Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The shamanic birthday surprise

In a little more than an hour, I will be celebrating 61 years in the daylight. As you may remember, I am a practical sort of person when it comes to birthdays. A few years ago, I livecast my colonoscopy prep on my birthday.

So what has the shaman done for himself this year? To himself? Ah! therein lies the heart of the tale. On Thursday last, I awoke from sleep about 0300 and thought, "What have I done to my ankle?" Chalking it up to middle age, I dropped some Ibuprofen and went back to sleep. Since then, things have become progressively worse. I've lived on Vitamin I around the clock. I barely made it out of bed this morning. My right ankle is singing to me.

I went to work yesterday with a stout cane. By quitting time, I could barely walk and a co-worker suggested a place called Ortho-Cincy which accepts walk-ins. I drove out to the nearest location and limped in. After some X-Rays and a brief look at the ankle, the doc decided it might be either gout, a stress fracture, or just an inflamed Achilles tendon. He gave me my birthday present:



. . .and a letter that says I need to take up to 10 days off work.

Needless to say, I am less than overjoyed. The doc says a few days in the boot should get me strolling down the right path. Meanwhile, just taking a whizz in the turlet is an adventure.

Well that really stinks. Hope you get better soon. Get the Dream Team to work covering for you on the home front till you can kick their butts once again.

Not a great birthday present!

Hope you get over that soon!

Happy Birfday Shaman!!

What a pain in the butt, Hope you're better soon.

Not good, a HAPPY BIRTHDAY anyhow as best as you can. Heal up soon!!

Does that come in camo?

Get one for the other foot and taking a whiz might not be so much of an adventure.

Just my two cents.

Oh yeah and you go and have a wonderful B'day.

That is quite a spread in diagnosis.

It seems this doc has diagnosed you with SWWL (Something Wrong With Leg).

You should be happy that the diagnosis wasn't SBI (Something Bad Inside), or worse yet SVBI (Something Very Bad Inside).

Here's wishing for a precise diagnosis -- and for something easy & cheap to treat!

John

Happy Birthday, Robo-Shaman.

Bum foot never got me any Robocop attire.

Happy BD you lucky dog.

Update:

Back from the Primary Care Physician. I tried to trade KYHillChick for pain meds, but the doc wrote me a script for Tramadol and let me keep her. He's a heck of a nice guy.

Been into work and collected my laptop. Now I'm back with the Tramadol and expecting one hell of an afternoon. Thunderstorms are predicted. Does anyone know a good single malt that goes well with Tramadol?

I hate to be Johnny Raincloud, but you might want to check and make sure that Tramadol is compatible with alcohol consumption. A lot of drugs in its class aren't.

Well, I'm awake, and I've just taken my second Tramadol, so it looks like Scoresby is at least a short term candidate for the role of "Plays well with Tramadol." I had a pleasant nap. The pink elephants kept their distance, and the spiders went off and found somebody else's legs on which to climb.

I'm about to venture to the bottom of the stairs and have a nice conversation with the man who wasn't there. Normally that would be a hard task, seeing as though I live in a ranch house, but I can thank Tramadol for making it easy.

More later.

PS: If you see Pooh, tell him. . . nevermind. I'm sure we'll meet up.

UPDATE:

So here it is Friday, and I'm back at work. I'm still a little zooey from all the pain killers earlier in the week, but the heel is no longer singing, and I can walk with a cane. Yesterday, I had an MRI-- won't get the results until Monday afternoon.

Yikes! Tramadol really has a kick to it! Most of Wednesday is missing. I got a call around 4 PM Wednesday from the plant manager: a freak thunderstorm had flooded the plant and knocked out the server room. They needed me back in to restart the servers. Angus drove me into work around 9 PM and I got everything restarted inside of 20 minutes. #2 son, Moose, drove me in on Thursday evening for an hour so I could help with the scheduled plant-wide inventory. Outside of that, I was glued to the recliner for 3 days with the stinkin' boot on my leg. The Tramadol made it so that everything I did was like outside myself, doing it in 3rd person.

Thanks all for the well wishes.

That sounds a lot like gout. Lay off the alcohol and drink water.

They tested my uric acid levels on Tuesday-- well within the normal range.