Monthly Archives: April 2026

Gravity, Like Karma, Is a Bitch

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Gravity and I have quite a history. We’re not friends, to say the least.

Some of our disagreements resulted in little more than damage to my dignity. (Not that I have much of that to begin with.) I land on my amply padded ass and sustain no physical injuries.

My head, however, is not so lucky. When I was a kid, I liked to hang upside down on the monkey bars by my feet. (Yes, by my feet.) As you might guess, my feet slipped, and I succumbed to gravity, landing on my head. I remember thinking falling wasn’t so bad, but that was before I hit the ground. (This was back in the day when playground supervision was less rigorous, and playground surfacing meant asphalt. I didn’t even get rushed to the emergency room afterward. But I digress.)

Over the years, from childhood to my adult years, I have honed my falling skills and my disagreements with gravity to a fine point. I have fallen off a horse and off cross-country skis. I have fallen out of car doors and tripped into a chair I was carrying. (Gravity snickered at that one and gave me a fat lip the day before my ballet recital. The ballet was supposed to make me more graceful. That worked well. My parents should have gotten their money back. But I digress again.)

It was almost exactly one year ago that I went “under the knife” and got a bionic knee, or at least a snazzy chrome one. My adaptation to new ways of standing, sitting, balancing, and walking took rather a long time. At six weeks, when my friends who’d also had their knees replaced were ready to get their other knee done, I was still falling down. A lot. Eventually, I admitted I needed help, and the emergency squad took me to the ER, where they did imaging to make sure the robo-knee was still firmly in place. (It was.)

One of my gravity fails, however, was spectacular enough that I broke the two little bones that stick out on either side of the ankle. (That day, I learned a lot about controlled substances. The EMTs gave me fentanyl to get me to the ER, and the ER personnel gave me ketamine to “reduce” the fracture (put the bones roughly into place before pins and plates were inserted to keep them there). But I digress some more.)

I don’t remember any untoward effects of the fentanyl. (The EMTs and I joked about prices for it in various parking lots around town.) The ketamine had definite psychedelic effects. Everything began to look like various colored blocks and cubes, as if I were in the Minecraft movie. Everything returned to normal fairly quickly, and I was whisked off to surgery to get my new hardware.

Let me tell you, if you’ve ever thought wearing an arm sling was awkward and annoying, it’s nothing compared to using a walker with a knee sling, if you’re not allowed to put any weight on the damaged foot. It involves flinging yourself up from a chair onto your one good foot and lurching with your other knee towards a piece of fabric. Even ballerinas would find it lacks grace.

Right now, I’m at an awkward, in-between stage when it comes to walking. Travel requires a good deal of planning and switching among mobility aids. Until this past week, to go out, I needed to take a wheelchair down a ramp to get out of the house and to the car, and a walker to get from the car to the destination’s door. Now, the wheelchair and the ramp are gone, but I need a cane to negotiate the front steps and then the walker to get to the car. And I can’t carry one while using the other. I’m trying to figure out how to manage the process on my own so I can travel independently. It’s frustrating.

But by now my motto is the old saying: Fall down seven times. Get up eight. And gravity can go to hell.

Changing Our Collective Minds (And How Difficult It Is)

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We’ve heard a lot lately about the Constitution, particularly the 2nd, 14th and 25th Amendments, and the Bill of Rights. Most of us don’t have a clue what those amendments mean, and I’m here to help. (I’m not a Constitutional scholar, nor do I play one on TV, but I do know a few things on the topic, and I’d like to share them with you. But I digress.)

The Bill of Rights

After the Constitution was written, it became apparent that it didn’t cover everything that needed to be covered. There were disagreements over ratifying (the states agreeing to) the whole Constitution, so “amendments” were needed. (There were originally 12 amendments, but they were pared down to ten. These were considered “natural rights” that the government could not take away from the people.

(Nonetheless, the Powers That Be have been chipping away at the Bill of Rights. The right to freedom of speech and the right of free assembly have been nibbled away at by the courts. For example, shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is not a protected right. And the freedom of the press doesn’t mean that you can publish anything you want. It just means that the government can’t censor or suppress your writing before it’s published. Nor does a publishing company have to publish it. You can still privately publish or say anything you want, but no one else has to publish it or agree with it. You have not been cancelled. But I digress again, at length.)

The 2nd Amendment

The 2nd amendment is under fire as well. Most people know it as the right to own guns. However, it says that a “well-regulated militia” is necessary for the protection of the country. (Unfortunately, most people who form “militias” are not well-regulated or even regulated at all. Nowadays, it generally refers to the National Guard. But I digress.) I have opinions about non-militia citizens owning guns, primarily that they should be licensed after proof of instruction on how to use them safely. I will not argue this point at this time and in this place. So don’t push me.

