Rant #2,734: Welcome To My Nightmare

Boy, did I oversleep last night!
 
]I guess it was a mix of eating food again after a very good fast for Yom Kippur, and the pills that I am taking for my latest orthopedic ailment … a real knockout punch that kept me in bed way too long.
 
But it felt just soooooo good.
 
Remember, just a few weeks ago, I told you that I couldn’t sleep, my latest bout with insomnia.
 
Now, I am sleeping too much.
 
Honestly, last night was the final night I was going to take these pills, so starting tomorrow, I am sure I will be the same old person, tossing and turning in my sleep to no end.
 
And that directly leads me to what ails me now.
 
Evidently last Sunday, after exercises helped me get over what I will call sciatica in my left side, I woke up with tremendous pain in my right side, pain that was much worse than what I had in my left side.
 
I tried everything that I could to rid myself of the pain—including more exercise—but I literally could not walk, and on Wednesday, I finally decided that I had had enough of this, and I went to an orthopedist to see if they could tell me what ails me.
 
And I went to a different orthopedist than I did the last time.
 
If you remember the last time, about a year and a half ago, I won a judgment from the fast-food orthopedist chain that I went to, because their billing practices—everything was charged to me in an a la carte, piece meal style—was reprehensible, and I had the law on my side.
 
I am convinced that if I wasn’t as nice a guy as I am, if I did not take the judgment, I could have sued them for thousands of dollars more, but heck, I did not want to go through that hassle, and I simply took the money they offered and vowed never to go there again.
 
Little did I know that there was an orthopedist just a walk away—literally-from where I live, a place that I must have passed a million times but never realized existed.
 
I went there, I had some x-rays done, and the doctor there said that even though the x-rays were not conclusive, he thought that I had a torn meniscus, a real sports injury that athletes get all the time but regular folk like me don’t get too often.
 
The meniscus basically protects the bones in your knee from rubbing and banging into each other, so if you have a tear there, you have bone on bone, and that is not good.
 
What little I know about this is that surgery could be in the offing if I were an athlete, but the doctor said my bone structure in my knee is excellent for a 64-year-old, over-the-hill, ready for the dumpster male adult, so if it is the meniscus, at least for me, surgery is not suggested.
 
Again, with my limited knowledge of this area of my body, I know that there are athletes who simply take time off to work it off, and others also take a cortisone shot to relieve the pain, something that I would not want to do but would do if I had to.
 
Of course, there probably is physical therapy involved, but I would need to be assured that this place’s billing practices are way different than the other place than to get myself involved in such a thing again.
 
Just give me a list of exercises and I will do them at home!
 
Let’s see what happens with the MRI, but a clear sign of what I have is that I have a lot of popping in my knee—some so severe that you can literally hear them with your own ears—so I believe that the preliminary diagnosis is correct.
 
But again, we will have to see what the MRI says.
 
So that is where I stand—or where I sit, because I have been told to stay off my feet, which is a complete impossibility with my lifestyle—on this latest episode of my life.
 
With all that has been going on here—I haven’t told you the half of it!—if this is retirement, I really and truly want to go back to work.
 
This is purgatory, not retirement to me.
 
I am supposed to be slowing down, and all that I am doing is revving up.
 
Everything is happening at once—again, I haven’t told you the half of it—and honestly, I would rather be at work than “retired” like I am … or semi-retired as I am.
 
This week, in particular, has been a real nightmare, and funny, even though I overslept last night into this morning for the first time in ages, I didn’t really have any bad dreams during the more than nine-hour sleep that I had.
 
So I guess that is good, but I would rather have a dream nightmare than a real nightmare any day … or night.
 
Have a good weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday … perhaps a little wobbly, but I will be here for sure.