Hah, so the latest medical crisis in the Barker household wasn’t mine!
Hah! There’s a first for everything, I guess. This time, rather than being Trey with galactically high cholesterol or Trey with a ruptured disk in his back or Trey with a heart attack or Trey with friggin’ cancer, it was LuAnn with a broken wrist.
And obviously, I don’t wish that on anyone, especially the love of my life, but if it’s going to happen, better someone else, for once, than me! Really, there’s no good way to say that thought. I wrote that sentence about twenty times and it sounds awful every time. Whatever.
She was washing some windows and in our old farmhouse, the windows are pretty much original to the first time mankind climbed down outta the trees. Old, really old, in other words. They hang by a counterweight in the wall and most of them in the house are broken. So she had something jammed in there to keep the window up. Well, that slipped and down the window came, smashing both her wrists.
She called me at the store and said, quite non-chalantly, “I think maybe I broke my wrist. You wanna take me to the hospital?”
Easy as you please.
Are you kidding me? I whined and cried and nearly went into cardiac arrest whenever I had to give myself a pansy ass little shot. She breaks – no, not merely breaks, but shatters, said the doctor – her wrist and she’s as casual as can be. “Yeah, whenever you get around to it, maybe run me over to the hospital.”
I half expected her to finishing up washing the windows, maybe do a load of laundry, cook up some dinner, then kind of amble over to the emergency room.
I can see it now. “Yeah, doc, put a Band-aid on it, it’ll be fine.”
I, on the other hand, was more along the lines of: “What? A shot! Can I get a general anesthesia for that?”
She had to have surgery and then they put her in a splint and told her not to lift or write or damn near anything. It was her right hand and she can’t even hardly eat.
It has driven her slowly insane. Quite fun to watch, actually. See, the ol’ wife is about as independent as they come. And the fact that she has to ask me to cut her meat or help her put on her shirt is, for me, hysterical to watch. For her, it might well lead to my death.
At first, I thought she’d just shoot me. Grab up my service weapon and shoot it dry. And I could hear the sheriff asking her why she thought she had to reload.
“There were still some bullets and he wasn’t quite dead enough.”
Then I thoughts she might beat me to death with the splint. But I think now neither of those would be slow enough for her. I think she’d rather inflict something desperately slow and painful. Maybe a hanging where the knot on the noose didn’t quite knock me out, where I strangled instead.
So I’m enjoying myself, how she can’t drive or cook or whatever, and then it’s time for her to go back to the doc. And what does he do? Ruins all my freakin’ fun, that’s all.
Oh, yeah, she’s healing. Yeah, it’s getting better and stronger and all the rest, but where does that leave me? I mean, come one, hasn’t anyone thought of me in all this?
He took her out of the splint and said she’d be just fine. She’s not 100 percent yet, but she’s getting there. And all I can do is watch all the jobs I’d done slip away, back to her control.
It is a sad day today. I mean, yeah, good for her but sad for me. I mean, I had to depend on her for a year during the poisoning. She had to depend on me for…like…five weeks.
Let’s see…fifty-two weeks. Five weeks. Fifty-two. Five.
Not quite the balance I’d hoped for. Means she’s still got 47 more weeks worth of good karma than I do.
Damn.