I’m worried about it.
Noticed on Friday that I limp now. That’s because my right knee keeps buckling. Not all the way, thank God, but enough to cause me to lose my balance if I am not ready for it and to make me “dip” on the right hand side.
It’s at its worst when I have just gotten out of bed after laying down a while. I guess the transition from “no strain” to “full fat guy strain” is a bit much for it.
And it’s at its best if I have walked enough to work out the knots in my leg muscles and gotten the blood flowing through them and warmed them up.
I still risk a fall, but it’s more manageable.
For now, I am keeping a close eye on the situation. If I feel like it is getting better on its own, I will leave it alone.
But if it stays the same or gets worse, I’m going to have to take it to Doctor Chao or maybe even the dreaded Urgent Care.
I am growing quite sus of that place. Last time I went there, I went to take a number like the sign says but lo and behold, the numbers were not there.
I ended up standing there completely confused. And it was up to a kind fellow waiting in the waiting room (ergo, another sick person, not any facility employee) to explain to me that this meant they were at capacity and not taking on more patients at that time.
Not that there was a sign telling people that or anything. No, they apparently thought just taking the numbers away was enough.
After all, it kept patients from bugging the receptionists, and that’s the only important thing, right? What an atrocious clusterfuck.
Hey near. Clusterfuck is in the Windows dictionary. Under “Fuck, cluster”, no doubt.
And then recently, when my roomie Joe went there after having had a cold/flu/whatever hang on for more than a week, he found their doors shut tight because some kind of very loud alarm was going off and nobody knew how to turn it off.
You’re right, I would hate to have to endure a very loud alarm. Way better to just die.
As an adjunct to the ER at Richmond Hospital for the less-urgent cases, the place is failing. The fact that they turn people away when they are at capacity is proof of that.
You know who doesn’t turn people away when they are at capacity? The ER. You know what they do? They manage. They improvise. They work it out.
At this point, personally, it is only a thin thread of wanting to do my civic duty and use the system like I am supposed to use it that would keep me from saying “fuck Urgent Care” and taking my bum leg straight to the ER.
Better still to take it to Doctor Chao, but the probability that he is all booked up till Groundhog Day is high so I have to consider other measures.
This is the Boomer Medical Apocalypse that has been coming for a long time and that we knew would happen but had no idea what to do about it.
The largest demographic in modern history is hitting their most medically demanding age and us smaller generations are left with a medical system where all the Boomer doctors are retiring or dying and we are stuck with way too many patients with way too few doctors, nurses and so on to treat them all.
Leave it to the Boomers to save being the biggest pain in the ass to everyone who is not them till the last.
More after the break.
Somehow I have to fly
This song has come to be a hell of a lot to me.
And it means that much to me because I feel like it expresses exactly where I am in my spiritual journey right now, albeit from the other side.
The singer of that song is an ephemeral, delicate creature of the mind and the imagination trying to cope with having to deal with drab, boring, indelicate reality in order to survive.
But me, I’m a Taurus. We live in the “real world”. We are grounded in it. We are inherently drawn to the real, the stable, the lasting, and the solid and tend to ignore the more diaphanous realities in which the singer lives as being too soft to be reliable.
And we need things to be reliable.
And yet, the singer and I have reached the same place in our lives, albeit from the opposite sides : somehow, we have to fly.
I need to be more like him, and learn that there are worse things than leaving reality’s limitations behind in order to become what you need to become.
To a stolid Taurus type, leaving reality behind is the definition of insanity. We try to be one with the limitations of the world in order to exert mastery over it.
But I’m a Taurus with Venus in Gemini. And that song feels very Gemini to me. Geminis tend to be tender little butterflies it seems like a drop of dew could destroy.
And me, I am a very old caterpillar who is just now, at the age of 50, starting to seriously wonder if those butterflies know something I don’t.
Maybe their world of thought and imagination and inspiration unbound by mundane reality contains the things I long for the most and is therefore not the blind alley trap that I think it is, necessarily.
Maybe part of my particular nature demands release from the chains of the “true” and the “real” so it can spread its wings and fly.
Maybe I have to leave the roads of logic and the “sensible” world behind so I can stop looking for the exit to where I want to go and just go there anyway, without justification.
Maybe that’s what learning to fly really means.
And therefore maybe I can escape the logic trap after all.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.