Monkey Wrenched

Testing, testing, one two three. Is this thing on? Check! Check! Check!
Ok, thank you all for being here this evening.



-----Disclaimer: Yes, I know it's not a male monkey.-----


The first items on the agenda are my testicles. As most of you know, I have no shame. My innards (and outwards) are pretty much an open book. What little humility I might have still possessed a short time ago evaporated in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, 2am or so, twenty-three days ago. I was hanging out, minding my own damn business, trying to remember what I had done that day to cause my coconuts to register such discontent. One minute I’m considering a dull ache, a moment later I’m in the trusty old fetal position. I have found that position to be a versatile maneuver for trying times. It has amazing analgesic properties. Anyway, knowing that my first-aid kit contained not a single remedy for testicular tribulation, I began the process of deciding which ER should have the displeasure of seeing me on their doorstep once again.

Shuffling bent over into the triage area, I was greeted by a check-in droid who could not have been old enough to drive, I guessed ten or eleven years old. She handed me the familiar form to fill out and asked me why I needed to see a doctor. I told her my nuts were hurting really bad and I asked her what I should put in the corresponding section of the form. I mercifully cut short her endless re-phrasing and dancing about the issue by bluntly telling her I would write, ‘my nuts hurt really bad.” She said ok.

She asked me to describe the pain on a scale of one to ten while directing my attention to the little placard on the wall. Every ER has one, ten little stick-figure faces illustrating severity of pain in ascending order. The face of level-one is sort of a baleful stare. Stick-figure number ten has tears flowing and a mouth drawn in a perfect “O.” The “O” is hospital code for scaring the shit out of the other patients with high pitched howling and uncontrollable sobbing. It is always a good idea to add at least two frowny faces to your score in these situations, trust me on that one. I pleaded a solid ten with breached bulkhead imminent and then prepared to disgrace myself for affect. I didn’t have to go that far because they weren’t very busy anyway.

While being wheeled to my curtained-off cubicle, I noted a consistent trend in the ER staff, more rosy-cheeked children, like a middle-school lunch room with kids running about in lab coats and scrubs. I also noticed there was not a single male employee in the bunch. I’ve said it before; I prefer a female urologist, or any ologist for that matter, when it comes to handling the tenderloins. Female “ologists” are naturally more empathic and gentle. This was a primary concern at that time because I was rapidly taking on the appearance of those red-assed monkeys on the Discovery Channel.

The ER physician turned out to be female, which was a good thing, but she looked even younger than the receptionist. She asked the obvious questions. I hadn’t been kicked in the nuts or paid for sex in the recent past. She read my chart and posed her questions with a distressingly pained look on her face. Her demeanor spoke of dark times to come. I feared her runaway sympathy might hinder a thorough administration of medical care and I was getting increasingly creeped out by her pigtails and knee socks. I was about to receive a digital inspection of my comically inflamed man-parts from Pippi Longstocking. The nurse who entered the room twice during the pre-prod setup awkwardly averted her gaze and stammered at my request for a drink of water. There was plenty of irony to share with everybody that evening, very strange.

Back to the business at hand, with my hospital gown hiked and the danger zone exposed, Doctor Longstocking advised me brace myself for a whole lot of hurt. For the first few seconds, I was thinking, that’s not so bad. I guess it took a while for the nerve endings to recover from the initial shock, and then, discomfort! It spread through my pelvic region, up the spinal cord, into the brain and on to whatever specific region is responsible for relaying the signals back down the spinal cord, through the pelvic region and right back where it started from.

The examination now complete, Doctor L told me to start breathing and she would order up some morphine. I told her I had to work the next day, refused the morphine because sometimes I’m a stupid f*cking idiot, and I opted for Tylenol instead. In short order, another baby-faced woman-child carted me into the ultrasound room and started treating my poor nadicles like billiard balls, batting them about with a gel-coated tool resembling a post-war Norelco Electric Shaver, at least from my contorted vantage point. I gave the ultrasound tech two options, morphine, or stampede. I didn’t want to scare my fellow patients, but it was out of my hands.

I think it was for punishment that they administered the morphine in the form of a meat-shot in the upper front part of my left leg. My kiwis quit hurting but the morphine never did dull the pain from the knot that formed at the injection site. It must have been opposite day at the ER, I prefer a certain level of logic in my world but I can make due with less.

I did get a diagnosis, doctors call it “Orchitis” I’m on the twenty-second day of a twenty-five day course of antibiotics, which of course means I haven’t crapped in twenty-two days but considering the alternative, I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Unfortunately, because of all of this, my spine doctor refused to administer a third and final spinal injection. My back was on the mend, only to be thrown a curve and left to fend for itself until this other situation clears up.

And this is the story of why I haven’t been blogging in the last several weeks. By the time I finish each day’s worth of desk and fieldwork in a desperate attempt to keep my little business afloat, and take care of all of the home-life chores that fall within my area of jurisdiction, the thought of spending even one more second at a keyboard has all the appeal of a bathtub full of squids, but without the fun parts.

Let’s check the score. According to my research, in the last twelve years I’ve had every malady known to medical science except for Distemper and Monkey Pox. I’ve noticed my monkey has been a little poxy today, so I might be able to cross that one off the list soon. Damn monkey pox!