They Tried to Make Me Go to Rehab & I Said Yes Please, Thank You

"Abe Lincoln Needs Rehab!" Youtube.com

My physical therapy session will be tomorrow around the hour of noon. Instead of my usual lunch routine of  eating at my desk, listening to podcasts and writing gibberish, I’ll be retraining my wounded left wrist/hand to do all the things that used to be second nature to it. Fire off blazing wrist shots. Crush aluminum cans full of rocks. Play the harp like an angel.

                I’m excited to start physical therapy because it means I’m getting closer to putting this whole mess behind me once and for all. That will be awesome. No more mild wrist pain. No more medical devices attached to my dominant side. No more having to walk around with my cell phone in my right pocket because I can’t get it out of my left hip pocket in less than twenty minutes. God, it just feels so wrong. Phones aren’t meant to go there!

                Perhaps a certain level of trepidation would be acceptable in a situation like this. After all, this is a new experience for me and new experiences tend to be horrifying. But no, no trepidation. Not even a queasiness.

                This sharp deviation from my generally established demeanor may have you scratching your head. But there’s a reason for it. It’s the same reason Drew Barrymore doesn’t get nervous when someone needs her to put a movie on her shoulders and act it across the finish line.

                Cuz it’s in her blood. When stuffs in your blood, you don’t get nervous. Unless that stuff is like a really ghastly virus or some sort of burrowing insect. I’ll clarify, when stuffs in your blood and someone asks you to do said stuffs, THEN you don’t get nervous. Drew Barrymore comes from a long line of actors. Her grandfather was John Barrymore, whose status as a Hollywood legend has been impressed upon me by the older generations of my family. So acting flows through her veins. Her cells are all shaped like those comedy and drama masks.

                My grandfather wasn’t an iconic actor, but the man was a physical therapy icon. In fact, some called him the John Barrymore of the rehab room. Some people like me. Just now. For the purposes of this very blog.

                He went to rehab initially because he had a few heart attacks, but I think he kept going because he was a god to those people. I remember going to pick him up from rehab with my mom or grandmom on occasion and he’d been in there, just running the show. Everybody loved him. The nurses wanted to tend to him, the other patients wanted to be him. He was a friendly guy who’d happily talk to anyone who’d listen about his grandkids or why all of the local sports teams were awful. Great, character guy.

                Naturally I just assume, despite my long history of social awkwardness, that these genes which skyrocketed him to the head of the rehab class will do the same for me. I expect to walk on that first day and crack wise about the weather and sports and the president and everyone will just totally love it. In no way will I go in, sheepishly go about my routine and then skulk off like a sewer-dwelling mutant.   

                In NO WAY will that happen. I’m telling you, the rehab gene is going to kick in.

                In other low-stakes wrist news:

• Putting the phone on the opposite side sucks, but we already talked about that. I like to keep it on my left side because one time when my old phone was in my right pocket, I leaned over in the car and broken the screen against the center console. Habit formed.
• I damn near fainted when they took the two or three stitches out of my hand last week. I attribute this to the stress of the day and low blood sugar caused by the too-light, Rice Krispie-based breakfast I ate and not to any lack of manliness on my part.
• No one prepares you for how much medical things like casts and splints start to smell after a time attached to a person. That’s some real talk. Dr. Phil doesn’t give you that.
• Combing your hair is next to impossible with one hand. I don’t know how Capt. Hook did it.
• I have two, small, black Sharpie dots on my left wrist which were made to indicate where to stick something during surgery. Those are essentially the surgery ground zero and will remain on my person for the foreseeable future as scrubbing them seems like it would make me die. Because of the Rice Krispies.