My Beautiful Girlfriend is now a Bionic Woman with a Brand New Knee. Of course, the New Knee to which I’m referring is her Lower Knee, not her Hiney. Her New Knee, after all Need Not Be Capitalized; but this was a Pretty Big Event at Our House so I just thought I’d use Capital Letters indiscriminately to Point This Out.

My poor baby has had a bad knee for some time now… and finally decided that she’d been hobbling in pain for more than long enough. Her cartilage slowly wore away to the point where there was nothing left as a cushion at all. She braved cortisone shots for a couple years; and those did help for some time. But she was told there would come a time when the shots coupled with pain medication would not be enough.

“I always told the doctor he could have my knee when I’m 60,” she’d say when the pain became excessive.

She’s 61 now, and got her wish not quite two weeks ago. Her New Knee did not come without some ouchy stuff though. It’s a pretty big deal… this knee replacement surgery. I told friends that it must have been pretty gross (and weird) to be in the operating room, watching the surgery. I envisioned the doctor running a nice, shiny Husqvarna chainsaw, spraying bloodly, fleshy sawdust all over the place as he went in to cut the old out to make room for the new. Maybe it doesn’t quite happen that way, but I’m sure that it would have been way more than anything I would like to have seen.

God bless the folks that do that stuff. I mean, I can respond when there’s an emergency and do the right thing; but if I were called upon to assist while someone was getting cut open, I’d pass out in a little less than 12 nanoseconds. Fortunately for us, one of the best knee surgeons in this area did the job, and there were no complications… well except pain of course. Amazing though it may be, knee replacement surgery is no cake walk. No, they don’t even want you stepping on cake!! I’m very glad of that because I’ve never really enjoyed cake with footprints in it.

On her first day home, it was slow going; so I greased the floor with cooking oil so she could slide about with ease. I also put together a rather interesting apparatus for helping her get into bed. It involves large stones, ropes and pulleys. When you pull the large lever, the cat screams while the launching platform lifts her out of her walker and into the air. If all goes well, the shock bladders inflate quickly and she is sloowwwwly lowered into the basement. From there it’s just a simple matter of throwing the soiled laundry down the chute to cushion her non-skid slippers into the variable shaker linkage.

She’ll thank me for all of this sometime in the future I’m sure.

Just to prove I can be a Good House Helper and a Nurse, I’ve been cooking some of our pillow cases with low fat mango peelings while setting up her medications according to the phase of the moon and the color of the snow behind the garden shed. I hope to brighten up her day a bit when I slip some pureed asparagus into her oatmeal, but the next few meals will be much less mainstream. Cream of watermelon soup, eggs on a stick, and buttered newspaper with Chicken Bone Surprise will all be on the menu for tomorrow and the rest of the weekend for that matter.

I must say, though, that without the kindness of friends this journey would be much more difficult. We are very fortunate indeed. We remind each other that this New Knee business is temporary… better days lie ahead. Loved ones who are near and dear to our hearts are plagued with much more serious matters.

Perhaps I should go be a House Help Nurse for them too!!

Or not.

As far as I know, these guys were NOT involved in any of the procedure…

Valentine’s Day is on the horizon, and believe it or not, I’m ready for it. That became fairly easy some years ago. All I have to do really is get a card; and of course some flowers. My Beautiful Girlfriend and I stopped buying Valentine’s Day presents some years ago. The primary reason for that was we got to a point where we had plenty of stuff. In fact, I have stuff strewn all over my office that I suspect may be having babies. Seems like I cleaned this up like only a year ago; yet the stuff seems to be multiplying somehow. All kinds of pens, a battery, a little tiny tape measure, a bigger tape measure, an eraser (an eraser??) miscellaneous receipts from bills, envelopes, oy yoy yoy yoy yoy.

So anyway, here I am, typing amongst all the stuff; being grateful that my Lovely Honey Pie will not add to the pile because we changed the Valentine’s Day Gift Policy (VDGP), and also being grateful that I’ve learned through many Crowded Flower Shop Years (CFSY) that if you’re silly enough to buy your sweetie some flowers the day before (or even worse, the day OF) Valentine’s Day, you must prepare to wait in line for many minutes and then try to pick out a nice bouquet of flowers out of a gaggle of containers filled with blooms that have been fondled to oblivion by other guys scrambling to meet the deadline; and this may be one of my longest run-on sentences I’ve written in a very long time but I don’t care because I went on WEDNESDAY to get flowers and ha ha on all of youse because I scored some really nice blossoms and I didn’t have to wait or nutting so nyaa nyaa na boo boo on the likes of YOUSE BOYS!!

