My bare-assed, bee-stung, arthroscopic day
We arrived 20 minutes early and the smiling greeter handed my wife a pager with blue flashing lights and the promise that pager would go even more bonkers by flashing more urgently and vibrating once our turn came up.
We found comfortable seats in the waiting area and the aromas wafted over from the kitchen….of the cafeteria below…at what I’ll call the Behemoth Big Box Medical Fortress, where we would spend the next 7 hours, for a 30-minute repair job on my left knee..wrecked by years of playing ice hockey at an age when most men experience the game from Lazy Boys in front of a big screen TV, lubricated by potent legal elixirs.
The day started with an urgent call asking if I could arrive two hours earlier than planned due to a late cancellation. Sure. Let’s get it over with. The deal is you must arrive two hours before the surgery is scheduled so they can verify your insurance is inadequate to cover the costs of the procedure, strip you down, have you wrap yourself in a paper-thin gown, stab you with an IV, ask you the same questions a half-dozen times then let you rot in a prep room until they’re ready to do the deed.
Let’s start the clock. Arrival: 11:10am. Surgery scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Pager goes crazy and I’m taken into prep room at 11:30am. Told to strip naked, stuff everything in a too-small plastic satchel and put on the little gown that opens in the back. Two friendly nurses come in and inform me their husbands play hockey too and have wrecked their knees. I feel better already. The nurse on my right is the designated IV inserter and lets me know over and over that I will feel a “bee sting” when she pokes the needle into my vein. I’ve never been stung by a bee but I now know it would piss me off. But one bee sting wasn’t good. She didn’t like how things were flowing so she popped out the needle and gave me another bee sting in another vein. I now hope for the extinction of all bees.
My wife was then brought in to wait with me and was informed she would have full custody of the satchel with my stuff. Said satchel was not only bulky since it was jammed with my winter coat, clothes and sneakers, but it weighed slightly more than her. Bottom line: the bulky bag would go wherever she went. If she got tired of schlepping it, chances are I’d leave the hospital with my bare ass sticking out of the gown..my feet shod in only the mint green socks they provided, helpfully emblazoned with the hospital’s logo.
In the intervening hours various scrub-clad people popped into my room asking me what I ate, drank, snorted, sniffed or injected into my body, along with repeatedly quizzing me on what procedure I was there for. By the seventh time I was tempted to say I was there for treatment of two really bad bee stings.
My doctor finally deigned to drop in and used a Sharpie to put his initials on the knee that would be fixed. I had already done the same. This way they would be reasonably sure they didn’t fix the knee that didn’t need to be fixed.
All this time saline solution is being sent through my veins via the IV, causing the urge to pee like a pack mule. This meant me gathering my IV lines, grabbing the pole that contained the bag of saline and wheeling it and myself to the can. My free hand was dedicated to grabbing the back of my gown to try to hold it closed so all the nice hospital employees weren’t subjected to my 65-year old ass. It didn’t work. But it’s a hospital and I was pretty sure they’d all seen worse. They could have better disguised their smirks.
‘So how long shall we put down he was waiting…3 hours 58?’
At one point the anesthesiologist came into my room during hour 3 and casually tossed off “there are still a couple ahead of you,” giving no indication as to how much longer it would be until my bed would be cleared for takeoff. Turned out it was another hour. We could hear some of the staff talking about me saying, “that guy in 26 is still here!” Heh..corpses probably spend less time in a room.
By the time my turn came up it was only 20 minutes before my original time, which means we got to the hospital almost 4 hours early. The “team” surrounded me, squirted some potent juice in my IV and my descent to dreamland came within a minute. When I awoke about 90 minutes later my poor wife could finally ditch the sack with my crap and I could get dressed and leave. But wait…one more indignity. My wife was instructed to get the car and pick me up. The key here is the word, “where.” “Where” would she pick me up. This hospital has more points of access than a hooker. But my wife is smart, has a Masters and doesn’t put up with a lot of shit. She figured it out despite zero instructions and poor signage, and as I sat in a wheelchair in the cold outside the pickup point, she swooped in and rescued me. Time: 6:30 pm, more than 7 hours after we arrived for the 30 minute procedure.
