be this much work, I would have gotten a divorce, instead.
     Just kidding.
     Maybe I would have just poured concrete and gone for a more industrial look. That's what I would have done, but I didn't. My wife had other ideas. So instead we went with the wood floors. Actually, she went with the wood floors. I just went along.
     Wood floors.
     Throughout the house.
     Throughout the ENTIRE house.
     Man, I must really love my wife. 
     And, while I'm hard at work doing the kind of manual labor I swore when I was a teenager I would never do, guess who's sitting in the great room watching TV?
     Yeah.
     My Dad.
     And I have to work around him.
     He now has an expensive, brand new, high-definition television set, courtesy of his hard-working son with the apparently bottomless bank account, but he always has to watch the TV set in the great room, just like I told my wife he would, but she wouldn't listen. She only listens to people who are not her husband. Anyway...
     I'm busy, my wife is busy, and, like a cat, he has to place himself right in the middle of everything. I have to use the Vacuum and polisher, but my wife has vetoed that idea. They make too much noise. And that would disrupt something important. Like my Dad watching a baseball game. E pluribus unum. One of many.
     "Who's playing, Dad?" I ask him, pretending an interest I didn't really have. What I have is a desire to finish with the floors as quickly as possible. 
     Doing something you'd rather not do is easier to take when you get it over with quickly. But, since I can't get the work over with quickly, I'll try to make things pleasant  between my Dad and I instead. You see, when you pretend to have a certain emotion, your mind tends to believe the lie, and starts to actually feel the way you're pretending to feel.
     "What?" my Dad answers his usual answer.
     "Who's playing?"
     "Who's playing?"
     "Yeah. Who's playing?"
     "Are you asking me who's playing?"
     "Yes. That's what I'm asking you."
     "That's what I thought."
     Pause.
     "Well?"
     "Well, what?"
     "Who's playing?
     "Oh, who's playing?"
     Another pause. I don't know why I start these things.
     "Well," my Dad says, thinking to himself, "I don't really know. I just turned on the TV, and there was a game on, so I started watching it."
     See what I mean?

 

 

Raising My Father

RaisingMyFather.blogspot.com

jimduchene.blogspot.com  Fifty Shades of Funny

 @JimDuchene
 

Life's Cruel Joke (Part Five)

I pressed the button, and guess what?
     The TV came on.
     Yeah, the TV works. That answered my third question. Someone, or something (and I'm not ruling out the possibility that there might be a ghost or a phantasm of some kind doing what ghosts and phantasms do), pressed the main cut-off button and turned the power off, but whoever or whatever it was will forever remain unknown. All I know for sure is that it couldn't have been my Dad, because he already told us a dozen times that, not only did he NOT touch the back of the TV, but he never even THOUGHT of touching the back of the TV.
     But if that's the case, then how did anyone get to that back part of the TV? I don't know, because it's not like the power button is within reach and out in the open. I didn't even find it until I had brought it into our kitchen and gotten a better look at the situation. Someone--or some thing--had to really go out of their way to press it 
     "Dad."
     "What?"
     "Are you sure you weren't fiddling with the back of the TV for some reason?"
     "What?"
     "Are you sure you weren't fiddling with the back of the TV for some reason?"
     "What?"
     I swear my Dad can hear perfectly fine, but he only says "what" in hopes that, if he repeats it long enough, I'll give up and quit asking him what he doesn't want to answer.
     "Are you sure you weren't fiddling with the back of the TV for some reason?"
     I can be just as persistent as my Dad.
     "Why would I do that?"
     My Dad also likes to answer a question with a question that really doesn't answer the question.
     "I don't know, maybe something fell in the back of the TV, and you tried to get it, and accidentally pressed the power button."
     "Nope."
     "Are you sure?"
     "Didn't happen."
     "It could happen."
     "But it didn't."
     "How can the button press itself?"
     "I don't know."
     "How is that even possible?"
     "I said I don't know."
     "It's impossible."
     "I'm sure it is."
     You see? So it couldn't have been my Dad. And where does that leave me? That leaves me with the possibility of ghosts or phantasms playing their supernatural  tricks on this mere mortal.
      Now I'm in the hole for the price of a new, larger TV, AND I have an extra TV I don't need. The only room in my house without a TV is the bathroom, and, although I'm sure my Dad would love that, I refuse to put a TV in the bathroom just on general principles.

