Dec
22
No Really. This Is Going to Hurt.
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 7 Comments
When a doctor says the above words, you don’t really believe him. I assumed he was trying to scare me so that the ensuing experience would seem better in comparison to the nightmarish holocaust of pain my mind inevitably conjured up. Also, being a man, and therefore stupid, I mistakenly believed that I could handle the pain in Rambo-like fashion. After all, he cauterized a wound in his side by filling it with gunpowder, and then lighting it. I think his mouth might have twitched, but that was about it. How bad could a shard of glass in my foot really be?
In fact, a piece of glass, or a foreign body of indeterminate nature as it turned out, isn’t really that painful a thing. Getting it removed is. But maybe I should back up a little bit.
It was two days before Thanksgiving, and the wife was brushing her teeth. I walked into the bathroom and placed a glass of water on the counter. Now, my wife likes to gesticulate (flail her arms wildly) while brushing her teeth. I believe this is an attempt to communicate with me. (Why should valuable time be lost even though one’s mouth is full of toothpaste?) In this particular instance, she communicated the recently deposited glass onto the bathroom floor. We cleaned it all up, or so we thought, and everything seemed fine. Until the next night, when I sliced open the bottom of my foot on a shard of glass that we missed.
So cutting the bottom of your foot is pretty painful for a number of reasons, not least of which is that you then have to walk on said appendage while it’s healing. I did quite a bit of that, and continued to run on it in preparation for a 10k in Central Park. This, perhaps, was not my best idea. It became increasingly obvious, as well as painful, that there was something embedded in my foot. Fast forward a couple weeks and I’m sitting in a doctor’s office listening intently as he explains just how much an injection in the bottom of my foot will hurt.
Since the removal of a foreign body, it turned out not to be glass, basically requires the doctor to spend a bit of time “exploring” the affected area with a scalpel, he gives you a local anesthetic. As it should be obvious that the only way to deliver a local anesthetic is via injection, and the bottom of your foot is home to many, many nerve endings…well, you do the math. How can I describe the feeling? It was something like having a nail, studded with shards of glass, driven into your foot. Then, someone lights your foot on fire.
The doctor didn’t lie though. He said it would be exteremely painful, and he said it would last only a few seconds. He didn’t mention that those few seconds would feel like they went on forever. The experience has taught me two very important things. The first is that the next time something made of glass gets broken in my house I should probably just move. The second is that I’m definitely not Rambo.
Dec
1
My allegiance to Gang Green goes back to when I was six years old. Growing up in Westchester County, I had two teams to choose from: the NY Football Giants or the NY Jets. I can’t really pin down why I chose the Jets but I imaging it had something to do with the following: my father is a die-hard fan of Big Blue and I am something of a contrarian. Also, I think really fast planes are much cooler than really big people.
Unfortunately, my love for the Jets is unrequited. The Jets are an abusive spouse and their fans are the worst kind of enabler. Week after week, season after season, we come back—cheering, screaming, pleading—for glory. In the 20 years that I have been a Jets fan I’ve felt real hope on only three occasions. The first time was in 1998 when they made a legitimate run, going 12-4 in the regular season and making it all the way to the AFC Championship, where they promptly lost to the Denver Broncos. I didn’t expect much in 2002 when they had a 9-7 regular season, but then they beat the Colts 41-0 in the wildcard game and I thought that maybe there was a chance. Of course, they got trounced the following week by the Raiders, the same team that had crushed my playoff hopes the year before.
And then there was the 2006 season: The year of the comeback. It was Eric Mangini’s first year as head coach, the previous season they had been 4-12 and Herm Edwards had left for Kansas City. All I wanted out of the team was a better season. If they had gone 8-8 I would’ve been happy; at least they wouldn’t have been losers. But they surprised everyone with a 10-6 season, winning 5 of their last 6 games, only to lose in the wildcard round to the Patriots. Read more