ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9610010108
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BEN BEAGLE
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
The way things have been going for me medically lately, I figure my aging body and Medicare will both give out sometime before Easter.
I'm on somebody's list somewhere, pal. Every morning, I check to make sure I haven't lost an arm or a leg during a night of dreaming about major surgery.
Take a recent week in my life if you think I'm making too big a deal of things:
I was still wearing the brace on my ruined ankle when I went with my son to the trash-train place. We were there, of course, to unload junk from his pickup truck.
Among the items were a half-dozen rolls of barbed wire. And as we unloaded, I got this awful wound in my right arm.
I hadn't had a tetanus shot since 1945, so they gave me two of them in each shoulder at the immediate-care place - which is not something you would stand in line to get.
This was just Wednesday; things went pretty bloodless for the next two days, except for a razor nick here and there.
But then came Saturday. My son and I were unloading a clothes dryer in my own driveway from this same truck. My end slipped and crushed my middle left finger on the tailgate.
I'll be honest here and say that I didn't exactly react to this with icy indifference. Actually, some of you who may have seen a sudden blue haze above Happy Highfields Road will be glad to know you weren't hallucinating.
I came away from the emergency room with five stitches and a splint on my injured finger. I was very quick to say that I'd had tetanus shots Wednesday.
(I don't want to get into why we were unloading a clothes dryer and barbed wire, which was called "bobbed wahr" in my youth. Not in public anyway. If you just have to know, send me a stamped, self-addressed plain brown envelope and I'll get back to you.)
I was able to play hurt and type - despite the fact that my left middle finger is my typing finger on that side.
The splint gave me a little trouble and you would never know that I originally wrote things like: "origina1lly; thin56g2; s2plint, and Hiugh23field R022 n."
I cleaned the typing up after they took the splint off, which I thought was pretty big of me.
If you don't see me hanging out at the emergency room anymore, it'll mean I got smart and decided to stay in bed until the week after Thanksgiving.
LENGTH: Medium: 52 linesby CNB