The 14th Amendment

The 14th Amendment is now controversial, as well. It covers what is called “birthright citizenship.” This means that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen. It sounds pretty simple, but there you have it. Some politicians and citizens feel it’s no longer needed (or maybe no longer relevant.)

I avoided an ugly argument with my brother-in-law recently by stressing that it didn’t matter what the original intent of the founders was or why it should or should not still apply (though I have opinions on those questions). I argued that those considerations don’t matter, but that if you wanted to get rid of the Amendment, there’s a process you have to go through. It involves getting both houses of Congress to agree (good luck) or two-thirds of the states to agree (also good luck). The point is that this takes a lot of time, debate, and argument. My point to my brother-in-law was that, if you wanted to get rid of the 14th Amendment, there’s a process you have to go through, and it takes a lot of time and relies on a lot of people agreeing to it. You can’t just say, “I don’t like it. Make it go away.” The only Amendment that’s ever been repealed was the one to make Prohibition go away.

(Anyway, the repeal process is also true if you want to get rid of the 2nd Amendment. But I digress still more.)

The 25th Amendment

The 25th Amendment concerns getting rid of the president. It says that if the president is no longer able to fulfill his duties, there is a process to ensure succession. First, the vice-president takes the reins. If he’s not able either, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is next. If he’s also not able, the Speaker of the House steps in. Changing that is another process that can be long and drawn-out. It doesn’t involve simply holding a new election. It’s usually used only when the president or vice-president is under anesthesia for an operation.

The Amendments to the Constitution were difficult to add and are difficult to get rid of. My point is that when the American public changes its mind, it’s purposely not easy to change our fundamental documents. (And I’m sure if I got any of this wrong, hordes of constitutional scholars and maybe my brother-in-law will descend on me. But I digress even more.)

(Yeah, I know this isn’t funny, but I warned you in the subhead that there would be rants. Now that I have this out of my system, I’ll try to be amusing next week.)

Hebrew Pill Caddies and Other Low-Tech Med-Tech

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My husband is going to the eye specialist on Monday to have a consultation on his cataracts. There, I assume they will show him a little film (if he can see it) about the latest in cataract surgery, which will presumably feature lasers and maybe robots or some other high-tech med tools. Doppler radar, maybe, or AI scalpels.

Over the past year, my experience with med-tech has been decidedly low-tech, other than my bionic knee and my Frankenstein ankle. Everything else I’ve had to deal with has been a bit more, shall we say, basic?

The Transfer Board

This is exactly what it says—a board you use to transfer from one surface to another, like from a wheelchair to a bed or from a bed to a chair. By board, they mean heavy-duty plastic, like a huge cutting board. I learned about this amazing invention during a stay in a post-acute rehab facility that offered five-times-a-week physical and occupational therapy, necessitated by the bionic knee and Frankenstein ankle.

You sit on the board and slide, or rather lift your butt somewhat while leaning forward and scootching. (I’ve seen wooden ones in catalogs, polyurethaned to avoid the heartbreak of splinters. Even ones with butt-shaped seats that go down a track from end to end, so you don’t have to scootch. Too bougie for me, though. I’ve stuck to the plastic variety, sometimes literally. But I digress.)

Transfer boards are reversible and even upside-down-able. They’re easy to clean, should you be wearing a hospital gown and shart as you scootch. And now that’s a thing you know.

The Knee Sling

A knee sling is like an arm sling, only even more annoying and cumbersome. It’s a piece of cloth, sometimes with a metal frame, that is attached to a walker. It’s what you use to practice walking on one foot when you’re not allowed to put weight on the other one.

The procedure goes thus:

  1. From a sitting position, fling yourself to standing on one leg within the confines of the walker. (In my case, it was not just a fling, but a massive push-off and a lurch. I was having enough trouble standing up already, but doing it one-legged was well-nigh impossible. (Un)fortunately, I got lots of practice. But I digress again.)
  2. Bend the other leg (the one that can’t bear weight) into a 90-degree angle as you stand, without kicking the chair you were sitting on.
  3. Try to guide the bent leg into the sling without letting go of the walker, which will be essential at this point. Good luck.
  4. Ambulate (hop), using your one “good” leg and the walker for balance. (I found a decided tendency for the steering (me) to pull to the left, as my right leg was not involved in pushing off. But I digress some more.)
  5. Continue doing this until the “bad” leg can once again bear weight. I think this is meant to teach patience, an OT skill, at the same time.

The Pill Caddy

Not directly tied to the rehab stays. In the rehab, the nurses brought my meds and injections twice daily, plus one extra pill visit three hours before wake-up time so I could digest it before breakfast.