Yes!! And I got the card a week ago!! So there!! And a little surprise too!! So there again!!!

I’ll show youse…

This Valentine’s Day will be followed by a rather historic event for our family though: my Beautiful Girlfriend is getting knee replacement surgery. Pretty scary stuff, no matter how many people who’ve been there and done that tell you “oh she’s gonna love it.” We’re doing our best to prevent negative thoughts from ricocheting around in our noggins. Has us both a little nervous though. Her especially. But the poor baby has had a knee that’s been bone-on-bone for some time now and it’s been increasingly painful for her to get around.

Don’t know about you, but when something like major surgery comes into our lives we seek comfort and counsel from friends and family. We’re both blessed with people who love us and are willing to share their experience, strength, and hope with us and yet listen to our apprehensions. Because I work in a factory, I’m also blessed with a number of work friends with whom I can talk. And, being the silly boy that I am, I usually sprinkle a little humor into the stress venting:

“I’ll be gone all next week,” I told a friend at work.

“Oh? Going south?” he asked.

“Well, yeah kinda… my wife is getting a new knee on Monday and the surgery will happen south of us a little ways. I’m staying home with her for the first week after the surgery.”

“Oh, OK,” he said with a smile.

“Yeah,” I continued, “she’s getting her low knee replaced; not her hiney.”

“OK…” was the response with gradually lowering intonation. “Never heard of anyone getting a hiney replaced.” And of course both of us chuckled a bit.

Friends have rallied in support already; lending us a walker, cane, a recliner, and other stuff to help her on her way to recovery. We are very fortunate people.

So when my baby asked “whatchya gonna write about tonight?” I let the cat out of the bag and said, “your low knee and your hiney.”

And that’s all the information on her hiney that anybody’s gonna get!!

Fortunately, our my Honey’s surgeon has an impeccable reputation. Not, I hope, like this strange physician…

Three of the biggest kids in our family stayed up way too late watching cartoons again tonight. Our two grandsons and I were having a grand old time with Marvin The Martian, Heckle and Jeckle, The Tazmanian Devil, and some newer, computer animated cartoons we’d never seen before.

A couple hours before they were playing Star Wars games of some sort. The two brothers took our only small, reasonably kid proof flashlight into the bathroom and closed the door. In Ollie’s imagination, the flashlight served a dual purpose: illumination device and light saber.

Nini and I were on the couch and listened carefully, then I raised my voice a bit and asked what they were doing in there. No reply. I asked again, a little more loudly. “We’re just playing…” the response was audible at first and tapered off, which kicked in our Parent Spidey Senses. My magnifying mind had them mixing nail polish with toothpaste or something. These boys are the ripe old ages of 7 and 3 so there’s no telling what they’re gonna do.

I raised my voice a little more and bellowed, “open the door.” They were simply enjoying the fun a flashlight brings on the mirror and other shiny surfaces. Gabe, the 3 year old, came up to me with wide eyes and a very serious tone and said, “I need to go to the force!!” Apparently, “the force” was in the dark bathroom with the door closed.

“You need the force? I’ll make a big force!!,” I said. Then I got up and turned all the lights off; making the entire back of the house a dark force dwelling. That satisfied both of them; but one problem remained. There was only ONE flashlight. A quick trip to the store would solve that. “Make sure they are the same,” Nini urged. “Oh yes,” I replied.

I mean hey, I’m not as dumb as I look.

After the force was with them for a half hour or so, it was getting close to bed time. At our house, that means cartoons. It’s become a tradition: Nini (Granny) hits the hay earlier than us boys. She stretched out on the other couch and nodded off a couple times. After announcing once or twice, “I’m falling asleep,” she got up and kissed us all goodnight.

We watched a few funny animal videos, then switched to cartoons. As their normal bed time became a thing in the distant past, Ollie uttered his normal stalling sentence. “Just one more cartoon Papa. Please?”

OK. One more. And one more after that, and of course one last “one more.”

By this time it was very close to 10 PM, and both were so tired their brain waves where getting pretty wonky. Nice thing about them being dog tired though, is that neither of them fought when I tucked them in; and just a few microseconds after I said “good night,” they were out.

Nini and I are both very aware that our “rock star” status won’t last forever. As they mature, their friends will get much more of their free time than we will; so we’ve learned to stop everything in our world for what matters most.

We’re loving every minute of it.

As I mentioned earlier, we watched some of the “traditional” cartoons… like the kind Nini and I watched while we were growing up.  Here’s a newer one we found that was pretty entertaining.