     I think about the button, and I wonder if I was set up? Did my Dad want a new TV set, and this was his devious way of getting it? Something bigger, something nicer, something with better high definition? Was he in collusion with my wife? Speaking of my wife...

     I told her that I was thinking about putting the old TV back in his room and installing the new one in my office.  She gave me a look that told me the new TV isn't going anywhere.

     But why does my Dad need a large-screen TV that he will never watch, and only  use to listen to music? Why does he even need to listen to music? He says he can't hear. I'd ask my wife, but she'd only give me The Look again. I can only hope to live long enough to spend some of his inheritance when I get it.
     If I get it.

 

 

Raising My Father

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jimduchene.blogspot.com  Fifty Shades of Funny
@JimDuchene
 

 

The Button (Part Four)

     My wife and and I work on removing the old TV and installing his new one. Okay, mainly it's me removing the old TV and installing the new one, and my wife cheering me on. Before I remove the old TV, I again checked all the controls, just in case I missed something. No, nothing. Everything's good.

     I'm done with my end of the job, and now it's my wife's turn to begin hers. She quickly becomes busy adjusting the color, size of picture, etc. The VIP treatment. Nothing's too good for the old guy sitting in my house in my chair watching a baseball game--any baseball game--on my TV and waiting for all the work to be done for him. If push comes to shove, I guess I'd rather have it that way, him away in the house, than trying to help my wife and I with something that he knows nothing about, which would have made TWO guys doing something they know nothing about. I'm not saying that all this new technology is beyond my comprehension, I'm just saying the simpler they make things, the more confusing they are to work. Anyway...

     After removing my Dad's old TV,  I carry it into the kitchen. As I walk in, my Dad looks up at me for a quick second, and then turns back to his game,  mumbling something like, "Ohhh, is that the TV that doesn't work?"

     I place it on the center counter and hook it up. Why? Because to paraphrase Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek's The Wrath of Kahn: "It tasks me!"
     Why doesn't it work, dammit?
     Geez... now I'm starting to sound like my Dad.
     Maybe the light's better in the kitchen. Maybe the new surroundings gives me a fresh take on the problem. Maybe I just got smarter in the seconds it took me to walk from the father-in-law house to my house. Whatever it was, I start checking out the TV inch by inch, left to right, up and down, Simon and Garfunkle, and what do I see? I see the main cut-off button located in back of the TV and out of the way from all the other controls. Now that I've found the button, I don't know how I could have missed it in the first place. It was hidden in the back and out of the way, but it wasn't that hidden and out of the way. The fact that the entire back of the TV is black, including the button, didn't help, but still. It's like that visual puzzle that's just a jumble of colors, but if you stare at it long enough you can see a boat or a car or a building, and then you can't stop seeing the boat or the car or the building, and you wonder how you weren't able to see it in the first place, and then you feel like a dope, because a puzzle just made a fool out of you, and it's nothing more than colors on a piece of paper. Yeah, it's something like that. Anyway, I see that the button is turned off, and now that I see it, I can't stop seeing it.

     Not good. I can kick myself. If I was Chuck Norris I could, because Chuck Norris is so fast he can run around in a circle and kick his own behind. That must be true, because I read it on the internet.

     I look at the button

     My first question is: How did it get turned off? My second question is: Who turned it off? And my third question is...

 

...to be continued...

Same Bat-Time. Same Bat-Channel.

 

 

Raising My Father

RaisingMyFather.blogspot.com

jimduchene.blogspot.com  Fifty Shades of Funny
@JimDuchene