My knee is healing, my “bee stings” are gone and most of all, I’ve covered my ass.
So I toss up this jump ball for discussion. First, eliminate voting. The venues would contain constantly updated displays of arrays of, say, top 100 achievers all-time in various statistical categories and winners of honors like the MVP, Cy Young award and Rookie of the Year. Bowing to how the games have changed over the years, similar displays would be broken out into various eras in order to place certain accomplishments in a viable context.
Given the totally objective method of recognizing player’s accomplishments, it’s time to trash the “fame” part of the name. Let’s face it, many of those not admitted to halls of fame are as famous as those who are.
Instead, call these venues Halls of Recognition? Stay with me. You do something great, it’s instantly picked up by the computerized display system and added to the appropriate display. I would think visitors would be somewhat enthralled watching the displays update as the season progresses, and secure knowing the displays would not be the same upon repeat visits. 
On this Sunday morning I’m nursing deep lacerations on the fingers of my left/dominant hand, suffered in the noble cause of freeing a cinnamon donut from the edges of the scourge to humanity known as razor-sharp clamshell plastic packaging. 
And so you ignore the blood and growing pain and pull and tug and curse and stomp and scream until, until…you hear that lovely crackling “pop!” of the two side separating. Finally, there are no barriers between you and those bear claws, or jelly donuts or cinnamon sticks or apple danish. They give you that look of “take me…take me…but please don’t take cream or sugar.” 
Went food shopping this morning and things became tense at the french fry freezer case. There’s only one brand of fries we like..not your store brand or Ore-Ida or microwave fries, but those awesome fries they serve at Checkers and Rallys fast food joints. You can buy ’em by the bag, stick ’em in the oven and fall into a french fry rapture.
One of the cool benefits of my particular health plan in retirement is something called “Silver Sneakers.” One of the things I hate about that cool benefit is the name “Silver Sneakers.” Silver Sneakers gives you free entree’ into a number of health club chains around the country with the intent of enticing you to exercise more and lowering health care costs. What really gives me grey hair is the association of the color silver with those of us who have taken a certain number of trips around the sun.
Personally, I would prefer to be identified with a much stronger metal such as steel or titanium, not a malleable milquetoast such as tin or aluminum. How cool would it be to see an AARP ad hawking benefits of membership during your “Kickass Steel Years,” Those are the years when you say exactly how you feel, tell poolside mah jong yentas to put a cork in it and berate Izzy the deli guy about how fatty the pastrami was, in front of all his customers…all without a hint of regret or self-consciousness. Yeah…time for us codgers to kick a little brass.
Whether we like it or not, self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles are in the cards. While they may be useful for any number of reasons, I don’t see them sparking any great tunes.
One of the great things about my little job at Automotive News is my workspace faces a window that looks out on downtown Detroit. Ford Field is just across the road, GM headquarters looms to the left and I have views of Comerica Park, Little Caesars Arena, Greektown Casino and Hotel, the historic Penobscot Building, and even the Wayne County Jail and a glimpse of Canada, just across the Detroit River. It’s a wonderful view but doesn’t show one of the key reasons I think Amazon should decide to locate its second headquarters here. 
The first hint of something not exactly right was when the stream of water coming out of my shower head was roughly as weak as a pee from a man with a faulty prostate. Hint number two was the sound of a loud cough coming from my bathroom sink faucet once I turned the tap. Sounded about the same as an Englishman with his mad dog out in the midday sun. I g
It’s been about a year since I quit Facebook cold turkey as a means of reclaiming my time and a bit of my sanity.
What this has all done is harden my resolve not to reverse course and resume my Facebook presence. Oh..I’m still online..through this blog and a very occasional tweet and posting links to some of my current work on Linkedin, but that’s it. 
I was happy to read today the Boy Scout will welcome girls. It’s about time. When I was a kid in the 60’s, joining the Cub Scouts then graduating to the Boy Scouts was cool. We proudly wore our uniforms to school assemblies and flashed our merit badges like gun notches. Oh no, they didn’t help you get girls, but it also told them you were probably not a bad risk…in a pinch. In later years, the scouts became supremely uncool to the point where strolling down the street in your khakis and neckerchief could get you beat up.
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