From Pickleball to Walker: Who Knew? pt 3

 Wow...it was kind of like Covid-19, my memory of the hospital stay is fading fast, but I do get little flashbacks here and there. I need to write about the staff before I lose those memories. First off, when people speak of diversity, I usually think they mean one of every kind of ethnic group and sexual orientation. In this case, diversity meant to me, whoever was hiring, was after people that had some kind of pizazz or character trait that made them stand out. That was why I kept thinking I was on some kind of Wizard of Oz trip and wondering which one of the staff only needed a heart or a brain while we traveled down the recovery road.

The first distinct memory was of the guy I called the "backpacker". Nobody understood what I meant, but he was my first Physical therapist, a smaller thin guy with round John Lennon glasses and his hair in a bun...looking much like many of the guys I met on the Appalachian Trail, usually with taller girls that seemed much more excited about the hiking than the guy did. My backpacker Therapist tried to stand me up right after the surgery to demonstrate that I had full weight bearing ability...and I immediately passed out from the pain...twice. He finally went and found a large woman therapist who was able to get me to take two steps before I begged for mercy.

I knew I was down for a long time, and was hoping it all wasn't going to be in a wheelchair. One thing I did not count on was a bit of collateral damage to my groin area. I don't know happened there, all I saw was black and blue mess. Somebody asked me if I could pee and I replied, "with what? I can't even find it!" And that was how I came to meet the first of many characters that kept me laughing when crying seemed more like a correct response to the situation.

Nurses usually came one at a time, but there was a tag-team couple of nurses that I never got the right names of. All I can remember is they were both in their 30's or 40's and Latin. They had a running private joke that one of them was Jessican the Mexican...although both were Puerto Rican. I know from one of my own friends, Josh, that Puerto Ricans being mistaken as Mexican is a joke...not 100% sure I know what that joke is, but those ladies both laughed a lot when referring to Jessican the Mexican. When I met them, I already had my room fixed up to keep me from being bored to death and I had a music keyboard and a computer. They all knew I was a musician and was working on writing songs about my journey from happy-go-lucky to screaming in pain to recovery. These two ladies were actually my first inspiration for a song when one asked the other (like I wasn't there), "What exactly did you do?" Jessican replied "I cleaned his thing with the GNC." The other said "What did you just say?!"

At this point, pain was forgotten, and I was giggling as I composed my first recovery song about how my life turned around when the nurse cleaned my thing with a GNC. 

BTW, I'm not sure if I got the acronym right, but it was some long-handled tool that was used to keep you from getting a Urinary Tract Infection...which I got anyway...but from that day on, I spent my time looking for the spark in each of the staff I would meet to figure out what made them special to get hired there...and I found some doozies!

 

 

From Pickleball to Walker...Who Knew? pt. 2

The video above depicts the end of the hospital/rehab part of the journey. One of the truly strange aspects of this whole trip, was how I became famous as the "pickleball guy". It seemed to start with me in the emergency room, hoping that I had just somehow dislocated some joint in my hip and that somebody would just say "on 3, 1....2...snap!" and I would be just like new. That turned out to not be the case and my newfound friend, Jon, took one look at my foot flopping and shook his head. He told me I was getting the best surgeon around and that he would make sure I'd be back on the court in no time.

It didn't sink in quickly. I'd never spent the night in a hospital before, much less with the CEO of the whole place standing by and telling me stories. He was a neighbor of the folks we were playing pickleball with the day I got injured. Somebody made a call, and man, did I get the red carpet treatment. Jon told me stories about him playing tennis and pickleball and how he was going to be more careful after seeing what happened to me. I remember telling a nurse a few weeks later how cool this guy was, and she replied that she had once spoken to him for 5 minutes and was wowed. Many times during my stay, I wondered how much he had intervened on my behalf. I don't know if I was at the best hospital, but I did know that I was getting the best service that hospital could offer.

Soon, I had x-rays that were shared around as everybody wanted to see how the surgeon had fixed my spiral femur fracture...and they would say in the hallway, "are you the pickleball guy?" One of the head nurses, a petite Filipino woman near my age, always jumped when she saw me. Whipping out her phone and showing me photos of her husband playing league games. "He's rated 4.1!" she exclaimed. I had no idea what that meant, except that I barely knew how to keep score...but they didn't know that. "Yeah, I was a 4.5, the last time I got rated," I replied dryly. Knowing that she was the full-on cartoon version of the Asian mother, I added, "By the way, my blood type is A+!" She looked serious for a moment and then started showing me some more photos of her husband on the traveling circuit of Pickleball pros in Florida. 

Yep, no one was ever going to know that I was a rank beginner that fell over his own feet...the bigger they are the harder they fall...that saying had a brand new meaning to me now...

 

From Pickleball to a walker..who knew

 

 

3 weeks in a hospital...I'm still processing that as I prepare to leave this rehab center where there are two options: get better or go to a nursing home. It's been a huge journey and one that has been full of characters that could have populated a story like the Wizard of Oz.

In a huge bit of irony, a repeating phrase from a seasoned pickleball guy kept coming back to haunt me. It started simply as something fun to do with Taylor while at the gym. We didn't know how to keep score or anything, just having fun beating the ball back and forth, and then we watched other people play and saw how serious they got and the thought started seeping in "hmmm, we could beat those guys.."

One of the senior guys in the group we frequently saw playing, cautioned me that the local emergency rooms were full of injured pickleball players. "Never chase a ball that's past you, never go after a high ball." I basically thought the problem was that really old, decrepit folks were trying to play this simple game.

Then came the day of our first real test as a doubles team, playing against a couple of younger women that were pretty good. Me, as the big guy, I just needed to show that I could return any shot that could come my way. How did I get to this point, I don't know, but I was happy, excited and on fire until the moment I charged the net, missed the ball and crumpled like a rag doll on the ground.

Soon I was surrounded by 3 concerned women and a team of EMTS that decided they might as well bring the hook and ladder truck just in case. I was like "I'll just walk it off" until I saw my foot flopping on the ground and realized that I could not even move an inch without screaming like a little girl.

Soon, I was carried off in an ambulance and began the journey from happy-go-lucky to discovering the true meaning of pain. However, this story is not about pain, surgery and medicine, it is about the parade of characters that filled my life in the next 3 weeks. The closest experience I've had is on the Appalachian Trail, where you briefly meet someone, and sometimes learn something about them that blows your mind.

I would have to say, that one of the craziest bits was meeting the CEO of the hospital and having him keep up with me the entire time. He loves Pickleball, and apparently many of the doctors are into as well. It is very possible that I influenced them to be more careful on the court...but let me tell you about the medical folks that cared for me...it's the part I don't want to forget.