Once I was home, though, I had to leave town for three days. I threw my bag-o’-drugs (literally a Meijer bag full of pill bottles) in our duffel bag and off we went. The drive back from Florida to Ohio meant we had to stay in a hotel (with an ADA-accessible room) halfway home.

When we got home, however, the bag-o’-drugs was nowhere to be found—not in the duffel, not in the car. I called the hotel management, who, after several days, admitted that the cleaning staff said it simply wasn’t there.

The people who had to refill all those scripts said I should fill out a police report or they couldn’t do it, as there were controlled substances involved. (No opioids, though.) I can just picture calling the police about it.

(Hello, Georgia police? I probably left my bag-o’-drugs in hotel room 109. No, I can’t come in to fill out a report. I’m 400 miles away. You’ll send me a report form, and I should fill it out and return it? Then you’ll process it and investigate the hotel? And get back to me sometime after that? And leave me unmedicated the whole time? Just no. But I digress still more.)

I finally got the scripts refilled after a doctor visit and three days of phone calls (none of them to the police). I owned my idiocy and went shopping online for a pill caddy.

I never knew there were so many kinds available—one set of pills per day, four sets of pills per day, one-week, two-week, monthly, easy-open buttons, vertical dispensers, and more. I settled on a no-frills model without the turbo-charged carburetor. One-week, twice-a-day.

I was all set to click “order” when I realized something. The caddy I had chosen was embossed with the days of the week, but they were backward. The names of the days were not mirror writing, of course, but the days of the week went from left to right: “Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday,” so you’d end up taking your pills from the right to the left, like Hebrew writing. I searched again and found multiple products labeled that way.

I ordered one with orderly days. It should arrive today. Filling it each week will be tedious, but not nearly so tedious as calling the Georgia police and getting transferred from department to department until I reach the department of clueless packers.

On the Road Again

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What do you say when someone offers you an 18-year-old car? If you’re me, you say, “Thank you very much,” and you fly down to Florida to pick it up.

Mom Reily had a Mercury Milan that she rarely used, and she said I could have it. So, I have a new-to-me car at long last.

What makes the Mercury more than a museum piece is that it has only 40,000 miles on it—a literal “only driven once a week to church by a little old lady” car. And before we arrived in Florida, it had been thoroughly cleaned and adorned with new tires, and looked over by a mechanic. You can’t ask for much better than that.

The Road Trip

That was how we ended up flying down to Florida to pick up the car. (We thought about having it shipped, but once we added up the plane tickets, gas, and supplies (including hard pretzels and cereal, which, for some reason, Dan always takes on road trips), the cost was a wash, which the car had also had. But I digress.) All the flights were on time and no more or less hideous than economy travel ever is.

Then we drove the car back to Ohio. We figured to be gone for three days: one to fly down there, and two to drive back, stopping at a motel halfway. I kept Dan awake on the road and practiced driving. (With my various infirmities, it wouldn’t have done to leave me alone for three days. I might have tripped over the cat and fallen. But I digress again.)

On each day of the trip back, we drove well into the night. Partly this was because Georgia is a very tall state, and partly because I insisted on stopping at sit-down restaurants. I didn’t want fast food wrappers piling up or taco spills on the upholstery. We even found a Denny’s in Valdosta, Georgia, that was quite nice and had a lovely apple pie crisp à la mode for Dan to have on his birthday, which happened in the middle of our trip. (A little Googling tells me that there are only nine Denny’s in Georgia and only around 1,300 in the whole U.S. Also, there are only 24 in Ohio, none of which are near me. I have fond memories of one particular Denny’s, though. Back in the day, after practice, our martial arts group would convene there, taking up the big, round corner booth, and discuss the finer points of punching someone in the throat. But I digress at length.)

Google Maps helped a lot, except when we got off I-75 to find one of those sit-down restaurants. Then it would insist that we make a U-turn or go down Cherry Blossom Lane in order to get back to the highway. But we never would have found our hotel in Marietta without it.

Now that we have the Mercury home, I have freedom that I haven’t known for years. I will be able to do errands, get to appointments, meet friends for lunch (looking at you, Ellen Kollie, Kelly Heir, and Beth Bengough), or drive myself to Urgent Care without Dan having to take off work. That means Dan will have more freedom, too, which is also a Good Thing.

I know many people name their cars. I don’t usually, though the little Chevette I once owned was “Baby Car-Car.” Will the Mercury get a name? Right now, I’m thinking of it as The Freedom Machine. Or maybe Harriet, after Mom Reily. (No, maybe not. I’d end up saying things like “Someone scratched Harriet in the parking lot” or “Harriet has plenty of gas.” Dan says to call it Mom, as in “My Mother, the Car.” (Yes, we’re old.) But I digress yet again.) Perhaps, as cats do, the car will let me know what her name is. I imagine I’ll be as surprised as anyone when she does.